Internet

visordown.com – Alternatives?

| Richard

So then, given it is abundantly clear that the new Visordown is how it’s going to stay, I decided to do something about it. The alternatives were to put up and shut up, start a new message board or join another one and effectively leave Visordown behind.

Now, what makes a decent message board are first and foremost the people who post on it and secondly the software that runs it.

So I posted this suggestion on visordown.com:

“The old visordown.com was running vBulletin software which is just about to have a major upgrade released: see this thread over on vBulletin.

Now, although I can see why this change has taken place from the owners’ perspective, from the users’ perspective it’s not been a complete success, shall we say, with lots of folk asking for the old visordown.com back.

So what if something the same only new, starting from scratch was to be offered?

I have a spare licence for vBulletin that I am happy to pay to upgrade and install on a server somewhere. I have a couple of domain names regsitered that might be suitable:

TrackDayHero.com (currently pointing at my blog); or

BikeChatBoard.com (ditto).

I’d start by running Google Ads and a supporter scheme with benefits for supporters, so just like the old VD really. No publishing house looking over our shoulders, so perhaps more relaxed?

So, would anyone be interested?”

There was a lot of interest, but I was also reminded about the Revcounter which is shortly to be ported over to vBulletin and already has some of the old Visordown members on there. So to avoid duplication, my suggestion is on the back-burner and can be set up if needs be. In the meantime, I’ve changed the redirect for www.bikechatboard.com to the Revcounter.

visordown.com – An Object Lesson

| Richard

Once upon a time, a motorcycle journalist and his friend set up an online discussion forum for motorcyclists and called it visordown.com

The forum software they were using was vBulletin which is very fine indeed and the site became a great success. That success led to Ben Cope selling advertising space on the board and serving ads. as well as setting up a supporter scheme to suppress those ads. and presumably putting some of that revenue into the hosting and software costs (although there was a rumour that some of those costs were being met elsewhere).

Then a publishing house called Magicalia bought visordown.com to complement their motorcycle magazine, “TWO”. Initially things got off to a bad start with TWO including some content from visordown.com in an issue without asking for permission to do so.

It also appeared that visordown’s free and easy, say what you like attitude was being clamped down on by its new owners.

In the meantime, vBulletin announced that the latest version of their software – version 3.7 – was being developed with user blogs (basically extended user profile pages) and user galleries to make what was already the best message board software even better.

So when an announcement was made a little while back seeking testers for the new version of visordown.com and when the board was turned off yesterday for an upgrade, I was quietly pleased.

And then they re-opened the board today. It’s been moved to a different server now running different ASP board software. A server that appears to be common to the rest of the Magicalia sites all running the same board software. No doubt that decision makes sense to a large company running a number of message boards: one set of architecture to support. Of course that throws aside the history and treats visordown.com as a new site rather than an established one.

And the ‘new’ board software is, frankly, rubbish compared with vBulletin. It also appears from all the server error messages I was getting this evening when trying to post new threads or reply to existing ones, that the server or the software (or a combination of the two) cannot cope with the traffic that visordown.com generates.

I expect that the regular users will soon get fed up with the board issues and the lack of features they were used to before.

Let that be a lesson to us all…

NEC Bike Show 2007

| Richard

An earlier start than usual as I was heading off to the NEC at Birmingham for the bike show on Trade Day.

I picked up a friend just after 8.15am and was at the NEC at around 10.30am. Wandered around the other halls until 12.00pm when Hall 1 opened. This was where the big manufacturers were exhibiting as well as where TWO Magazine had their corner plot. TWO bought visordown.com earlier this year and they were running a competition involving their “Wonderwall”: a collage of photos of VD members as submitted by us. If you spotted your photo on the Wonderwall, you would be entered into a draw to win something, in this case a Shark Helmet.

As Hall 1 only opened at 12.00pm and the competition draw took place at 2.00pm (geddit?), there weren’t many entries today … two, as it turned out. And I won! Now all I need to do is ring Nevis Marketing and claim my prize.

