Plakatt Blog

Long time no update here. Yet we’ve done some nice things on the site, and with the most recent version just published on the server it is a good time to introduce the most visible.

First we changed the way you log in to the site - to email and password instead of screen name and password. When this happened we sent a notification email to everyone using this login method. The reason we did this was this feels more natural - people have become accustomed to logging in with their email addresses. Also we want make space for possibly a third way to log in on Plakatt (no promises yet) and the screen name is just not very convenient as an ID for the password login as it’s variable. That’s why we call it “screen name” instead of “user name” by the way. (Maybe you didn’t know that, but yes, you can change your screen name. Just make sure people know it’s still you!)

For the people with OpenID - there’s finally a working remember me feature for you too! Also there used to be a problem when creating an account using a homepage as an identity URL, which includes a link rel pointing to their OpenID provider, and that has been resolved as well.

For a long time we wanted to give the community an opportunity to edit tags, and that is now possible. In our case editing means easy deleting in an acceptable way. Maybe the original author did not use the more common word form, and you want to fix that. So now each member can delete tags, however there is a limit to how many you can delete from pages which you have not published yourself. There is no such limitation on the pages that you originally authored. Oh and we accept tag input with commas as separators to make it comfortable to everyone. Examples of not-so-well handled input like that were actually the main motivations to come up with a community-driven tag moderation strategy.

We noticed that first duplicate entries have started to appear, so we added some text and time matching magic which tries to identify possible duplicate events and locations, with suggestions. It’s proved itself as pretty good a number of times already.

We’ll be at biZBuZZ 2008 in Niška Banja, Serbia, starting tomorrow.

It’s a great pleasure to say that we’ve made a partnership with Superawesome design, and that from now on we (that’s us btw) will be working together with Dragan and Petar towards the goal of making Plakatt the best event platform out there, our way. Hint: you should see significant changes in the site esthetics by the end of this year.

Now we show user posted photos and videos on the news stream. That was really missing. Check it out, it looks so good!

As of today we have the event RSS feed for yer.

Actually, we publish in Atom format, but the term “RSS feed” is what pretty much everyone uses regardless of the format. Depending on your feed reader, it might show you first the summary (when previewing in Firefox for example) of full content immediately.

This is not the only type of feed that we’ll have though, so stay tuned for more.

Our automatic YouTube video retrieval has been defunct for some time [*] but now it’s back.

If there’s a video taken on a certain location and uploaded on YT, we’re going to show it without any user action necessary. See what it looks like for example for Studio M.

[*] due to a bug in Rails 2.1.1

We’ve just rolled out another major update, which changes the way you approach Plakatt. We now have a global news feed displaying recent activities on the site. Previously past events would kind of get “lost” because we would show only the upcoming on the explore page. Well, we realized that and now show past events as nicely faded items there too. Want to find a location quickly, or just vaguely remember what an event was supposed to be about? No problem, now there’s a search bar at the top-right corner ready to help you.

Here are other highlights:

• Personal pages have been redesigned, with a clever summary of activities and a clear way of seeing a person’s recent activity, plans of attending future events, attached photos and videos, and contacts.
• When exploring events, you will now see them sorted in time-ascending order, that is from closest to the far in the future. When they’re over, the past events will be shown in time-descending order, so that the recently past ones are easy to find.
• People from countries with no geographical regions, such as Montenegro and Monte Carlo, should not have any more problems using the site.
• OpenID users will feel better with ID Selector, and the way we remember your preferred login method in the cookie; the whole login page actually has less clutter.
• And as usual after a few weeks of work, there have been many minor fixes.

We’ve added the AddThis button for sharing events and locations across the web - now anyone (including non-registered visitors) can email events to friends, bookmark them and submit to Digg, reddit and so on.

People sending messages will notice that we now turn web and email addresses into proper links, and properly quote received messages when replying.

We realized that exploring only five events or locations per page can be annoying, so number’s ten now.

Also we fixed some bugs like regarding proper handling of non-logged in people trying to access protected parts of the site, such as when viewing a received message or replying to a contact request. People for whose IP address we couldn’t guess a location in the world should not have problems accessing the site either.

We’ve been quite busy in the past two weeks and this is what happened:

• Improved explore page - we’ve clearly unified event and location exploring on a single page, with links on the right hand side to filter entries by tag, town or country.
• We finally managed to set up a proper email server, so we now send nice emails on signup, contact requests and incoming messages.
• And we can now reset forgotten passwords too :)
• There’s a little link now to say that you love a certain location. At the moment there’s not much more to it but expect to eventually see some nice recommendations based on your taste.
• The site is now time zone aware…
• …which was made possible after we upgraded our Ruby on Rails framework to version 2.1.1. Also the whole site should feel a tiny bit snappier.
• The personal activity feed is made more readable through (again) less design.

One of the things we realized through the feedback people gave us was that it’s hard to tell what the web site is about when looking at the home page. We made the new index in an attempt to solve that. Also we pushed some smaller changes in design, mostly related to displaying events, and some fixes for bugs we noticed eg regarding displaying wrong time of comment writing and editing read-only event descriptions.