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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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

Hey everyone, just a quick message to let you know that the Community for Unknown Tales is now online. The rest of the site should follow shortly, but for the moment, if you want to get settled into the Community and make a few posts, it’ll feel like home before you know it.

Back when I was building Unknown Tales as part of my Independent Study I had a problem trying to get data to save to three separate models at the same time. I was creating a form based around the Story model, and trying to get it to save data to that, as well as the Chapter and Path models at the same time.

Well, I’m happy to say that the latest edition of Unknown Tales, which is starting to come together very nicely, has fixed this problem, and it is such a simple fix that I’m kicking myself for not thinking about it before. (more…)

I’ve spent every minute of the past three weeks working on Unknown Tales.

Well, that is, I would have if things like sleeping, travelling to and from work, work itself, eating, cleaning (both myself and the flat), gaming, going into town, and chilling out – hadn’t of got in the way.

I have, however, spent a good portion of the past three Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays working on the site, and I’m really starting to get the feeling that it will not be long before I can start doing some end-user testing on it. (more…)

Although I said yesterday that you would have to wait before you get to see the JavaScript bits and bobs I’ve added to the site, I didn’t say how long you would have to wait. Well – the wait is over (more…)

Out with the old, in with the new. That’s my philosophy regarding Unknown Tales.

Unknown Tales, the interactive story site that I built for my Independent Study, has been taken down. Well, that’s not strictly true as it still exists in archive format, but for all purposes intent, that edition of the site is gone. (more…)