Jaysen Marais

After several weeks’ work, quintonmarais.com launched this evening.

Hi-lights include

1. .Net 1.1 to .Net 2.0 upgrade (long live the MasterPage)
2. Amazon S3 for all image storage (dramatically reduced bandwidth and hosting costs)
3. Google map-based location search.
4. Creation of “Pusher”, a fire-and-forget image watermarking, batch uploading and data-entry smart client app (to create the 12+ thumbnail and preview versions of each image).
5. Creation of “S3 Viewer”, a smart client app for viewing/maintaining the thousands of S3 items and buckets which support the site.
6. ‘New Images’ atom feed (surprisingly easy to get going).
7. SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 upgrade (Common Table Expressions are the goods).
8. GeoRSS feed to (hopefully) ensure photographs appear in search results as geo-tagged objects.
9. Tag-clouds for hierarchical image categories.
10. Colour search (still beta, currently rewriting the search algorithm to favour colour coverage rather than colour fidelity).
11. Cleaner UI design.
12. Xhtml transitional doc type with vastly improved markup validity (flash still causing some issues here). Some tables remain, to be slowly phased out when I have time.
13. Flash 9 homepage scroller (flash cs3 didn’t play nice with my old flash 6 swfs).
14. Self installed and configured SSL.
15. New hosting provider (discountasp.net, very impressed so far)

All told the upgrade took about 3 months’ worth of train trips, nights and weekends (around my day job). It’s meant an overall reduction in sleep, but ultimately worth it. Now I have just to force myself to stop tinkering with it.