Anyway, I took some photos:

Snap Shots: All Good Things Come to an End

| Richard

I used to use Snap Shots on this and my other blogs and on one of my main websites as a way of enhancing “the user interface” for visitors (lol).

Understandably, they need to support the service and they’ve chosen to introduce advertising within the pop-up preview windows. Despite softening the introduction of the ads. by sharing revenue with the sites with what they call Snap Shares, I’ve removed the system from my sites.

Why? Well on my blogs, I already display adverts using Google AdSense (click on the button in the sidebar to find out more and join up) and the revenue they generate is shared between Google and me. Why would I want to display more Google AdSense adverts and yet get a smaller share of the revenue?

The way Snap have approached this is by claiming that the ads. will effectively be macro-targetted and hence more appropriate to the link being displayed and that may well be true, but for the end user, they’ll simply be seeing far more adverts than they did previously.

New, Smaller Photos Section

| Richard

There’s a nifty plug-in to bring a nice touch to a small photo-album page: the Slimbox WordPress plug-in.

To operate it, just use this format:

Single example:
<a href=”img1.jpg” rel=”lightbox” title=”my caption”>thumbnail1</a>
Image set example:
<a href=”img1.jpg” rel=”lightbox[roadtrip]”>thumbnail1</a>
<a href=”img2.jpg” rel=”lightbox[roadtrip]”>thumbnail2</a>
<a href=”img3.jpg” rel=”lightbox[roadtrip]”>thumbnail3</a>

I’m now using it to display sub-sets of my photos on Flickr on this site (in addition to the six latest photos over there in the sidebar).

The Trouble with PNG Images

| Richard

I’ve recently been doing a web site refresh for someone who wanted their site to be more up to date looking, less ‘blocky’ and still CSS-based and standards-compliant. They’d had another designer approach them – or more particularly, the boyfriend of a staff member had approached them – and knocked up a good-looking, if table-based, version of their home page.

OK, he’d forgotten to check the site in different browsers and on different platforms, so it was very broken and likewise it was nowhere near being standards-compliant, but hey-ho…

So they asked me to produce a working, standards-compliant version which I duly did. One of the elements they wanted was a navigation bar to match their current logo colours and I created the background for the navigation area and saved it as a PNG: I didn’t want a GIF image due to the blockier look of the curved ends that would result from using that format and I didn’t want a JPG image due to the file size (I try to ensure my pages come banging in as quickly and efficiently as possible).

The result looked great in all the browsers I tested it on.

The client then asked me to change the navigation element so that there was some mouseover effect, so I went for their logo colour on the text over white when the mouse is over the link and white text over their logo colour in the ‘off’ state. At this point, it looked great in Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. but the colours were off in Internet Explorer 7 (which has only recently included support for PNG images).

I thought it was just my CSS being screwed up and checked the PNG file I was using for the DIV background against the hex code I was using for the navigation element colour and found they were exactly right. I then did a screenshot and lifted the hex code from the background to find that it was different to the original image when displayed in Internet Explorer 7. The reason? Gamma correction within PNG images which gets stripped out by web browsers except for Internet Explorer! I’d never come across this before as I was used to using GIFs and JPEGs due to the earlier lack of PNG support in Internet Explorer.

There’s a good blog entry about it here that links to this article and this paper.

Declaring SORN

| Richard

Well, I would if I could.

I realised yesterday that the tax has run out on my bike as of the end of October. Now given the bike’s been in the garage since it was last used in September, it’s hardly surprising that I’d forget.

But as it’s not been used on the road, surely that’s not an issue? Well it never used to be until the irritating idiots running this country decided on another scam called a Statutory Off-Road Notification whereby if you take your vehicle off the road you have to tell them or they come after you for the “lost” tax.

Now they’ve decided to allow you to do this online … or at least you can when it’s actually working:

“I am sorry the service is currently unavailable due to essential maintenance.”

And it’s been down all weekend for me. I wonder how much of my tax went on this useless system?