derivativ

This week I was assigned to work on advertising the website in order to get the word out about the BETA. Aaron had me do some research on SEO, or search engine optimization. It is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines through mathematical search results. It can be done by means of keywords in the page coding, and search engines themselves. Being popular on the web doesn’t come easy. With a little more optimization and implementation, Derivativ can be an extremely high traffic site with many readers, stories and user accounts. My Internet was on and off for most of the week so I honestly didn’t get to do much work as far as implementing any of my research farther than keywords, we can hopefully do that next meeting. There are lots of companies and resources out there for SEO. I’ve been looking at the forums on

http://www.seochat.com/ and Google searches in general. There are lots and lots of pages to check out.

Aaron also asked me to do a few last minute icons that I am currently working on now for the finished site. They should be implemented shortly as well.

I also took the time to build up a larger BETA user list by creating another Facebook group that has information about the website and offers Facebook users to give us feedback on the Facebook page as well. In just a few minutes, the group went from 0-50 members. I alone invited over 700 people. With the other group members requesting for others to join, we should skyrocket in no time. (Well I hope)

The group site can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=75333569316&ref=mf

But you need to have access to a Facebook account to view or join it. So far we are getting some pretty good feedback.

I also added more curses to the profanity blocker. (With help from DIGM faculty and classmates) It works but a different version was implemented on the site that changes every curse to ‘RAINBOWS’, mine changes curses to “f**k”. That will be put in on the site as well.

Oh I also posted my story in case you didn’t see it. It is about the end of the world, but it is pretty unclear about what happened. Hopefully the uncertainty will inspire different branches

http://derivativ.net/index.php?p=profile&s=stories&prof=13

At This point, I think it is important to really get the main functionality of the site down so our beta testers don’t get frustrated and never some back. Being able to edit your story would greatly reduce this frustration, as well as having basic paragraph formatting in the site posts.

Lastly I have been spreading the word about derivativ. I went to my brother’s baseball game the other night and spoke with all the parents about the senior project and what the site has to offer. This way we can reach out beyond our Facebook friends and campus classmates.

So the Gantt had me down this week to pretty much finish messeging and the comment PHP code. In light of the many many feedback responses we’ve gotten from our new users since going live, we all decided it was probably a priority to fix a number of glaring problems that become apparent with the unscrupulous and unforgiving testing of some routy users. A bunch of problems come to light within minutes of our release which had flown under the radar: things like formatting of double line title, and words too long for a single line (which we never bothered to test for, but of course it’s the first things the new beta testers wanted to try). So that is what I focuses on this week.

The first things i did involved spreading the word about the beta release. I made a face-book event and invited all my firneds. I also made myself an admin on franks group page and invited alot more people to that.
[about 30 minutes or so]

Throughout the week I had been taking periodic captures of the feedback section on the beta site. We didn’t have much time to implement it last week, and the version I did throw in there was vulnerable to any user who wanted to erase all the feedback doing so. I fixed this problem. I made a new feedback page, which now uses the same functionality we’ve been using throughout the rest of the site. The submitted text now updates as part total feedback block as the top of the page. Now we will have a consistent feedback log. I also wanted to create a page in which we could log changes as we make subsequent releases each week. I set up the needed architecture for a simple list page, and filled it with a couple of Items I also worked on this week. This should be beautified a little, as I think it will be a valuble asset to users while we develope the beta, to see whats new and what we’ve fixed.

feedback_2.0
updates page

After all that was done, it was time to tackle some of those problems. I was having a heck of a time fixing the problems with CSS as there are still apparently discrencies between what CSS methods actually work at all between IE and Firefox. Surprisingly it was Firefox that did not support the meetings I needed. In the forums where I found this reason for my problems, I also found some answers. I discovered the PHP wordwrap() function, which can be used to count charcers in a line, brak it when neccisary, and (this is what I wanted) even break a word that is too long to fit onto a single line. In some cases the PHP version was not enough (as when ajax updates a page, past the point where the server side can touch the page) so I was also about to find a javascript equivelant sombody had complied to do the job. I made a new JS file which we can include in each page to hold this and other useful JS functions for frequent use as we move forward. I implemented these changes for testimonial and story content on their respective pages. There are alot more places that need this. We’ve decided to limit the length of titles our users can submit for stories. Stories should not have titles that exceed 2 lines. If they need to be that long, perhaps the author needs to be more creative (and economical) with their naming.

