K Frog Designs

Fire In Ice Programming To-Do List

2005-12-08T15:39:00.000-08:00

Ok, I've just finished the graphical design of Fire In Ice's layout, as you can see on deviantart. Here's a few storyboards I've put up there, I hope you like them;

Now I have to write a small, very general To-Do list to keep you and me updated about progress.

To-Do List;

Prepareations for modifications

~~In Progress: Create a new mysql table and duplicate all current data across to the new table for preservational reasons~~
~~In Progress: Duplicate current site and set up in a new directory, modifying all necessary details to get the mysql/php configurations working.~~ [Example: Fire In Ice Test Site]

Jewelry Entries

In Progress: Add "Feature" option to collections
~~In Progress: Add element details options~~
- ~~In Progress: Create X amount of elements~~
- ~~In Progress: Provide details for elements~~
  - ~~Carats~~
  - ~~Cut~~
  - ~~Colour~~
  - ~~Clarity~~
  - ~~Grading~~
- ~~In Progress: Add Overall Details~~
  - ~~Dimensions~~
  - ~~Price~~
  - ~~Designer~~
In Progress: Develop collection display pages
~~In Progress: Add jewelry type option (Pendants & Necklaces, Earrings, Rings, Bracelets, Loose Elements)~~
- ~~Has option to add new jewelry type~~
~~In Progress: Add option for multiple images to be displayed under the same entry~~
In Progress: Re-create main page display
- In Progress: Enable graphics for categories
  - ~~In Progress: Add image field to gallery.php display~~
  - ~~In Progress: Add image field to category table~~
  - ~~In Progress: Create directory to store images~~
  - ~~In Progress: Add post scripts to gallery.php~~
    - ~~In Progress: Migrate basic image uploader to gallery.php~~
  - In Progress: Apply graphics to necessary pages
In Progress: Re-work piece creation script adding flow
- ~~In Progress: Create general details form~~
- ~~In Progress: Create specific details form~~
- ~~In Progress: Create image uploader form (w. cropping script)~~
- ~~In Progress: Create element data form~~
- In Progress: Add contextual element data display
~~In Progress: Add easy editing options to view.php~~
~~In Progress: Add image order modification page~~
In Progress: Write error instances for most of the new data
~~In Progress: Create stylings for thumbnails~~

~~In Progress: Create 1px thick border overlay for all thumbnails~~
~~In Progress: Create an inner shadow with about 5% translucency just to give the thumb a little depth~~
~~In Progress: Apply these two filters (with changeable options in the config file) to the thumbnailing scripts & large image uploading script & cropping scripts~~
In Progress: Create an image rotation script

In Progress: re-organise admin files to suit new flow of information
~~In Progress:Fix CHMOD problem with files (files are being written with CHMOD 600, they should be written with 644).~~

Jewelry Display

~~In Progress: Design Main Page displaying collections in short description~~ [Link: Main Page Example]
~~In Progress: Design Collection page which can later be adapted to browsing page~~ [Link: Collections Example]
In Progress: Design Jewelry display page
In Progress: Design Browsing page using collection page large and small product displays from the collection

Styles

In Progress: Implement a style changing script
- In Progress: Make it possible for script to change the thumbnail border effects
- In Progress: Allow each category to have its own style

Browsing

In Progress: Add Browse page
- In Progress: Calculate date of last entry
- In Progress: Calculate numbers of entries
- In Progress: add paging options - (universal operation)
In Progress: Develop feed recollections of browses/searches for contextual display
In Progress: Work on cart scripting & integrate with jewelry entries
In Progress: Add optional enquiry listing similar to cart listing

Links

In Progress: Add rating calculator for links page
In Progress: Add paging options for links page - (universal operation)

Textual Content

In Progress: Migrate newsphp to news/updates display
In Progress: Develop seperate blog for Andris w. Blogger-esque details
In Progress: Add a simple content manager for services data w. similar css options as the blogs
In Progress: Add simple content manager for contact page

Well, thats a very tiny to-do list, it'll get bigger over coming weeks, and hopefully some results will develop.

Fire In Ice Piece Display

2005-08-16T16:39:00.000-07:00

The image display took a lot longer than expected to design, so now I 'm a little behind in the drafting process, but at least I'm happy with this design. There's a lot of new little styles to this draft, including the new search box, and the buy/enquire/print icons (which I love).

