crazybobbles » code http://www.crazybobbles.org photos + music + geekery - mind games Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:08:19 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7-beta3-9762 en hourly 1 More site changes: cooler sidebar http://www.crazybobbles.org/2008/10/19/more-site-changes-cooler-sidebar/ http://www.crazybobbles.org/2008/10/19/more-site-changes-cooler-sidebar/#comments Sun, 19 Oct 2008 16:47:40 +0000 crazybobbles http://www.crazybobbles.org/?p=1046 crazybobbles.org: site redesign

Slightly trippy seeing a screenshot of the site you're seeing (if that even makes sense)

Last night I spent the evening coding like no tomorrow till 4am (hence no tomorrow). I’ve revamped my sidebar menu to allow a sample shot section, a better introduction to my blog and a fancy flickr bar showing the latest 15 photos I’ve taken on the side, this was part of my site fattening procedure where I screwed all 800×600 users and move to the 960px territory.

The site will be more flickr integrated than ever (don’t know what i’d do without it!). Of course the quality of posts will improve with time as well as more features here and there being implemented, so yeah, if you’re a previous visitor, hope you like, if you’re new, hope you like! Please leave comments on your thoughts and opinions on the site redesign, since the code hasn’t settled in just yet so I can still do additional tweaks to it.

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]]> http://www.crazybobbles.org/2008/10/19/more-site-changes-cooler-sidebar/feed/ Crazy sudoku puzzle thing http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/05/07/crazy-sudoku-puzzle-thing/ http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/05/07/crazy-sudoku-puzzle-thing/#comments Mon, 07 May 2007 02:28:33 +0000 crazybobbles http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/05/07/crazy-sudoku-puzzle-thing/ Sudoku gameSlowly completing my other projects now, been doing the crazy sudoku one now :D It wasn’t too hard to implement I must say, though I did use the dirtiest coding ever to build it, nonetheless I completed the juice of the system and all I need is to finish bits and bobs off, write the report and bam, another project out of the way. I’m suppose to be making posters right now so its pretty awesome that I’m way ahead of time. Got lots of presentations and demonstrations to do this week. Including some crazy poster presentation and a database presentation. Will most likely need to look representable so ties all the way (leather one to make it slightly rock and roll haha). Watching loads of Studio Ghibli films lately, felt really inspired to watch them again :) Still wanna goto Studio Ghibli in Japan :(

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]]> http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/05/07/crazy-sudoku-puzzle-thing/feed/ Musecast.co.uk finally relaunched today http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/04/28/musecastcouk-finally-relaunched-today/ http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/04/28/musecastcouk-finally-relaunched-today/#comments Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:46:25 +0000 crazybobbles http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/04/28/musecastcouk-finally-relaunched-today/ After months and months of coding I’ve finally managed to get Musecast.co.uk to launch. The site is pretty intense after we started putting in real content into the site. I’ve already received some feedback on the site and I’ve started up google analytics on the site to track the outcome.

Pre launching the site was quite a painful experience, it included some MORE bug fixes (this time, loads more popped up!) as well as some quick features added onto the thing (such as a navigation bar for news and podcast so you can move to the next and previous podcast / news so news searching is easier). The tags in particular seems to work really well. It does provide an easier way of organising and finding information based on keywords.

After all the bug fixes I had to export the database and import it into my client’s hosting server. After that, a few site configurations and the site was up and ready. I’m quite proud at the overall outcome of the product. Theres quite alot of features which greatly increases the chance of a user reading more pages within the site, theres also a great potential of using digg, reddit and delicious to further increase the exposure of the site to potential visitors.

Now we play the waiting game (not really, I need to write the project now haha).

