I’ve started looking at sites like Deviantart, SmugMug and, as I said, Flickr for inspiration. I intend on using HTML5 for the structure, WordPress for the backend, and CSS3 and the Canvas element for some polish. I want it to be dead simple, but also beautiful — of course, minimalist designs are often the hardest to pull off respectfully.

Here’s some early mock-ups:

So, at this early stage in the design process, I ask you; what photo sharing sites do you love, and why? What elements would you like to see in a photoblog theme? If you built Flickr, what would you change?

When I went looking for a solution to self-host my Tweetie images I was surprised to find so few options out there. I mean, I couldn’t be the only one wanting to do this, right? Figuring I should probably take a night off from playing Dragon Age anyhow, I decided to start hacking at the Tweetie API and build my own solution. Colugo is what I came up with.

Colugo is nothing special, really. Just a simple PHP script that interprets the POST call from Tweetie and stores the image data for you. I added a few nice little bonus features, like writing tweet data and copyright info onto the image, and integration with Lessn to auto-shorten the tweeted URLs for you.

You can grab the latest version off GitHub. This is an incredibly early version of the software, and I would expect many of you to run into bugs, but I’m hoping you’ll report them, share bug fixes you come up with, and help build Colugo into something really special.

In this particular case, I’m my own client. A few years back I founded the Aureus Knights with a handful of my friends, and I inherited the responsibility of maintaining our community’s site. We’re a guild centered around online gaming, and MMOs in particular. Maintaining an online community is always a rough thing; it requires patience with your users, an open ear to their wishes and criticism, and the willingness to adapt to their needs. For a community that centers around it’s web site as it’s leading form of organizing and communication, these qualities are essential in keeping the site fresh and exciting, and appealing to potential new users.

After the Redesign

A few months ago I sat down and began work on redesigning the Knight’s website, for a few reasons. First, our active design was too dark. We had a near-black background, white font, and fairly bland colors and graphics. While this looked appealing to me initially, we outgrew the look rather quickly. Likewise, the “dark” theme didn’t suite our membership terribly well, as we generally play “the good guys” and felt this gave the wrong impression about who and what we were.

Next, we relied on a combination of two content systems to communicate: WordPress and vBulletin. It’s well known that I love WordPress, but it didn’t work in this particular instance because we simply weren’t updating the site with news frequently enough to warrant it. You might say the overhead didn’t meet the demand. We decided we wanted to build our new site around vBulletin; to be able to deliver gaming and guild news to the homepage using the forums alone. Having two systems that can do the same thing (at least, the same thing we need them to do) didn’t make sense.

Finally, we wanted to more deeply integrate our wonderful Chatterous chat room and frequent Livestream coverage into the site somehow, and have a way to feature the tweets of our growing community. We always wanted a easy way to highlight the wonderful screenshots our users share in our Flickr gallery.

After the Redesign

After a few prototypes, we went forward with development on the concept you see above. The new design is a stark contrast to our previous look, with a clean, light scheme and a fluid layout designed to work on low and high resolution screens. The tab layout at the top draws attention, and the “feature ribbon” at the top funnels our members into breaking news and hot gaming topics that we want to build discussions on.

One feature I’m especially pleased with is the new “Chat” page. The tab uses the Chatterous API and a little jQuery to display the number of active users chatting in our channel, so people know when there’s a big chat going on. Likewise, venturing into the Chat page itself, you’ll enter a central communication hub for the whole guild; we have a live chat room, live streaming coverage from guild events and a Twitter feed from our members all in one location. This page has proven to be incredibly popular with our community since the design went live last week, and I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from our users about it.

Of course, all of the site content now relies on our posts on vBulletin. The new site is essentially a PHP wrapper around the threads on our forums. This has made our jobs a lot easier, and the caching system I wrote has done a great job of improving site performance for our members.

In summary, our redesign has passed with flying colors. It’s reduced overhead, boosted performance, increased user involvement, and we’re seeing seeing a tremendous increase in hits to the site, which I presume is due to our more frequently updated gaming coverage thanks to the new PHP-built vBulletin wrapper. There’s still room for improvement, of course. I’d like to offer a higher contrast theme that can optionally be used by our color blind members, and I’d like to find ways to further integrating our Chatterous room into the site and forums. I also intend on creating a mobile interface so users can stay in touch on their iPhones, Blackberrys and other mobile devices.