I think I'm going to revise the other drafts to suit this later, because the hierarchy of information display is very important in site design, and currently there's little connection between the designs :( *click for a full size view - the full size file is 280kb, it may take a while to load*

Descriptions;

The search site box has been minimalised and brought in line with the main content of the site, just to ensure that there's a connection between the main information being displayed, and the potential content on the rest of the site. The plus sign (now that I think of it) is a good symbol to use with search boxes, it alludes to the vast potential for other content.
I've re-aligned the RSS button, as I've been getting so many suggestions to do so (though i'm not sure why). It is now a less important element of the site, and it doesn't conflict with the main logo.
Now I'm not sure about the new contextual location display, as it does conflict with the header elements, but it is essential to the site. Its a contextual header display because you could be viewing this piece from the browser, or from the collection display, or from the price list, or from the blog, so the location display will change to respond to this (possibly through session data or through a HTTP variable legend – though the latter option would confuse google and other search engines, and double up on the same content, which could eventually remove the site from the search engines, so thats a very bad idea)
The "similar pieces" display on the right hand side needs a little more work I agree. It still doesn't fit in with the rest of the content. The similar pieces display is meant to be contextual too, here's a run down on what would be displayed;
1. From the collections -> Similar Pieces
2. From the browser -> Previous and next results obtained from the browser
3. From the price list -> 20 previous and next items from the price list (displayed in textual form)
4. From the blog -> other pieces talked about in the blog, previous/related posts and comments, blog archive, other usual blog elements (like the ones on the RHS of this blog)
The "featured piece" box will display for pieces that have special offers, or other information attached, like blogs/etc. I think there needs to be a revision on the "take offer" button, because viewers could be confused between the "buy" button and the "take offer" button.
The zooms on the left hand side of the main image are further images of the same item so the user can have a better understanding of what they're looking at. These elements have rollover styles, which play with the alpha of each image, and the selected image is loaded into the main display through javascript (though there might be formatting issues here with the different sizes of the images, so width and height may be constrained to small variations).
The main box display which shows "Description"/"Detail"/etc... is something I'm really proud of. Its a box with hidden overflow, so when an image is too small, a scrollbar will be displayed instead of having display issues. The "read more" button will expand the descriptive text, and "Details" will probably become half hidden, with a thick white alpha border to symolise there's further information on the piece. (Its hard to explain here, once I have a representation of what I'm talking about I'll show you).
And finally, the new sexy Buy/Enquire/Print buttons!!. Hrmm there's not much to describe about them here, I just love them :)

Eventually I'm going to have to redesign the logo, because its looking a little tacky and out of place with the rest of the site. I'll get to redesigning the "similar pieces" display soon, its been put on the back burner ever since the first draft.

I should have the rest of the drafts done by the end of this week, then I'll get to designing the site and programming the new features into the current scripts.

Fire In Ice Collection Display

2005-08-10T14:07:00.000-07:00

This new design for Fire In Ice is supposed to represent and promote textual content which is related to images (as opposed to the browser). It only took a day (which is surprising of late). *click for a full size view - though the full size file is 370kb, it may take a while to load*

I suspect there needs to be some revisions done of this, namely the "new to collection" list and the "browse this collection" link, the former is too present for lhs information, and the latter is not present enough *sighs*. Ohhh well, hope you like this one (no descriptions yet, will write more on it after some revisions).

PS: I've removed the search box just for the time being, it'll be incorporated in later designs.

The Fire In Ice Browser

2005-08-09T13:49:00.000-07:00

Recently, i've been feeling a little stifled for ideas, i'm not sure whether this is due to the overwhelming amount of information I have to design for, or that I've simply had a slow start to this month. Anyhow, I've come up with a further Fire In Ice design. Now this design is for the browser, which is intended to make it easier for a user of Fire In Ice to find the product they're looking for.