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]]> http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/04/28/musecastcouk-finally-relaunched-today/feed/ Musecast Bughunt http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/04/28/bughunt/ http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/04/28/bughunt/#comments Sat, 28 Apr 2007 02:55:06 +0000 crazybobbles http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/04/28/bughunt/ Tonight was a final bug hunt before launching the site, I’ve asked several internal staff members and fellow programmers to test the site for me for bugs as well as design criticisms. Tonight I went through about 10-20 bugs spotted and fixed them one by one, some include:

  • The nav bar, I’ve increased the size of the header again so that theres a gap between the nav links (in particular their hover top border) and the subtitle of the site. My client wanted this fixed in particular so it was good that I managed to get that done
  • Feeds, the way they are parsed and added onto the news page. They were being escaped when double speech marks were used, a fix was to use the htmlspecialchars() function and then strip slashes on the form. The process was a bit tedious in pinpointing how to correctly parse the thing
  • Logging in system, made it work more smoothly now,it will now take you back to the original page you were on
  • Logging in system, I’ve also ensured that admin pages are not accessible unless you’re logged in AND you are an admin, I will also do some htaccess on this folder just for added protection
  • Include more bookmarking sites on the summary pages
  • Fixed the links on the meta box
  • Sorted the headlinks, turned them to pink instead of white (since white was the main font so it made sense that way)
  • Delete news, that works now. Twas a few typos in the code
  • Fixed the comment approval section, was suppose to display “no comments required approving” but it didnt, was a problem with the query, fixed now though

That should be about it for the bug fixes, tommorow I will refresh the database so the id numbers are all nice and new and after that we’ll be able to enjoy a nice site launch. Hopefully.

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]]> http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/04/28/bughunt/feed/ Extreme Programming and report finalising. http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/04/17/extreme-programming-and-report-finalising/ http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/04/17/extreme-programming-and-report-finalising/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2007 20:48:02 +0000 crazybobbles http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/04/17/extreme-programming-and-report-finalising/ Features are being churned out everyday for the past 2 weeks. I’ve been able to:

  • Redesign the side so that the navagation menu is at the top rather then at the side to save space.
  • Implement tag and song boxes, sort out their admin sections
  • Implement comments for news, this includes editing, deleting and adding
  • Implement a comments page which enables an admin to approve comments that have been made
  • Introduce side boxes; just simple blocks that contain things such as tags for the news, meta data for the site, comments that require moderating, user login and logout
  • Implement a user logging in and out system.

I’m going to focus alot more on adding things such as digg, delicious and other social networking integrations. I’ll also be focusing more on my report.

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]]> http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/04/17/extreme-programming-and-report-finalising/feed/ Current tasks ahead http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/01/31/current-tasks-ahead/ http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/01/31/current-tasks-ahead/#comments Wed, 31 Jan 2007 15:44:59 +0000 crazybobbles http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/01/31/current-tasks-ahead/ Right now I’m focusing mainly on finishing the podcast admin page, the page is similar to the news page, and finishing this means that I’ll be able to complete the main requirements of the site (ie the administrator can easily create, update, edit and delete records for both podcast and news). I’ll be targeting to complete this on Thursday evening. Afterwards its essential that I focus on the RSS section since I have the least knowledge about that section.

The following requirements needs to be done by Thursday:

  • Sorting columns
  • Pagination
  • Code cleaning

Shouldn’t be too hard, I’ve done the main functionality of the site, include tag clouds, toggle switches and general editing, creating and modifying of the data. Just needs the finishing touches

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]]> http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/01/31/current-tasks-ahead/feed/ Tag cloud alogrithm http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/01/29/tag-cloud-alogrithm/ http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/01/29/tag-cloud-alogrithm/#comments Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:44:40 +0000 crazybobbles http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/01/29/tag-cloud-alogrithm/ Song tag cloud for MusecastOne of the site’s features is a tag and song “tagcloud” used to show which tags are popular and which aren’t. The idea is simply, for tags that are popular, you emphasise them more, this can be done in terms of font weight, size, colour and whatever styling method that enables the text to be highlighted from another text.

Right now I’m only using the font size as a way of demonstrating the tag cloud but perhaps if theres time I could go about doing it for font colour too (which might need a bit of configuring to ensure it works).

I’ve managed to stumble upon this article which helped me out on how I should establish the correct distribution of font sizes etc so I’ll be using it for making the tag cloud.

http://semanticvoid.com/blog/2006/01/06/tag-cloud-font-distribution-algorithm/

The article is pretty small but does the job

Ever thought of how the collection of tags with varying fontsizes (known as Tag Cloud) populated. As I say ‘theres an algorithm for everything’, theres an algorithm for this too. Assuming you know all about tag popularity (if not refer previous post) I’ll go ahead explaining it.

The distinct feature of tag clouds are the different groups of font sizes. Now the number of such groups desired depends entirely upon the developer. Usually having six such size-groups proves optimal.