For those curious, I plan on open sourcing a number of the technologies I developed for this project, including my caching framework and vBulletin integration library, in the coming weeks.

Version 2.0
* Background gradient is now hidden
* Fixes scrollbar flickering
* Highly optimized
* Update 1.2 compatibility confirmed

Grab it from Curse Gaming.

My first project is very simple: a chat interface modification. The chat system in Warhammer is nice, but a bit clunky. The chrome around it (that is, the huge social button, the scrollbars, etc.) take up a lot of screen real estate. Being the minimalist I am, it kind of bugged me. So I took it upon myself to fix it.

The fruit of my labor is MinChat. It does one simple thing: hide all the crap you rarely if ever use in the chat interface. No more social button (press O to open that window), no scrollbars, no input text button, nothing. Just text and, when you hover over it for a few seconds, chat channel tabs. The addon also automatically focuses your chat on the most recent line when new text comes in.

You can grab the addon from Curse Gaming’s Warhammer site. Please let me know you’re thoughts!

I haven’t had an opportunity to test this on many environments, but it should work on Apache under Windows or Linux under most circumstances. Has very few system requirements (PHP5 and fsockopen support.)

Give it a download and let me know if you encounter any bugs. Thanks!

Update Beta 2 is now available with a fix for Dreamhost users and new customization options.

It should come as no surprise to any of you that I really, really like FriendFeed, given the things I’ve done with the API and the unholy amount of time I spend browsing, commenting and liking people’s stuff. However, I’ve had a hard time converting most of my friends into “true believers” and using the service. I know it’s not for everyone, but the potential value of the service to some users seems to get lost in the UI. Me? I love it. It’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s precisely what I need and nothing I don’t. But, again, it’s not for everyone.

The biggest complaint I get? Hard on the eyes. No, not the design. But the color scheme. Black on white isn’t the best pallet choice when you’re potentially spending hours browsing pages. Thus, my theme FriendFeed Neo was built. It inverses the scheme, placing white text on a black background. It also softens the blues, removes the rounded edges and does nifty little things like highlight friend’s comments in threads to make them more noticeable.

I have more plans for the theme, but for now I’m releasing it so I can start getting feedback. So, please, give it a try and let me know what you think- preferably in the evansims.com room on FF or here in my blog comments.

Grab it at Userstyles.org

Thanks!

TwitterBash takes the concept of the long Internet-famous bash.org, which allows folks to post snippets and quote conversations from IRC, and applies it to Twitter. Just sign up for an account, then head to the submit page. Pop in the permalink for a tweet you want to quote and you’re done. Tweets can be voted up or down by users, and we base our popularity index off that score (which we call karma.) You can even embed quoted tweets into your own pages using a number of methods.

I think Judson came up with a great concept here. It’s simple, it’s fun, and people will hopefully have a great time using it.

For those curious about the tech behind it (that was my department, after all), TwitterBash runs atop PHP5 and the wonderful CodeIgniter framework. Thanks to CI, I was able to rapidly pump out a prototype in a matter of days for Judson and I to begin playing with.

Give it a look, bash your favorites and have a good time!

Just a quick post to let folks know that I’ve pushed a major update to my SmugMug URL forwarding service SmugURL. It’s got a new web UI, a revised API and a lot of improvements behind the scenes. The rework I put into it allowed me to lay some framework for some future features I’ve been thinking about adding, namely social bookmarking, voting on links and optional hit tracking complete with fancy bars, graphics and other bells and whistles.

Give it a try, let me know what you think.

P.S. Don’t forget, LOST tonight!

So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and build SmugURL. It takes a obfuscated SmugMug URL (be it a gallery, or a direct link to a photo or video) and makes a pretty version suitable for sharing on your site or with friends.

Take, for example, my Myst Online (God rest it’s soul) gallery on SmugMug.

Original URL: http://evansims.smugmug.com/gallery/4717671_Ywtjp#279209234_a2ALu
SmugURL: http://smugurl.com/evansims/myst_online

They take you to the same place, one just gives some indication of what we can expect to find there. What makes this different from the multitude of other shortening services out there? Not much, really. However, I liked the idea of enforcing the SmugMug username in the URL so there is some indication of ownership at a glance.

Give it a try, and let me know if you encounter any problems. It’s very much a work in progress.