I'm not as content about this design as the main page design, but I believe I'm travelling in the right direction. The principal ideas I have had for the browser are present in this, there's just a few problems with the visual categorisation of objects, which is mainly due to proportion, but I'll talk about that later. Here's a schema of the browser design *click for a full size view - though the full size file is 370kb, it may take a while to load*

Descriptions;

The grouping of all the objects in the item browser is intended to represent that this browser should be considered as an application of sorts, somewhat seperate from the rest of the site.
I've taken a stand against dropdowns for browsing, so that probably explains why all choices are listed as either swatches (the collection selections on the left) or horizontal selectors (the view and element rows).
The collection selection (swatches on the left side) are supposed to be the most forward elements on the page. They change colour (become more vivid) on rollover and when browsing any style, the gallery display changes colour to correspond to the collection selected. The main problem i've had with this is they tend to compete too well with other elements and this may be a detriment to the items displayed. It could be possible to lighten these further, but this would require a strengthening of the inner shadow in the swatches, and maybe some sort of white graphic in the drop shadows *shrugs*. The colours could have been better selected too (some of the colours compete with the rollover colours in the header menu.
As you might/might not have noticed, the search box has a new button. This button was styled when I was coming up with styles for representing the information displayed with each thumbnail in the gallery. Now, this search box will need to be restyled again, as its too light, and there are some inconsistencies in the proportions of the search box to the "GO!" button. And the serif font can be changed too (erghh! one day I'll stop using serifs completely, but not right now).
There were so many styles I went through to represent the thumbnails, and this representation was the best of the lot. I'm not very happy with it at all, the only reason I used this was because of a decision I made to remove most of the text when displaying thumbnails (ie. the description text, title, etc.). This was probably not the best move. I'll have to go back to the drawing board for this one.
The browsing options (the stuff on red up at the top of the gallery) is probably the thing i'm most pleased with, though there are again problems with this. It needs improvements (especially in colour) because it stands out too much against the thumbnails, and i really dont want that to happen. Maybe I wont need to change this after I've re-sketched the thumbnail display.
The paging details (down the bottom) i'm almost content with, except for the previous and next links. I'm sure everybody else has this problem because there has always been a very bad representation of previous/next links on pages (just take a peak at phpbb's custom styles for at least any good idea for representing these and you'll see what I mean). They always look hideous and out of place, they dont display any relevant information about what to expect to the user, and are normally done like this '<<Previous | 01 | 02 | Next>>' ) *shivers*. I've noticed recently with the explosion of blogs that most pages have turned away from this representation, some not even bothering to page their objects, but this seems inescapable for any representation of thumbnails, and I believe this is slowly deprecating thumbnail displays. I'll whinge about this later and come up with some ingenious solution, trust me :P
The "Browse Our Collections" big half bold/half light title needs some work. Right now it seems like the only thing out of place *sigh*

I'm pulling a 'production-completed' to this design, its good enough to produce for now, but I need to explore more textual representations. Over the next 5 days i'll be designing the product display page, the blog/news display page, the collection display page and the links display page. After these have been done I'll come back to this and revise it with more text, better thumbnails, a list option, and better colours.

New Draft for Fire In Ice

2005-08-06T04:03:00.000-07:00

Sometime in the last two weeks, the owner of FireInIce.com.au requested a re-design of the entire Fire In Ice site. I have spent the last week or so, slaving away at proportions and schemas for the new design. I thought that I would give a little sneak peak at the new design here, with a small run-through of the GUI. *grins* Here's a preview of the main page design *click for a full size view - though the full size file is 420kb, it may take a while to load*

Descriptions;

I have re-designed the links bar and broadened what the links contain (ie. "browse our
collections" contains all collections for the site, "our jewelry services" includes 'brokerage and appraisal', 'education, training...' etc). On rollover of any of these links the bg will change colour :P
Putting a description of Fire In Ice up the top ensures that the viewers know what kind of site they are viewing. When a viewer pulls the cursor over this, the description will expand. (very sexily, with an alpha shadow around the edges and a nice scroll bar on the side :P)
I'm not sure about the new logo's font (it sort of reminds me of Coca-Cola, i'm not sure if i'll be sued yet, lets hope not), but it is eye catching. I had to design a new logo because the old one wasn't as eye catching.
Each collection has a different style in an attempt to embody the type of collection. If you look closely you can notice this in the different fonts, the different presentations of the images and thumbnails.
The small thumbnails will only exist on the front page just because there isn't enough space to have larger thumbnails on the front page. When browsing the collections I intend to use thumbnails at least twice as big as these. The first piece in the new collections represent a rolled-over piece, the second represents how the piece will be displayed normally
The large collection images are taken from some stock photography sites and arent intended to be published as is, they are only there in the draft to represent the type of image that would suit the category. I was thinking for the 'Colours of Australia' collection the imagewould be a quite romantic and rich image, for the 'Fire In Ice
Fashion' image one that has multiple pieces of jewelry and an accentuated style, and for the 'Preloved & Still Loved' image one that contains some hint of a story, or history. You will need to photograph similar images before the site is published, the sooner the better.

