And then there was another one...

[codebyren]

So I’ve been working on a site for the past few weeks (my first live attempt beyond “place holder” pages). It’s come a long way now though so I would appreciate some thoughts and critiques on it. Check it out at http://www.oohdesktop.com. I don’t know if it is valid xhtml because I haven’t looked yet - I have tried to be mindful though so hopefully it’s close. Also, sorry to the other guy on here with the “ShowYourDesktop” site - I had started working on this site a little while before I saw yours.  If you see the ad placeholders, I plan to eventually put some black google ads on it… mostly because the page looks a bit akward without it I think. I don't really care for the money... unless it's a lot.

 

[codebyren]

You don't have to read this massive chunk if you don't want to but I figured I’d pass on some info to some people that like some of the features or want to know of some decent resources etc. (Not that I am the king of web design). I just used this website to practice for future ones so I tried to include some cool, useful stuff.

 

If you’re thinking about tags for your website, http://www.pui.ch/phred/archives/2005/04/tags-database-schemas.html is legendary. I went for the “mysqlicious” with fulltext option because I don’t expect my website will get to a million records. Then it was just a case of using implode() and explode() when validating, loading into database, and extracting a list of comma-separated tags.

 

Image verification: well, http://www.recaptcha.net was my choice and was incredibly easy to implement. You might recognize it from a few big sites out there but it works well for us little guys too.

 

For creating thumbnails and resizing images, I switched from a custom script to using http://phpthumb.sourceforge.net/ which was also really easy to implement (and infinitely better than my script). I’ve just pointed it to use imagemagick on my server which it is apparently faster with. Haven't tested this yet.

 

For allowing html to be entered in textareas and then later displayed without cross site scripting vulnerabilities etc., I use www.htmlpurifier.org which was one of the more complicated things to get going. The main issue was that I didn’t really understand “doctypes” and xhtml all that well when I started. Also, initially I was running http://www.fckeditor.net as a wysiwyg editor for comments and desktop explanations (which is easy to implement) but then I figured it was a bit overkill for users to have to download the entire script just because they want to look at a desktop screenshot - and then probably wont even leave a comment.  I might include it in an optional popup window someday so if the user wants to use it, they can. Htmlpurifier is genius by the way.

 

http://vikjavev.no/highslide/ was used for the javascript when zooming to the full size of a desktop screenshot. Easy to use as well.

 

For hosting, I went with www.surpasshosting.com which I will have to report back on in a while. It’s the first time I’ve used a host for anything that does more than run the time( ) function in php. There are some potentially intense scripts here that I’m using so it will be interesting to see how shared hosting handles it. I have no idea what to expect, or how intense these scripts actually are relative to what’s out there.

 

What do I probably need to change? Well, my code is such that the left and right bars will load up before the main content … which is bad. It’s bad for users and bad for search engines from what I’ve read. Now they will probably find useless paragraphs of text like “upload a jpg, png or gif < 500kB” before they find a useful description of the actual page… Oh well.

 

I still want to add a desktop rating system that can work anonymously but also prevent spam votes via proxies etc. I don’t want to use image verification just because a user wants to rate something. Though I will take this plea for suggestions to the relevant part of this forum