Taiwan Flickr with comments

I’ve recently added more functionality to the Cruisy website with regard to comments on Flickr photos. You may be thinking, why have comments on Flickr photos? This can be done in Flickr. Well, yes… But the point here is to aggregate the Taiwan Flickr pools, photos, and comments into one place where they can be accessed easily.  

So, to start off, there’s a ‘Photos’ page which includes a small selection of photos from Taiwan-related Flickr pools.

Taiwan Flickr section on Photos page

If you click any of the Flickr pool hyperlinks, a pop-up gallery will appear (as in one of my earlier posts) with more photos from that pool and if you click on the photographer’s name (in this case it’s Paogao), you’ll be taken to their Flickr page.

Taiwan Flickr Gallery

Clicking on the blue comments hyperlink will pop up a Flickr photos comment dialog (you need to be logged in to add a comment).

Flickr comments dialog

Then, after adding your comment, you can then view it…

Flickr comments dialog

Commented photos can be accessed from elsewhere on the site and can be viewed, with all comments, as an article.

Flickr article with comments

I’ll go more into the comments functionality in a later post. If you know of any Flickr pools that should be included in the list, let me know!

Photoviewers

I’ve been busy with the Photos section of the Cruisy website lately and have developed the basic functionality for the pop-up galleries. There are two main categories of photos that can be viewed: news, and Taiwan Flickr. The news photos gallery will pop-up when the ‘Photos’ link associated with a particular news story is clicked. Unfortunately, this functionality doesn’t currently exist for Taiwan news articles, but I’m hoping to be able to implement it in the future. The ‘Today in Photos’ section will have a similar pop-up which provides a daily summary of happenings from around the world in photos.

Today in Photos image gallery

The ‘Taiwan Flickr’ section will will also consist of two main features: Flickr ‘pools’ (or groups) related to Taiwan, and a search tool. As with the news photos, pop-ups will also be used to view Flickr galleries. There will be a list of pools to choose from and I’m planning to have a form so that users can add their pool to the list. As well as providing an outlet for photographers, I think this could also be quite a cool feature for any members of clubs or associations in Taiwan as it could be a quick and easy way to check out what happened at an event.

Flickr pools pop-up image gallery

November progress report

Well, I finished my exam a couple of weeks ago and have begun the development of the Cruisy website. I had actually already done a bit when I had time throughout the semester, but now I’m able to spend more time on it. Since my exam, my time has mostly been taken up with:

• Designing the home page – just a rough layout so that the content looks OK when it’s spat out into the view.
• Searching for sources of information.
• Working out which technologies I’ll need. This took some time because there are many ways to skin a cat.
• Finishing off a javascript newsreader.
• Sorting out a caching mechanism.

Here is a screenshot of the javascript newsreader I built:

Newsreader

 

As I’ve switched from PHP to Java, and I’ll be using another instance of MySQL (as apposed to the one built into XAMP), I’ve removed XAMP from my computer. So, for the meantime, I won’t be able to do any more develoment on the Noted website. I know it can be improved, especially with the sharing functionality (the navigation through subjects is not very intuitive), and there may be a bug here and there – if something serious comes up, I can always put XAMPP back on and fix it up. Let me know if you find any bugs!

Cruisy – Application requirements

My final exam is coming up at the end of this month, and I think it will be largely based around the management of software processes (project management). This got me to thinking about the Cruisy web project. I want to model Cruisy, somewhat loosely, around a real-world software project, and follow software development processes as closely as possible (I say that now, but if it really happens is another story!) I’m working on it alone, so a lot of processes reserved for team development won’t be necessary. Similarly, application requirements won’t need as much documentation – considering there’s no one else involved, it’s actually easier to have it all in my head. But on the other hand, things might become clearer if I use analysis tools such as use cases and storyboards. We’ll see…

Here are some tactical decisions I have made, so far:

• The programming language will be Java. The last application I wrote, Noted, was in PHP, but this time I’m choosing Java because I plan to use a very object-oriented approach. Also, the application will call for integration of some high-level technologies, and I’m more comfortable using Java for that.
• I want to use a framework for this one – possibly Spring. I haven’t used a framework for my other projects, so this will be something new. Hopefully, this will help to keep the project organised, efficient and maintainable.
• Caching is going to be a concern. I haven’t had to deal much with this, but it’s something this application is going to need in order to have semi-decent performance.
• I think I’ll use Eclipse IDE. I’ve been using Netbeans for a while now and really happy with its functionality, but Eclipse has a few things that Netbeans doesn’t. For one thing, it has better code history contol –  you can revert back to old code if you make a screw up. Also, I’d like to check out an Eclipse plug-in called Enerjy, which gives an indication of application quality.

Cruisy logo

I’ve recently been playing around on Photoshop, sorting out a logo for the Cruisy website. A couple of days ago I came up with this:

I liked it, but thought it needed a bit of jazzing up to make it more “web 2.0”. So tonight I had another shot at it, and came up with this:

It’s a bit flashier, but still needs a bit of reworking. I used a gradient for the outlining, but I think it might need toning down a little. I’ll update this post with any subsequent designs.

Update: I toned down the darkness of the outline, as well as giving it more of a uniform thickness. I also put a 1 pixel line inside the outline to make it pop a bit more.

 

I downloaded a font from 1001freefonts.com, and here’s how it looks together with the logo.

 

 

I’ll play around with other fonts to see what looks best.

 

Hmm… I think I might stick with the first font.

New domain name

I’ve just purchased my first domain name!

It’s: cruisy.com.tw

It will be a while until I get the website online, but it’s a good starting point – no turning back now! First things first: get this course finished…