I'm currently working on designs for the 'browse our collections' page and the full view of jewelry pieces. Next I will be working on the 'our jewelry services' page and the 'news' page.

Further Ideas

2005-06-16T01:05:00.000-07:00

I've been visiting deviantArt alot over the last few weeks in between long uploads of the cluMe project, and I suppose this exploration of the site has brought me to discover new and conflicting ideas about club management.

The most recent one was to consider photographs and artworks as "projects" in the same way as an architects drawings are developed. This would probably require the "club" to become more of a corporate front, which is dertimental, but on the other hand, it would also improve the content and context of the work of the artist or artists. As I see it, each piece of work would display the current version of the work foremost, and then link to displays of previous work. This might/would require collaborative artworks and maybe some source files (.psds) that either all members or selected members can download, work on, then submit a revision of the work. The brilliance here is that stock artists get to control and see who develops their original piece. However the problem is the connection between each work, it isn't necessarily going to be linear, more like a tree structure, and that would be hard to represent graphically on the page.

How would this fit into the club layout as to not detriment the purpose of the club?
The detriment lies in the propogation of an anarcho-syndicalist structure between users. There is definitely going to be more challenges to the club structure and increased humility within the users if we were to place this control or power in the users hands. Therefore an equality must be obtained between the club and the user to minimise this. Maybe the club will promote these collaborative works more, and maybe even create their own. This structure of projects can be applied to even the most basic of club activities.

Should these collaborative works be controlled by the club then?
First of all, this control does not need to exist for stock pieces because it is promotional in this instance. There may need to be a control for members of a club, so certain members can do collaborative works and other members cant create them (they can only add to them).

The trouble with badly drawn bubbles

2005-05-22T22:41:00.000-07:00

After riding a mechanical bull 3 times over the weekend, all my muscles are in a big state of vapid slumber. And now it is Monday, the worst day of the week (if I had a job), and no amount of coffee can wake my body up. I moreso feel dissapointed, I could only last one and a half bucks on the "bull", which curiously wearing a cow's leather jacket, and lets just say that its anthropophaginian and paradoxical fashion sense did not make the outcome feel any better.

I'm pondering ways in which I can quit smoking, with little to no loss of my productive qualities. There's this profound numbness I feel after about 2 days without a cigarette, that leads me back to my old smoking habits. I've got to work around it somehow, and my best guess is that this is a psychological withdrawl symptom, which could be solved by patches, but they're too expensive to buy right now so I'm waiting for the next month, and marking a day on my calendar to attempt quitting again.

It seems that with all the effects of planning and planning, which leads to more planning and more challenges, cluMe's alpha 0.2 release date has been postponed for about 2 weeks. I proposed by the 0.2 release that it would be perfectly possible to work on the obedience to authority factors of the site, and on nuclear communities, whilst also having a stable site in the background, where users have an easy way to produce content, but the user features (which I love quite frankly) are still being coded.

I'm feeling kind of slightly dilluded and dilluted right now, so I'm off for a walk down brownhill creek to see what I can think of.

Until nexttime coteries

OFFICIAL cluMe Public Alpha 0.1 release

2005-04-23T20:31:00.000-07:00

I've officially released cluMe to the public. Go visit it, its delicious, upload your artwork and have some fun. I'll be around fixing problems in the background.

cluMe

cluMe public alpha 0.1

2005-04-20T11:34:00.000-07:00

In a few days, I will release the first public alpha of the now titled "clume project", but I can't help wondering why I am so inspired by this gut feeling I have to even bring out what can be seen as a flickr or deviantArt copy. So I have decided to write a little compost upon why the structure of clume differs from those of flickr or deviantArt, or even yahoo Groups.

