Sumea Profile/Journals suggestions

Journals? Where? I guess that answers some of your questions!

:)

Yeh, I probably have to give journals an appearance on the main page. At the moment, you need at least two clicks to get onto someone's profile/journal page fom the main page.

Just some more ideas I thought of... each member gets a general comments page so people can comment and message anything there. Sorta like a guestbook. I'll parse out the journals as XML so anyone can bookmark your xml page with an RSS reader and get your latest entry in an instant. The code for all this is already in place in other areas of the site so it should be easy enough to implement.

Anyway, more suggestions, people. [:)]

web cam portal? ;)

Hey Souri I just have to ask cause it's been bugging me for a while now, what happened to your forum avatar? Where's Astroboy? is it just me that's getting this strange wash of colours instead?

thats the M+Ms add by the looks of it (in his AV)

Yep, it's the 'colour my world' M&M ad. I love that ad. ^_^

Oh yeah I get it now, love that ad, makes me want to swim around in a sea of M&M's gobbling as I go.

I've gotten off my ass and upgraded the journals/blogs a bit. It's a little bit more useful (random sumea member, list of latest entries), and it looks a bit more cleaner, I think. You also have a guestbook as well. Also planned is that rss feed (when I can figure how to do it a certain way), and also let members customize the look of their profile page a little.. Upload your own background, choose if you want it tiled or repeated, change the colour of fonts/background colours for certain areas etc.

There are a few errors that need sorting out but I'm working on it.

oh this sounds really cool! As I was going to use my sumea journal thing to write stuff about all those art related goals and that. I just never had a chance to start it :p

suggestion: make the timeout on writing a new post a bit longer, or if you are timed out, at least save the post? :(

oh well. it's always better written the second time around. :)

oh, and perhaps we can more easily link the sumea profiles and the forum profiles? (ie: it's taking me forever to find out how to link to my own profile page...)

i agree, if you want to look at someone's profile, you have to seach manually though all mapper, modeller, programer, etc sections to find their name. it would be great to link to it in forum profiles.

You could place your link to Sumea profile in your forum profile homepage link, cool links, or comments. [:)] You could put it in your sig if you want to.

If you want to find your own profile page, you'll have to do what Livewire just mentioned. Actually, for new registrations, I've been sending them their profile link in the activation email.

I'll do something about raising the session timeouts..

don't get me wrong - these new features are great and I'm ecstatic that I don't need to set up my own blog now :)

Just "usability" suggestions... :)

Ok, folks. If you login and go to edit your profile/select or create profile style, you can choose a fantastic *2* styles that I've thrown in there for testing purposes. Better yet, you can create your own one and choose to use that! It's pretty straightforward, you're just customizing font colours, background colours, background graphics, tiling etc but if you have any problems, let me know here.

Also, if you do create a custom style for your profile page, post it here, I'd love to see it.

Cool! Just tried it out with a colourscheme I've used before (CCFFFF text on 4B3300 background). It would be really nice to also be able to override the default white page body colour too, though...

Just trying to replace the existing background with this new one...

[img]icon_paperclip.gif[/img] Download Attachment: [url="http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/attached/mcdrewski/2005414184051_bg.jpg"]bg.jpg[/url]
62.14 KB

...and it doesn't seem to work for me.

So, my guesses are - either work's web proxy is caching the image (which means that the timestamps reported by sumea.com.au need to be 'touched' when an upload occurs) or the upload doesn't let me overwrite for some reason.

any ideas?

EDIT : It's working fine now.

Yeh, soemtimes images are stuck in your web browser's cache. Sometimes you have to shift+refresh, or even clear your cache to see the changes. Because these images are referred to by the CSS style, sometimes it's pretty stubborn in displaying the new image in your browser. You'll probably see this when you upload a new forum avatar.

Got this while looking throught the profile thingies:

Random Sumea Member

ADODB.Field error '800a0bcd'

Either BOF or EOF is True, or the current record has been deleted. Requested operation requires a current record.

/sprofile.asp, line 53

Yeh, I know exactly what's causing that. I'll be fixing it sometime later though. [:D]

So Sumea Concepts is done, and while I won't be making that available to the public just yet, I'll be working on fixing up the very neglected Sumea Profiles/Journals.

If you have a quick look, I've made a few changes in the appearance of the journal pages. Firefox has some tiny issues with the CSS but I'll be fixing that once I find out why it's doing what it is. IE and Opera is fine. If anything else is broken, just know that I am working on it [;)]

Unfortunately the customised themes that 5 or so members have created will be lost as I've come up with a new way for members to completely change the way they want their journal to look. It'll be really simple and I hope people do some great skins for their page once I finish all that. I'll also get onto that rss feed idea which I had many moons ago, and any other ideas I can come up with to make the journals cooler.

I've overhauled the way you can customise the way your journal looks. Log in and choose "Select or Create Journal Style". There are some docs, pics, and files to download if you need any help. If you're stuck on anything or find something wrong, you can post it in this thread.

It's pretty simple, but you should be able to do some pretty wicked stuff with it. Just use your imagination!

cool! works great! For those artistically crippled souls of us that don't upload images much though, that big blank space at the top of the page looks a bit odd...

Hey, very nice work on your journal page, mate [:)] [url="http://www.sumea.com.au/sprofile.asp?member=444"]Everyone check it out[/url]! I'm hoping more and more people have a go. It's pretty simple to do!

Yeh, I've been trying to get get that blank space to disappear with javascript if you don't have any thumbnails. I've put in some asp code in the iframe that says "hey, there's no thumbnails, output this javascript code to hide the thumbnail space", except I don't have that js code working yet. I know it can be done, but my javascript-fu is pretty non-existant. [:(]

If anyone wants to help out with this. [;)]

I'm assuming it's something more complex than this...

[code]

if (document.getElementById("MyDivOrSpanID")) {
document.getElementById("MyDivOrSpanID").innerHTML = " "; // <- that's an & nbsp ; in there...
}
[/code]

I'm gonna have to pick your brain for this after I finish up on another project.

Hey, that went much smoother than I expected [;)].

Anyways, I've had to overhaul how members write entries and upload pictures to their journals. I know how uploading pictures to your journal used to be such a pain in the arse (anyone remember how it used to be when Sumea first started? *cringe*), and I know even recently people still had problems uploading work. The first problem is that people didn't understand that uploading images was a two step process. The other thing was that reuploading images was a bit of a hack job.. so I've been working on a solution this past week and I'm happy to say that:

1. Writing and uploading pictures only takes one step, the way it should be!! Write your journal, select your pics, then click submit and that's it. Simple!
2. Reuploading images is a *breeze*. Click edit, go to the thumbnail of the pic you want to reupload, and browse for a replacement.
3: This whole deal involved me renaming the thousands of submitted pictures on the website and database, which I was so close to doing by hand until I realised how mind numbingly time consuming that would've been. A simple script and a few minutes later and it was done [:)] I was afraid I was going to do some mistake and accidently batch delete all the images, but it turned out fine. Phew.
4: I've managed to cut down on the number of stinkin pages required to add/edit journal entries from 8 to just 3.

So anyways, I might put in an upload check so that people don't upload files larger than the set limit, but once that's in, the whole writing a journal/uploading picture procedure should be fool proof! No one should be having any problems anymore!

*ALSO* I've put in some functionality in there so you can embed a picture into your journal post, just like most other blogs. I haven't finished it off just yet, it'll only take a few minutes to complete but I'm taking a break for the rest of today. [;)]

sounds awesome! i promise i might actually start using it soon too :P (VCE..)

Three Cheers!

Hip Hip!!!!