OK, so we’ve gotten the bad news out of the way, we can focus on some of the good things that the next edition of Unknown Tales will feature.

The first of these is Member Profiles.

Read the rest of this entry »

Despite the lack of a cliché ‘Beta’ hanging off the end of the site’s logo, Unknown Tales is very much a Beta project. In fact, if I’m honest with you, it’s not really out of the Alpha stages of development….

Anyway, as a result of the beta/alpha status of Unknown Tales, there is always the very real possibility that ideas might change. You’ve no doubt seen a lot of changes to the design and interface of the site over the past couple of months – and found that some parts of the site have moved to new homes – but  the core functionality of the site has always remained the same.

Well, that is until now!… or at least soon… Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick post to let everyone know that the new site for South Worcestershire College is now live! It’s taken a long time to get this far, but now that it’s online, I’m happy with it.

Now I need to spend the next two months promoting it – this will be fun

Today was going to be the launch of my latest project – the new site for my current employer: South Worcestershire College. Due to technical difficulties with the server hosting the site, however, it’s now not going to happen for another two weeks.

The problem stems from the fact that the server is running both Apache (for my site) and IIS (for the college’s internal systems), and is resulting in all requests coming into the server, regardless of the URL, being grabbed by Apache and forcing people to view the new site.

I have to admit that I’m feeling disappointed – not so much at the fact the site hasn’t gone live yet (after six months of development, I can wait another two weeks) – but in the way that some people at the company reacted and the nasty comments directed at Jason (the guy who was doing his very best to fix the problem and keep everyone happy).

Although this is something that is entirely out of my control, I can’t help but feel guilty.

Hopefully, in a couple of weeks, I’ll be able to make a new post celebrating the launch of the new site, but for today, I’m on a bit of a downer

I just wanted to make a quick post ‘bigging-up’ Plogger. It’s a PHP/MySQL based image gallery that seems to take a lot of inspiration from WordPress. Read the rest of this entry »

While the event was a success in some respects, and I guess it did achieve the objective of populating the forum a bit, it was not in anyway what I wanted.

My team (Cos, Sofi and I), starting at 9:00 am, spent most of the day on the forum interacting with each other. We started threads, posted replies, and for the most part had a pretty good time. Before we knew it, it was 1:00 pm… but not a single other person had come to join us. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, so yesterday I submitted Unknown Tales to a couple of sites to get some feedback… The results were not good. The mascot image in the bottom right corner was a big focal point of the site, but was causing too much of a distraction. The advertising at the top of the page was a bit too overpowering and ugly, the colours are letting the site down, and people were not feeling encouraged to explore the site. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick post to let you know that I’ve added Unknown Tales to Concept Feedback. The idea is that people come along and review your design and give you feedback based on it. I’ve no idea what sort of feedback I’m going to get, but hopefully it’ll be positive – or at least negative, but with feedback constructive enough to fix the problems.

In other news, I’ve also submitted a screen shot to Five Second Test. This is similar, only on this site you get only five seconds to see the image, during which you need to click on everything that stands out, then label them. Should be interesting to see what people notice about the site in just five seconds.

If you’re able, would you be kind enough to check out the two links above and give me some feedback, as they say, every little helps. I’ll post the results as soon as I get any.

I’m trying a bit of an experiment over at Unknown tales. Meet The Unknown is my attempt to try and help populate the community a bit. The idea is that by hosting a specific event, a specific day in which people can visit the site and be guaranteed other people to discuss with, it’ll let them find out more about the site and what it has to offer. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to keep this short as I’m very tired, but I wanted to take this opportunity to let everyone know that Unknown Tales is now live.

Although I’ve set-up an official UT blog over on the site, I’m going to be using that for mostly promotional purposes, while this blog will remain mostly technical with more information on the back-end stuff.

Talking of which, at some point I’m going to make a post listing all of the technologies used in the building of the site – not just the big stuff like CakePHP and jQuery – but the specific plugins and other bits that have been used.

Anyway, please go and have a look at the site and let me know what you think of it. I’m after some honest feedback, i.e. if you think something is crap, let me know – just make sure you also let me know why.

Thank you