There seems to be a lack of great sites on the net, consisting of consistant factions or groups. flickr for instance, offers accounts for users, and once you become a user you can join certain groups. But there lacks a lot in these groups. Lets take as an example, flickr's Adelaide group which consists of 27 members, myself included. This group is not constantly maintained (footnote #1) and has no authority figure. If this group did exist outside the world of WWW, as a photography club, the group would be far more successful for a number of reasons. First there would be an authority figure, or someone who organises regular meetings for the group. These meetings would allow the 27 members to get to know each other, and each others work, and they would more readily comment upon each others work. Some people might even entertain their own ideas about photography to other people, ideas that cant be phrased on the specificity of one image. The authority figure might even organise group competitions, or group experiments to produce more work upon one subject or object. And Finally have even noticed, in groups of 50 or more, a guest speaker is invited in to talk about their photography each month.

I ponder why a group outside the world of the WWW, could be more successful than one inside the WWW? Why the content of a group of say 500 members on flickr, could not match the content of a group of 50 members outside the WWW? There is some signifigance in the lack of success with the absence of an authority figure. If you closely compare groups on flickr, you might notice that ones which advertise an authority figure within the groups description are more successful than ones which dont. Furthermore, groups with an active leader, constantly involved in updating and promoting activity, are more successful than ones with a leader that exhibits little involvement. Milgram conducted several experiments upon "obedience to authority" in a more consistent manner than the flickr groups that I am generalising upon (footnote #2). The most notable point about these experiments is the importance of an authority figure (or "the experimenter" in reference to the "obedience to authority" experiments) appearing as real and present as possible. This point is in reference to the conclusion that "...teachers were less obedient when the experimenter communicated with them via the telephone versus in person", ("teachers" are similar to users). Of course there is a great limitation of meeting the leader of a flickr group in person, and even so, the leaders main control is through the group that exists on the web, his authority may be defunct outside the world of the WWW.

There are other problems with the limitations of the authority figure on flickr, as the leader is treated in the same respects as other users to the group. They have no control higher than a user over what is posted and how things appear. The only way they can identify themselves as an authority figure is through the description of the group.

Footnotes

Flickr's Adelaide group has 4 discussions, the latest of them being started 2 months ago. Each discussion has, on average, half a post each. There is little textual information about the group (not even two lines), and the group has no authority figure. There are also 132 images submitted to the group, with little contextual discussion (which is surprising for 27 members, which, I believe, are not really interested in the group at all).
The two notable conclusions from Milgram's "obedience to authority" experiments are that;
• "...'two-thirds of [the] studies participants fall into the category of ‘obedient' subjects, and that they represent ordinary people drawn from the working, managerial, and professional classes' ".
• "...that teachers were less obedient when the experimenter communicated with them via the telephone versus in person, and males were just as likely to be obedient as females".

An Update on Current Projects

2005-03-28T03:50:00.000-08:00

The EP|Club Project;

I love the ideas I have come up with for this new site I am in the process of developing. The ideas spring from previous ideas mentioned by some developers, and I've done some expanding on these ideas. Here's the Beta0.1 proposals;

Beta0.1:

Implement community weblogs so it is possible for each member of this small club to post their own weblog. I am using Simplog for this. You can view a dummy version of Simplog that I am working on by following this link: Simplog on Edwardstown Photography Club.
Implement a community photographer database. This is similar to the community weblogs, but instead each member has their own page, displaying their profile and a few other peices of information. I am modifying Simplog to do in-depth profiles.
Implement community galleries. This is the main purpose of the site. I am using a script called 4images to do this, as it is the only one which enables you to have a page dedicated to images by a specific member. You can view a dummy version of 4images that I am working on by following this link: 4images on Edwardstown Photography Club. It is crucial that 4images runs in the same or similar manner as Simplog. This is because of the following proposal;
Implement weblogs and galleries on the photographer database. This means when you view a members page, you get along with their profile, their recent Simplog weblog posts, and their recent uploads to the 4images galleries. This poses a problem, however one which I intend to work around, with a member logging into their page, what I propose for this is the following;
Implement a global member editing center. When a member logs in they get a similar page that is displayed in their profile, yet they have easy editing options. This will probably require the user database of Simplog and 4images to be merged together. I have a few extra editing options that the member can use that I want to implement. One being an option to post an article on the main weblog for the entire site. This post, however, should be moderated by the admin.
Implement an events manager that will be displayed on every page, and alert reminders to those members that login. This seems like a very easy add on, I'll leave it for something to do later.
Implement simple add-ons. These will be like the DHS Threat Level Script and the Google Page Rank Retriever Script. Most of them will monitor statistics of certain pages so people can easily view how well certain pages are doing on a scale larger than the site itself.
Implement some API opions for the site. This was originally suggested by Dan or Clockwerks as he prefers to be called. He suggested as a promotional tool that I implement the Flickr API, so that images posted on EP|Club also get posted on Flickr. There are other API's that I should invest in to promote the site, and they should turn out to be valuable to a quick success curve for the site.
Implement an option for visitors to buy prints. This should be added later, after the site has achieved a good search engine saturation status, and the API's are fully implemented, as it would be pointless to do if there is no audience. I might need to look into options for art printing through other businesses, as I do not have the facilities to conduct such a business. Also, I need to explore ways that a member might suggest his or her photograph for a print status. Maybe this might stem from the current statistics of the photograph, or from visitor suggestions to obtain a print (ie. a link, similar to a voting script, that would allow the visitor to "vote" for this photograph to be printed, implying that the visitor themselves would like a print [this might even go into a marketing territory for prints]).
Implement a Photographer Directory to obtain links to the site. This is easy, and the simplest way of doing this would be to implement the same Directory Script that I have on FireInIce.com.au. Hehe, I can do this one in my sleep. You can view the current version of the Photographer Directory that I am working on by following this link: Photographer Directory on Edwardstown Photography Club.

Currently, I have a lot of work to get through, but the content side of the site seems easy to put out. The site itself is now hosting an old/mainly text version of all the information that is on the site. You can see most of the information that will be on future versions of the site, but as far as functionality goes, this version is not up to any industry standard. You can visit this version by following this link: Edwardstown Photography Club Main Page.

I should document all aspects of this site, as other clubs may be interested in a similar kind of club site, that is easy to run, and has some sort of proven success. This may even spawn a collection of club sites, that could be hosted/promoted under one domain, which also promotes the benefits of signing your club up for this.

I know I'm a bit naieve about this, but currently I see no problems with at least trying this out.

The Current Status of FireInIce.com.au;

It has been a long and arduous project, but I love the final result of this jewelry site. The graphic layout is very light, and the colour composition works great. This was the first site I have done that has discarded flash files and graphic menus, with great, low bandwidth results. It was also unusual for me to focus entirely on textual content, but there is now an incredible amount of content on the site, all of which can be easily changed by the Business owner.

Recent Improvements:

I have implemented RSS feeds for both the news section and the jewelry collections, so that visitors can be informed instantly of any changes to the site and the new offers that appear for a short time.
I have included an order/request form that works perfectly, and it also avoids the troubles accossiated with an online store, and emphasises the need for a salesman to sell a product.
I have trawled the web to create the jeweler directory, and currently there are over 32 sites pointing a link to fireinice.com.au, with at least 100 links pending....arrgg!!!
It is now possible to print and email news from any computer using the "print" and "email" links on each news article.

I am glad that this site is "finished" and its fully oporational, however, there is a lot to improve upon in my marketing ideas over the web. Ohhh well.

FireInIce.com.au update

2005-03-05T11:39:00.000-08:00

The site has reached its final stages, its been prepped for search engines, and now i'm optimising the imformation that the site contains on it, shortening the codes, and doing lots and lots of boring things so people can find and use it more. Gems, Jewelry and Diamonds at FireInIce.com.au soon will become somewhat popular, so keep your eyes peeled.

fireinice.com.au

K. FROG design is born

2005-02-27T21:29:00.000-08:00

well, not technically, but as part of my new website design initiative, "K. FROG Design" has touched down in the form of http://www.fireinice.com.au. I'm perfecting this site over the following week to have a better search engine listing.

The database will provide related information on the products
The database will also have a print and email function
The news will be more informative on the front page, with headlines on the LHS instead of products, which seems to appear a bit confusing
Ohhh, and some sort of keyword optimisation will occur
And listings on multiple open directories