Next I wanted to attend to pretty promenent article of feedback from the users. A couple of them wanted to write poems as their stories, but the reading box apparently ran all the lines together when they were parsed from the database. Essentially, the users wanted the posts to keep the line spacing format as they had written the pieces. I thought this would be more difficult, but upon investigation, I found that the database was actually storing the formatting the way the users entered it. The problem was one inherent of HTML when text with no formatting specifications is just echoed from the DB. Again I consulted the forums, and found a nice little CSS style setting to solve this problem. The whitespace setting, ‘pre’, essentially makes the text appear with its preformed white-space while still alowing us to style the font and size to our own specifications. This is exactly what I needed. I implemented this on the story and testimonial sections as well.

testUsers new ridiculous profile page

after all that was done, I decided to sit down and actually write a story: The Legend of Cerulea City

Overall I spent about 13 hours working on the site and promoting it and whatnot this week. I realize this doesn’t stack up to the amount of time I’ve been doing the past couple of weeks, and I plan to make up for it in the upcoming week.

- Christian

This week I tried to get a lot of advertising done, as that’s  probably what I’m best for at the moment.

First, little stuff, like telling my friends about it, advertising it through my social networking sites, etc…

As an avid roleplayer, I was sure to cash in on that network.  I’ve advertised Derivativ on the following forums:

www.kingshipofeast.com

http://www.guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?GuildID=90223&TabID=775063

Unfortunately for you guys, the user has to be a member of the guild to see the post.  But I assure you they’re there, and the people reading them are die-hard roleplayers!  I’ve also asked my RPing friends to spread the word.

I think it’s important to advertise our site outside of the roleplaying community so I am also collaborating with junior DIGM student Kristen Ward, who is animating a pro gay rights advertisement.  She is using the Reddit community to help springboard this project, and would like to use our site to foster their plans.

I have spent many hours researching how to upload images to Flickr from our site, but I have hit many walls.  I was also researching popups for the gallery we’d like to implement in the site, but decided it was more important to figure out how to send images to Flickr first.  Flickr made their Downloadr source code open to the public, but I am having trouble using it.  I’ve asked Christian for help.  I’ve spent at least nine to ten hours researching this, but I could only link you to open source code I found:

http://www.flickr.com/tools/uploadr/

Even though I spent a lot of time on all of the above, I knew I couldn’t submit this without something to show, so I tested the site for kinks for an hour and revised the Adding to Stories help section so that it fits with the site layout.

Revisions

Help Revision: Adding to Stories

Derivativ was created for users to contribute in any story, create multiple possibilities, and brainstorm new ideas. Just think of the process as a tree. The story first takes root with a new idea. When users contribute to this root, branches are formed. How large and elaborate the tree will grow is up to you and the community.

Adding to stories is simple. To contribute to part of, or the entirety of a story, simply click on the Contribute icon at the lower right of the branch. Title and write your contribution in the textboxes that appear beneath the last branch. When you’re finished, hit the Contribute button again. That’s it! Your writing will be added to the root of the story and viewable at any time.

Please note that all stories, branches and content alike must coincide with the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Derivativ’s rating system allows users to comment on and rate other story branches to see which entries are the favorites amongst the community.  See: Story Joining

Suggested Site Functionality Revisions

Add a contribute button: When a user is reading a contribution after clicking “view comments” on an original story, perhaps there should be a contribute button that remains on the original story. This would be helpful for users who don’t like the latest contribution and would like to continue an older branch without redirecting.

Browsing: Add browse filters.

Genres: Add a drop down menu to original posts featuring a selection of genres. This could be implemented with the browse filter.

Add to friends: Get rid of RapidSlayer name when sending default message for the add a friend pop-up.

Featured Authors: No username is listed for some of the featured authors.

I also added more content to the site.

All in all, I would say I put in 13 hours this week.

For this week I was to implement the qtip plugin for jquery. We wanted to have tooltips popup when users hover over a profile name and for the star rating in the stories.

So far I have been unsuccessful. I’ve used this example/tutorial on qtip’s site:
http://craigsworks.com/projects/qtip/demos/content/loading

But no matter what I do (I even tried just copy-pasting the code as is) I cannot get the tooltip to show:
http://test.derivativ.net/pavel/tooltips.html

Altogether I spent about 8 frustrating hours on this Saturday and Sunday. I’ll have to ask Aaron for help on this probably.

