Tassography v3 Goes Live…

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trickling out a couple of changes, which I have now wrapped up into what I’m calling Tassography v3. The site has come pretty popular to the point that I’m getting about 10,000 hits a day on a consistent basis. So hopefully these changes will be some freshness to the site and some new features. New Design I’ve had the same design since I launched Tassography in 2007, so it was time for a refresh. Nothing drastic, we all know the lashing Facebook is getting, but I have reduced the overhead of the banner to allow the photos to have more prominence. Over the next few months I’ll take advantage of this new space by improving the navigation between photos and collections and make it easier to change the way photos are displayed.

(The new and old homepage) When I wrote the site I chose to ensure the site would work on a 800x600 screen by limiting all views to three photos across. Over the last two years there’s been a significant shift towards widescreen laptops and LCDs who got lots of white space when viewing my site. Now all the image displays will expand to use whatever space is available:

(The new and old collection view) Now you can buy my Photos I’ve meaning to get round to it for years, the TransRockies finally gave me the push to allow people to buy my photos. I’m starting off with a very simple system with a single price, just $8 (£4) paid using Paypal. For that handsome fee you get a High Resolution photo for your own personal use. Commercial use will be negotiated separately. Fixed External Linking & Blog Content that goes Missing As the site has grown I’ve added more content and changed the way you navigate around the site. Unfortunately that’s frequently meant that photos people linked to a year ago won’t work. I’ve now fixed this so that no matter what query string is used I can work out the right photo to display. This also caused a problem with images in blogs that have since moved, now when the blog is published a copy is saved in a directory so hopefully I’ll never have this problem again. On the topic of blogs, I’m still plagued by a bug that will cause Feed readers to think an old blog posting has changed. Hopefully some of these have now been resolved because I’ve rearranged the way the RSS feed is published so that it is now never built from scratch. Sorry if you do getting a whole bunch of old postings every so often… More Geotagging Features I’ve been trickling out a number of new Geotagging features over the last six months, so whilst some of this is not new, I hope now it’s easier to discover. Now for virtually any photo you can see where the photo was taken, either accurate to 3m when I’m using a GPS Tracker or through a look of the address, which is less accurate. You can also see the route taken and see the distance travelled.

(A map of our recent trip to Salt Point State Park, click to see this on the site) New Storage Model At the heart of the website is a series of XML files, I chose XML because it’s so much more portable that SQL but it has caused issues. Thanks to Martin Peck a friend in the UK, I have rewritten the XML layer to speed up the loading of data, reduce the amount of memory it takes up and speed up the queries. Almost all the data queries use LINQ which has allowed me to delete 8 or so classes and an about a hundred lines of code. I’m getting another code review soon, so I’m sure I’ll have some additional changes to work on! If you have any feedback on the changes, I’d love to hear it.