Three Mondays in a row with an update! How about that for consistency? Mind you, it would be better if I were finished and didn’t need to post updates.

As I mentioned in last Monday’s update, I was in the process of ripping apart the design. This was pretty much completed last week. As I start building individual pages, no doubt I will find things I will need to tweak, but for the most part the ripping and shredding is done.

It was Thursday evening (actually Friday, since it was past midnight) that I was ready to begin building the individual pages when I realized that, oops!, I needed to get back on the backend stuff that had been pushed to the backburner while I finalized the design.

The first thing I decided to tackle was art. We have (currently) 257 images that can be used on our product. Customers can choose to use whichever image they would like, or none at all. Not all the images are even on our existing website!

On Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday, I worked on these images. Finally finishing just as short time ago (around 12:30 a.m. Monday). On the plus side was that I redesigned the template for artwork two years ago. And, since it used the current color scheme, it fit the new website perfectly without needing a redesign.

First, a little backstory. People used to hotlink to our images, apparently thinking they were free for the hotlinking. That eats up our bandwidth, which costs us money in our hosting fees. So, we would periodically change image names to break the links. Occasionally, we would replace a graphic (which were generally icon-sized, so people would hotlink to them for use as their avatars in web forums) with a huge ad. Typically, people would stop hotlinking shortly thereafter. (Yes, I know you could block hotlinking in .htaccess, but our website wasn’t hosted with Apache.)

That got to be time-consuming, not to mention making sure that all the links within our own site were updated so that people would see the image they expected and not an ad. So, we redesigned the image template so that it included our website URL as well as the image. It looked attractive for visitors to our site, but was no longer attractive for use as an avatar. Hotlinking dropped off dramatically. We also modified the images to make them harder for people to steal.

Anyway, back to present day, the template was still usable, but I still had to work with each of the 257 images. Those that weren’t yet on the site (which was roughly half of them) needed to be set up on the template. Those that were already templated needed to be modified. You see, the way that we modified the images to make them harder for people to steal also made it, in some cases, harder to determine what the image actually looked like. Most were okay, but a few were not. So, upon rethinking it, I realized that we need to cater to our customers first and worry about copy-protection second. Since the modification made it more difficult on the customer, we decided to drop it. We still have other ways of protecting our images, so we’ll rely on those.

Now that those are all finished, the next step is to add them all to the database. A number are already in the database, but a few have been renamed or recategorized. As I went through all the images, I realized that there were better categories for some of the images and better names for others. So, I expect a fair amount of work in getting the database completed. I think I may be able to knock it out in a couple of hours, but that’s assuming those are uninterrupted hours. What will be more likely the case is that the database entry will be spread out through the week, working in between other projects.

That makes completing the image database this week’s goal. Then, building the pages to display the images will be next weekend’s goal (or sooner!).

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 12:58 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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