I have also been tasked to put in star rating into a tooltip next to every story and it’s derivatives. However until I can figure out how to make qtip work the star rating thing has to wait. I’ve looked into it and it doesn’t look too bad: http://jquery-star-rating-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/index.html

I’ve also posted my primer story on derivativ. There’s an issue I found with that though. It does not recognize formatting if you copy-paste it out of a text file (like I did). So basically the story looks like a jumbled mess.
This brings me to another point. Users should probably be given an option to edit or delete their stories. I’ll bring this up next team meeting.

Next week is going to be more javascript I guess.

Sorry for being late but was working on the rap. I spent about an hour and a half working on some additional images and an additional hour getting those copies printed and over to Student Services. Will be spending Sunday through Tuesday posting those flyers on the wall, am pretty proud of the design and layout of the Derivativ quotes series, which I personally call “Derivators”.

Ritchie Red
Ritchie Blue
Kuralt Blue
Kuralt Red
San Blue
Literature Blue

I wanted to make the colors more reproduce-friendly compared to the original brown. Will apply these to the online banners as well.

I spent about 2 and a half hours on this song, which is still a draft. Managed to get Ja Fool as a guest artist. Will upload asap.

B-dubs feat. Ja Fool - Derivativ Rap (Kidz in the Hall sampling)…aka “The Song that stripped Brandon Wei of what little Street Cred he ever had or ever will have

We will be going live by Tuesday.

- we met with Troy last week, and we wanted to try to implimetn alot of changes he suggested before we went live, so we did.
- Pavel put some excellent work into some more pages for us to hook up after we go live, including an almost fully functional comment system for posts.
- Aaron and I both put a ton of time in fixing and adding lots of different elements for the release
- Frank wrote his stories, and made a lot of other important assets for the site, which have been implimented.
- Leigh started looking into drag and drop functionality for use with the flickr API

we are almost ready to go live. All the I feel is really left is getting the branch writing functionality hooked up, which we have script for, but I need to meet up with Aaron on Monday to sit down and learn the JS needed for the script to run off screen. After we both give the site the go-ahead we will officially start the site campaign.

after that we will not stop working on the site, we have a lot more features that still need to get hooked up, such as friending, favoriting, rating, sending messages, and uploading images.

a comprehensive list of Beta-release features will be supplied soon.

_ Derivativ

this week I spend about another 20 -25 hours making small tweaks to old problems, and hooking up tons and tons of new dynamic elements.

** edit —————————

first thing I did was spend about a half hour making a copy of the website we can work on, and a completely separate database for the copy to use. Our new ‘working-copy’ of the website is at test.derivativ.net

the live beta will be available at the orriginal derivativ.net

** —————————
I spent a lot of time cleaning up more old anchor links, and refitting them with links to new pages we’ve made, like the long awaited “create a story” page. After that I did some work on Pavel’s rendition of that page, and also added the additional script which allows it to now actually write full fledged new root posts into our database. This is working 100%. you can now write a story, and when you are done, it takes you to that stories page view.

next I spent alot of time revamping the ‘by-lines’ inside to story view page and also to profile. Nothing in the stories’ by-lines were dynamic, or linkable before this week. Now they lists titles, user-names, and the date, which are linkable to that user’s page. In addition, if you click the name of a story which is the parent of the branch you are currently viewing, it will jump you down the “ladder” and you will go to that story’s page, allowing you to select an alternate path through the story.
We decided that the by-line in the story page was fairly non-obtrusive, and we wanted to replicate something similar on the profile page, for the testimonials. I recreated the new by-line there from scratch. The point in both of these efforts is to keep the users eyes on the content of these posts without too much interruption from post info. They can however easily find if if they want it.

next I wrote a few functions which allow us to get the date spelled out in words or mm/dd/yy byu passing the a time-stamp variable. The product of this can be seen on all the dates scattered throughout the site.
after that I made another function that allows us to count how many children any branch has. It takes a parameter for the post-id and runs a query count. The returned number can be seen in the number of “contribs” a story is said to have on it.

products of both of these functions can be seen on this page:
http://test.derivativ.net/index.php?p=search

after all this was done I took a break and let Aaron mess around for awhile, and while I waited I made the following list of problems to fix, of which I completed later:

