Need your feedback on home grown gallery

[ryc]

For a while, I have been developing a gallery for my site. There is no way it can compete with flickr, smugmug etc ... It is not meant to be such a gallery. However, I have put a lot of time into the search feature so it stands apart from other pre-canned software that forums use. I would love to read your thoughts on the way it works. Hey, I would even offer a free copy to getdpi if they like it

The gallery is here:

http://icameradb.com/showgallery.php

And how to use the search is here:

http://icameradb.com/showreplies.php?qid=37

Thanks

 

[Steen]

Hi Jorge
Obviously you are a very skilled programmer and I think your website looks nice indeed.
Kudos for the technical part :thumbup:
But at the same time I need to admit that I find the Business Idea and/or the Website Architecture (the 'logic' and the content) a bit unclear.
Which part is the main part ? The Stolen Gear database, or the Forum, or the Gallery, or ... ?
In other words I think maybe you need to make up your mind about what demand you are trying to fulfill and then focus on that and name (!) the site accordingly.
Just my 2 cents of course

 

[ryc]

That is a good point Steen.

The site originally started as a stolen camera registry and it was written about in several magazines. It remained that way for about a year. That was the original plan. I have since been bored and added the classifieds/gallery/ Sample Links page/Events/Company Database and so on. The forum is not really a forum but a small message board. Besides being bored and adding code, I added the gallery to make it more attractive to users. But, since there is no business model I never put a lot of thought into where it would go,

 

[Steen]

Being bored sometimes, as well as having the time for further development, sounds like a dynamic strength
If you can program a site like that you might also be able to design a forum template software package for customers to tailor themselves like the present vBulletin, and phpBB and others ?
I don't know anything about the economy and the competition in the forum software field, but I'm sure you know what you need to know about that since you have used these software solutions yourself for your rangefinderforum and other photo fora.
But I have often been thinking about what a waste it is that so many useful informations get lost in the endless river of discussions on all these forums. So if you can invent a better way to search for the informations hidden in the discussions you might have an advantage in the software competition. Usually the search function is the weak point in these exchanges of huge amounts of informations. If you can solve that problem ...

 

[Oxide Blu]

... if you can invent a better way to search for the informations hidden in the discussions you might have an advantage in the software competition.

I think the technical name for such a function is 'Google'.

 

[Bob]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=h...(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
-bob

 

[ryc]

Bob,

I'm not too worried about the w3c validation. I actually cleaned up quite a few pages to make it compliant but its a waste of time. I think I am reporting 6 errors here and x there. And most of them are for nesting and tags. which vary from one standard to another.

I checked out the home page for one of the most popular sites (FM) and it came back with 219 errors

Errors found while checking this document as HTML 4.01 Transitional!
Result: 219 Errors, 76 warning(s)
Address:
Encoding: windows-1252
Doctype: HTML 4.01 Transitional
Root Element: html


And get DPI comes back with 85 errors.

Errors found while checking this document as XHTML 1.0 Transitional!
Result: 85 Errors
Address:
Encoding: iso-8859-1
Doctype: XHTML 1.0 Transitional
Root Element: html
Root Namespace: http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml

While my homepage at icameradb.com comes back with 0

This document was successfully checked as HTML 4.01 Transitional!
Result: Passed, 1 warning(s)
Address:
Encoding: utf-8
Doctype: HTML 4.01 Transitional
Root Element: HTML


Most of the errors I report are of the type

cannot generate system identifier for general entity "pages"

Where my url might be page.xxx?name=jorge&lname=

What it complains about is the & in the url. It would like to see & instaed.

 

[ryc]

Just added some new features based on the feedback. Here are some examples.

When yo view a photo and see the exif data below, you can click on the exif data to see similar photos. For example if the shot was taken with a 135mm lens, click on the focal length in th exif data to see others with 135mm.

you can send emails with links to the photo

One can now have unlimited collections and asign photos to various collections. This is cool if you have a bunch of landscapes then you want to create a collection of wide angle shots as well with the same pictures and so on ..

Anyway, thanks for the input via PM and public. I have put it to good use.

Guy, If you want a copy of that gallery software let me know. I will offer it for free to getdpi.