About That Crazy Photo Thing
So here's the deal: we're all from West Bloomfield, Michigan, and we all believe that story telling can be done better with pictures than without. And so we're telling the story of West Bloomfield--our story--here on this site. It's not a PR site; this is us in our (figurative) underwear, warts and all. But it's honest, and it's a story worth telling. So browse around, and if you want to join us, give a holler.
The site's got lots of neat features, including a photo annotation system. But it's still in its testing phase, so bear with us. If you have technical questions, or if you find any bugs (which is still entirely possible), contact the Tall Bald Guy.
The obvious rules apply. Keep it in good taste, okay?
Site Announcements:
Wish list?, published by gweiss on Friday, February 25, 2005.
So there are at least two features we still need to add, and we're soliciting suggestions for other ones:
1) The ability to upload photos directly from the "share" feature of your cameraphone; and
2) The ability to leave a speech version of the photo's narrative by dialing in on your cellphone. (We'll be using Asterisk for that, I think.)
If you have other suggestions that AREN'T of the "have a telepathic user interface" variety, give me a holler.
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Really really neat feature added, published by gweiss on Wednesday, February 23, 2005.
... and now for something completely different:
At the suggestion of Fred Goodman and, indirectly, John Nystuen (who wants to use this for completely different reasons), I've added a neat feature: you can now annotate images with other images.
That's right, you can now embed images inside of images. With a bit of tweaking we can have LOTS of fun making I Spy games online!
Heh. Next up may be embedded video and/or sound ...?
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Ready for beta testing?, published by gweiss on Tuesday, February 22, 2005.
Dare I hope? I think the site's ready for beta-testing ... sign up, sign in, and report all bugs to me with all due kindness ...
At Christian's behest I'll be adding a general discussion board to the site sometime later this week, when I have a spare moment or three. But for now ... geez, I think everything's working. Go figure, eh?
Oh yeah: just so everyone knows, the photo annotation system will not work on Mac IE or on Safari. Don't blame me, blame Microsoft and Apple, who don't believe in following HTML and CSS standards. The site code is, I believe, copacetic, which is why Mozilla builds like Firefox display things just swell. (IE for Windows, at least on XP, works just okay. The links are a little wonky looking, and because of the way IE handles inheritance the labels on the photos are to the right rather than just underneath. I suppose I could fix that with some browser detection but that's just way too much effort for a minor cosmetic issue.)
Anyway, enjoy ...
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Another update ..., published by gweiss on Monday, February 21, 2005.
Still majorly in alpha testing, and not ready for prime time by a long shot--but we're getting there.
Search function works (albeit it's not terribly robust); we now have the ability to annotate the text of each photo; and I added a few neato funky features.
Getting closer to beta testing here, guys ... I may add a "group blog" function, too, depending on how motivated I get.
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Site goes into alpha testing, published by gweiss on Wednesday, February 16, 2005.
Well, the site's mostly up and running, although I still have to code the search function--no biggie, and I'll probably do it this afternoon.
Also, I'm going to mess around this afternoon with--are you ready for this?--adding the ability to upload photos from your cellphone (now ain't that cool?).
And furthermore--I may add the ability to "pin" a photo to a map. More on this later. For now--g'head and give it a run through! The point of alpha testing is to find out what doesn't work (and I'm sure there's lots that qualifies), so ...
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