Busy

I have been busy on a couple of extra features on the site recently, but they are features that wont be announced untill launch ;) Safe to say, they will be firsts for the Red Dwarf community me thinks :) I'm just glad I havent got a deadline to finish this as it will be a few months yet!

The chatroom application is about a week from being finished now too, so we will have 2 applications for poeple to use from launch for certain, maybe more :)

There was some sad news in the Red Dwarf world of websites recently as one of the main fan sites shut down, for reasons yet to be explained fully - this however means there is one less site in the competition ;)

Still working hard on the backend of the site, and getting ready to start the search engine. I will also begin to add some of the content soon, such as the guides etc etc.

I have started a new blog, teaching the basics of PHP. I havent been able to start the first tutorial yet due to time, but it will be up shortly, I promise! (Famous last words there...)

A little bit of application

I have taken some time off from web design today, and instead built a little program for future regulars to my site. Its a desktop notification program, and will alert anyone who has it to any new stories on the site. Here are a couple of screenshots to wet your appetite :)


There are also a couple of other app's that I will be making to complement the site, but you wont see those for a while yet ;)

Sidetracked!

I got a little sidetracked yesterday, and suddenly decided that the site would need a Photo Gallery system. So I built one :)

There are various galleries, and more can be added or removed from the control panel. Members can upload their photos, and after I have approved them in the control panel they are added to the gallery. When the upload takes place, the thumbnail is created at the same time too. When you view the image in the gallery, you click the image to view the large version. That is then resized to fit in the page if it needs it. If so, there is also a link to view the complete image.

Because the resizing is dynamic, it only happens if it's needed. This however created a small problem. Normally I disallow hotlinking, but because this image is generated through a php script, the .htaccess doesnt realise that an image is being accessed, so it can be hotlinked :( I decided to add some text to any images that are created on the fly just incase people do hotlink to it. Here's an example:



(Yes, that's my cat, JD!)

I am planning on allowing members to comment on photos too, but I havent started that bit yet, should be quite simple though. Then it's just about done, and back to what I was supposed to be doing on the site!