- make names of stories in profile and search/browse links to story page
- make story score in search/browse page dynamic
- make date function in user functions
- change dates 99/99/99 on branches to date()
- change date feb 28, 2009 to date() at top of story page
- change dates inside search/ browse / stories / contribs pages
- make mini-blurbs for branch boxes
- restyle branch boxes
- make and run script to make dummy dates
- make and run script to make blurbs in database posts table blurbs
- make contribs count dynamic on stories and contribs tabs
- browse to more than 4 stories and contribs
- show blurbs instead of full story in story and contrib pages
- delete screwed up stories by test-dog from database
- change list of options that appear for you/other user
- add Entry button need to be real buttons…

_ Christian

Aaron had contacted me and asked me to create some transparent images to round the corners of the avatars on the Derivativ website. It wasn’t too hard to do the 64×64 one, but as the sizes got smaller and smaller, the pixel weight was worth a lot more and started to become confusing and fuzzy. It took a good while, but I was able to get a pretty decent sheet of these images together. We needed nine in total for the images, so I came up with this master sheet here:

http://www.jervo.com/basecamp/digitalmedia2009/sp2009/image_mask.png

A zip folder, containing all of the individual images can be downloaded here:

http://www.jervo.com/basecamp/digitalmedia2009/sp2009/avatar_mask.zip

This was a complicated and somewhat difficult task, it took me about 4 hours to complete. I’m not even sure if they will suffice properly as of now.

I noticed that Derivativ did not have a favicon so I took it upon myself to create this nifty little asset. It was a lot of fun and enjoyable to make, considering that for the 16×16 version I needed to jump into some pixel art to create the desired look. It reminded me of all those elementary school days on MS Paint. That file is here:

http://www.jervo.com/basecamp/digitalmedia2009/sp2009/derivativ_fav_16×16.png

Popular websites also have a favicon and icon for apple mobile devices, so I created the 60×60 icon image for that. It is here:

http://www.jervo.com/basecamp/digitalmedia2009/sp2009/derivativ_fav_60×60.png

This was a lot of fun; I breezed through it in about an hour.

The site should be launching the beta soon. My story is going to be a hit. (Guaranteed) I put about three hours this week writing multiple stories for the site. You can read them and branch off of them following the beta release!

Finally I put about two more hours into some basic JS tutorials. I wanted to learn a little about JQuery, considering it is the main JS engine we use on the site. Not mush to show from that, I have lots of debugging to do. According to the gannt, I should be writing stories and preparing and promoting for the site. That is already well underway, and I will look more into a possible Facebook API

Time is winding down and this is getting exciting!

This week was spent figuring out the code needed for developing a drag and drop interface.  This will be incorporated through Flickr to save storage space.  I have been experimenting with the tutorial here.

I also met with Christian to discuss our presentation this Sunday.

All of this took about 5 hours for the week.  I’m a bit slow on learning the tutorial, but I’m getting there.  It’s exciting to be working on code!

This is a week of general fixes - we’ve got most of the functionality all the way there, but we still need some.

This week I have knocked out several of these fixes.

At the top of the list was something that’s been nagging me for a while: The rotating banner. Previously, it didn’t really look as it was originally designed and didn’t work fully in all browsers. I had to go through each page and re-create the background images and the buttons along the bottom, following my original color scheme and design. It’s there now, though. It took about 2 hours.

Also, I’ve been trying to wrangle down more of the design characteristics of the website that differ from my original designs. For instance: prior to this week, there was much more space to the left and right of all page content.

We’ve also decided to include post titles on contributions, so I added a title bar to the form. There needs to be some labeling work on this still.

I re-created better rounded edge images for the avatar rounding script. It looks a lot better now.

We’re still on track to go live on beta for tuesday, and we’re definitely on track. Going to be doing a lot of work tomorrow and hopefully we’ll be ready soon after.

from last week: - Site design looks good.
- On index page, either reduce font size of “Featured …” headers or add more space in between them and the top half.
- Put the sign-in on each of the banner “pages” on the home page, except the registration one.
- Consider a star rating system for story rankings so no “mega stories” are voted upwards.
- Put the user rating controls with the story text, not outside of the box where it’s confusing.
- Experiment with the flickr api for images, due to moderation issues