Design/Dev/Business Blog
We won’t be able to do the public beta this weekend. Reid and I have some personal matters to attend to.
Originally I wanted to release it last weekend as more of a preview build, to show off to you guys and bug test. However, now that we’ve slipped beta release a few times now, Reid and I want to have the forum completely and totally polished when we show off to you guys. See you guys next week!
Welcome to this month in Fangamer… we should probably update more often, but Reid and I have been working with bugs, bugs, and more bugs. I do have some extremely good news though, we’re almost ready for a public beta. You need a forum account on our current forums, so those of you who aren’t members of Starmen.Net can participate. More will be coming within the week…
While we’re at it, we’re announcing the Smilie Contest. When trying to find a royalty-free set of smilies, we came up with the idea of letting our users design our next set of smilies. We’ve been paying attention, and really like some of the stuff in the Smilie topic. We’ve been designing this for awhile, and we got to thinking: What if the winner releases their Smilie set into the Creative Commons? That way, a whole lot of other cool developers can use it too! :D
It’s been a month since our last post! We’re not dead. In fact, things are going quite well. Reid’s finally working 100% on the CSS, and things are looking really, really nice! What better way than to show off some screenshots?
First here is a screenshot of the front page. We got a lot information on this page. As you can see, we have the forum spy on the right, but also latest posts below the forum as well. You can expand or collapse any forum or category as you wish. You can’t see it here, but the subscriptions show updates to your favorite posts in the same manner as well!
Continue reading ‘Screenshots!’
I’ve been working on the forum for quite awhile now, and it’s almost finished. For example, today I added the thumb up/thumb down functionality. I’m getting down to the more useless stuff, which is nice. Despite a couple of missing features, I could probably switch the old forums tomorrow if I wanted to. (It might be missing Reid’s CSS though, heheh.) The biggest thing missing is a more complete PM system. It’s slightly functional right now, but 100% ugly, and missing things you’d normally expect from PMs.
The second half of my insane-o long post, wherein I’ll be discussing the work we’ve gotten done on Fangamer’s design/code since February. A tl;dr summary for the lazy among us:
Again, we’ve got some more banners to show first!
A quick summary of what’s been going on:
There’s a lot more, but this is already a huge post, so I’m actually going to split it up into two updates and post the second half tomorrow. Before I jump into the details: the Banner Contest strikes back with another big update! Here are three of the 12 new entries:
It’s been awhile since Reid has made a post. Things are going quite smoothly. The train has left the station and we’re on a roll! While I’m not as wordy as Reid, I’d like to start about some fancy features we’re implementing, and Reid’d like to show you a couple of new layout images. More after the jump!
Long time since the last update, but there’s been lots going on in the meantime. Lawyer-Time Incorporation Station is rolling along, I’m getting ready to bring on some investors, Ryan has begun full-time work, and I’m deleting files indiscriminately to make room for the massive Photoshop files I’m working on for the forum. But before that, a long-awaited banner update! Here are three cool ones, but hit the Banner Contest page for more:
The problem is, I don’t have much to publicly show. I did a lot of Rails reprogramming to enable security on a lower level. That way, it checks for permissions in the model instead of in the controller. I have a few qualms with the find() lookup, but it works and I’m not going to complain. It’s ugly and not very Ruby-esque, but it gets the job done. The update, create, and delete are very clean though. I can see why people really love Ruby!
Read more to help me with searching!
And when home = Kokomo, IN, that means sporadic dial-up internet access! In addition to that, I had to leave my laptop behind at the Apple Store in Tucson since it was having some power/screen issues. Anyone want to buy a 1st gen Macbook with a new screen/topcase?
Anyway, since my laptop is in the shop, no banner updates today, and not a lot else to say except some random updates…