Assume any suitable metric for measuring popularity (for instance ‘number of users using the tag’). We can always obtain the max and min numbers for the same. For example:

max(Popularity) = 130
min(Popularity) = 35

Therefore we can define one block of font-size as :
( max(Popularity) - min(Popularity) ) / 6

For the above values we get one such block range as (130 - 35) / 6 = 15.83 ~ 16
Font-sizes therefore could be bound as follows:

Range Font-Size
35 to 51 1
52 to 68 2
69 to 85 3
86 to 102 4
103 to 119 5
120 to 136 6

Update
Tonight I managed to create the tag cloud. Not only that, I turned it into a function so that it can be used for more then just the admin pages. The coding was pretty much based on the above calculations to come up with the right sizes, I used percentages to portray the font sizes as it seems more relative to the web page.

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]]> http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/01/29/tag-cloud-alogrithm/feed/ Improved interface for admin panel http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/01/28/improved-interface-for-admin-panel/ http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/01/28/improved-interface-for-admin-panel/#comments Sun, 28 Jan 2007 22:39:21 +0000 crazybobbles http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/01/28/improved-interface-for-admin-panel/ Managed to really tidy up the admin panel, in particular the Podcast manager section. I’ve tried to keep the amount of links and functions to a minimum and have the rest hidden via css and javascript. Below shows the songs and tag section doing just that. I’ve also added navigation on the top of the page so users can go back to the main page via the top, and the links on the side as well

Meta podcast

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]]> http://www.crazybobbles.org/2007/01/28/improved-interface-for-admin-panel/feed/ Some more blog pimping http://www.crazybobbles.org/2006/10/28/some-more-blog-pimping/ http://www.crazybobbles.org/2006/10/28/some-more-blog-pimping/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 02:30:24 +0000 crazybobbles http://www.crazybobbles.org/2006/10/28/some-more-blog-pimping/ Ok, hopefully the LAST blog pimping up session for a long time. It’s definitely distracting me from doing other stuff haha. Anyway, I managed to update the theme a little bit more, features now include:

  • New subtitle bit at the top, had to shave the header padding a bit more to compensate the subtitle.
  • Dates are now shown on the right of each post via the calender type thing. This makes more room for category and meta bits under the header
  • Changed the header a bit, didnt like the rounded edge thing so I changed it to a normal heading, juiced up the size a bit too
  • Used a bit more of the random text plugin, some very subtle ones though, I’m sure you can find them quite easily.

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]]> http://www.crazybobbles.org/2006/10/28/some-more-blog-pimping/feed/ Pimp my blog up http://www.crazybobbles.org/2006/10/25/pimp-my-blog-up/ http://www.crazybobbles.org/2006/10/25/pimp-my-blog-up/#comments Wed, 25 Oct 2006 20:15:09 +0000 crazybobbles http://www.crazybobbles.org/2006/10/25/pimp-my-blog-up/ Made quite alot of updates to the blog. Some of them include:

  • Managed to add some hatching effect on the top menu, slightly more web2.0 haha (i feel like i’m abusing the visual styles used in web2.0 quite alot these days)
  • I really like the styles used for typo (a ruby on rails blogging software). Simple stuff like softer body text (using #666 instead of the obvious #000 or even #333) and the font being verdana helps quite alot in making the site more easier to read. I’m considering making my own skin in wordpress, it looks fun.
  • I’ve applied a random text plugin which allows me to shove in the occasional random bit of text for fun, one I’m using atm is the list of words you say when you reply, it can vary from x wrote this to x said that.
  • I’ve provided more contact methods to be used for contacting me, the email address will be forward to me instead of using my actual one just to make changing emails alot easier (spam and all)
  • I’ve pimped up my about page , it includes a photo of me, as well as some more stuff about me
  • Very subtle thing, but I’ve increased the font size of the headings on the sidebar
  • Adding a bit of padding to the header thing
  • Now I have a left and right class on my css, this means I can use it to float images to the left or right. Pretty useful.
  • Added some extra images to jazz the site up a bit, you can see them below

Post itEmail Icon
You can find the above on the to do list page and the contact page :)
For my next blog update, I think I’ll be redesigning the theme myself, might publish it and all too!

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