DorkMatter.net

This is the outside world. I don’t see it often.

The sun is reflecting off our building and casting those orange reflections on the building across the street. That’s all that’s going on right now.

My lighting tent cube thing arrived today and I keep wondering why I didn’t buy one sooner. I should have had it a week ago (yeah, thanks 7DayShop ) but they decided to keep me waiting on an out of stock item only to tell me they weren’t getting any more in and cancelled my order. Instead, I bought it from Steve’s Photo Shop yesterday afternoon and it was here this morning. That’s good service!

I did consider making one but since I’m going to be using it a lot and putting it away again I decided to go for something more durable that can collapse. It’s 50cm³ and by some magic collapses down to about 20 x 10cm, although I haven’t attempted that yet. I’m overly excited about this thing, so much so that I finally got around to photographing some of the products I haven’t put in the shop yet. Here’s a taster:

The trouble is, it looks so much nicer than the other images I have in there that I may have to redo the lot: 300 products. RSI is always a good excuse not to. Oh no, what will the boss say? I’ll say have the afternoon off. In fact, take a long weekend.

Wow the last thing I wrote about the gallery was a whole page and nearly 3 months ago. Well it’s moved on a bit from there but the Pareto Principle is now in effect. Here’s a rundown of what’s been done:

• Users can upload and edit their own photos.
• They can add products from the list in the product reviews page to their photo to show which colours they used.
• Photos where more than one colour applies are automatically added to the multi-coloured gallery.
• Photos added are now added to a “hair timeline”. That’s a date based view of their images.
• Photos can win photo of the month and a “Photo of the Month” image displayed next to winners.
• Hair timelines are displayed by user/year/month/day/id (ie the individual photo). There’s also a view of all photo for a year and month.
• EXIF data was being pulled from the images but some error handling seems to have overridden that.

This is all local at the moment. All the fun stuff like designing the templates is almost finished and I have a huge bug list in the wiki to work through. Not fun. (more…)