Upgrades in Progress

I’ll be taking Placeology offline for a few days, starting tomorrow, to implement some major updates that have been in the works for the last few months. There will be a number of upgrades to the site based on the feedback of the past several months, as well as careful observation of the useage patterns on the site. You’ll be able to see the changes for yourself in a few days, but here’s a sneak peek of what’s coming:

Photos reorganized around locations. By expanding the location model in the app we will now have much more interesting ways to explore photos geographically.

Login via Twitter. New users will be able to log in with Twitter instead of having to create a new account. Existing users will also be able to link twitter accounts if they so desire.

Anonymous posting. Users will now have the option to use the site with a username only, instead of being asked to use their real name throughout the site.

Improved Batch Uploader. The batch uploader is easier to use than ever before, making it much faster to share photos.

No more classification. After testing out different options for a year it’s pretty clear that people don’t want to put tags and categories on their photos, they mostly just want to look at other people’s stuff and maybe drop a few files in to share. So, I’m not asking users to classify their photos any more, other than to label what city they were taken in. From here on out I’ll do all the classifying of photos as they come in, with the help of a group of volunteer moderators.

Placeology is meant to be a useful tool for sharing and discovering examples of places. The changes coming to the site are meant to open it up and make it easier and more interesting for people to participate. To date the learning curve has always been fairly steep for new users to the site, hopefully with these changes and a few other tweaks that are coming over the next few months we can lower the barrier to entry and make this platform more useful.

Announcing the Live / Work Image Hunt

Placeology Users,

One of our goals at Placeology is to identify imagery needs among the community of urban development professionals and utilize the membership and database together as a resource to help satisfy those needs. With this in mind, we’re launching a new effort to conduct a targeted Image Hunt. By working together to collect photographs on specific subjects related to the built-environment we can build a resource that is more than just a database of urbanism, but also one that features the photos that development professionals need in support of their work to build better towns and cities.

Our first image hunt will be for Live / Work Units.

Live / Work Units are a hot topic in the design and development industry today, and although proven to be one of the most highly versatile building types, they often remain missing from the palette of suburban developers. With this Image Hunt we hope to aggregate the best examples of this building type from both new and old sites from around the country. Using Placeology’s built in Discussion feature for the submitted images, our community of members can turn this database of Live / Work units into a powerful resource of knowledge.

To enter your photos in the Image Hunt simply upload them and then tag each photo with #liveworkhunt. That’s it.

All images uploaded from today (Oct. 4) through the Thanksgiving Holiday will be eligible. Need a little incentive? We’re offering a couple prizes for people who join the hunt:

Top Contributor

The Placeology member that submits the most examples of valid Live/Work units will receive:

• A free one-year Plus membership
• A copy of “Greyfields into Goldfields”, courtesy of the Congress for the New Urbanism

Everyone’s a Winner

Every Placeology member that submits 5 pictures of Live / Work Units will receive a coupon good for a one-month Plus membership to the database.

Thank you for your energy in helping us get this resource going. Happy (Image) Hunting!

New, bigger photos on the front page.

Just a quick note, we’ve rearranged some of the content on the site and added the ability to select interesting photos as “featured.” If we pick a photo as “featured” it’ll show up randomly on our home page.

It’s really amazing how much better many of the photos in the database look when they’re blown up. This is the beauty of storing high-resolution, original images, and it’s something we’re really proud to offer our subscribers.

Now more social, just in time for the weekend

We’ve just added “Like” and “Tweet” buttons to the site, so now it’s easier than ever to share your favorite photos with friends. You can also find the Placeology Facebook page and Twitter feed, if you’d like to keep up with us that way.

New Name, New Look

I’m thrilled to announce we just launched Placology to the public at large! For those who have been with us in Beta, you’ll notice that there have been a pretty massive set of changes to the site. Given the sweeping nature of the changes, I thought I’d walk you through the biggest differences.

The New Name

When I started building the website I didn’t have a name for it, so I referred to it as “The Fourth Environment Community Toolkit”. This eventually led to using the FourthEnvironment.org domain name — a variation of our company home page at FourthEnvironment.com — and it became the name of the website by default. There were a couple reasons we felt it would be a good idea to change the name for the public launch, though.

First, the company (Fourth Environment, LLC) and the web site are not actually the same thing. The web site is only one of the projects that we work on, and in fact Fourth Environment pays its bills by providing consulting services for real estate developers. So, Cobby and I thought it would be a good idea to make it more clear that the web site was one of our products, not the entire business.

Second, T4ECTK didn’t seem very catchy, and more importantly didn’t tell people at-a-glance anything about the site. Now, having a somewhat abstract name works well for the company, as there’s a good story behind it and when I talk to people about the business I get to tell them the story. ( If you want to know the story, you can ask me too. ) So, in June we started brainstorming with some of our main contributors and testers in search of something better. At some point Dan Bartman made the suggestion “Placeology”, and that caught on. So now we have a new name!

The New Look

The next biggest change is the overall look and feel of the site. As the sole developer of the site I am constantly juggling back and forth from the role of Programmer to Designer. Sometimes as “programmer” I need to throw a user interface together really fast just to check if something functions or not, and I plan to come back later and “make it look good.”

Over the course of the past 8 months a lot of things that were thrown together quickly never got the refresher they needed, and my opinion about the overall look and feel of the site also changed over time, so that newer pages had a distinctly different feel from older ones. Well, as we were about to launch, that wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

Last week I worked through every page on the site and cleaned them all up a bit. I spent a ton of time making sure that there was a new, fresh, consistent look and feel throughout all the pages. To help you see the difference, here are some before and after shots:

The Old Homepage

The New Homepage

The Old Login Screen

The New Login Screen

The Old Photo Page

The New Photo Page

While the change for each individual page is relatively small, across the site as a whole the difference is dramatic. What was fragmented is now much more unified, polished, and professional.

There are still some pages I think I can make better, but on the whole I’m really happy with the look of the site. Honestly this is the first time I’ve been able to say that, as the inconsistencies of a product in heavy early development always drove me nuts aesthetically.

What’s Next?

Now that the core of the site is stable our effort is going to shift toward marketing the site, attracting users, and collecting lots of good photographs. You can help us toward this goal by telling your friends and uploading photos.

I’ll also continue to work to improve the site, and you can expect to see incremental improvements from week to week. Have an idea? Send an email to hello(at)placeology(dot)ws.

Thanks for helping us get the site out of Beta, we’re looking forward to growing Placeology into the world’s best collection of built-environment images!

Let there be batch uploading :)

Today you’ll notice that you can upload images to the FourthEnvironment.org photo database in bulk. This is a massive upgrade to architecture of the database, and it should help make it easier for people who would like to share photos through the site.

After you’ve uploaded some photos they’ll sit in your “Queue”, and wait for you to classify them. You can quickly apply a location to a group of photos at a time, and then edit the finer details of each photo individually.

Photos in your queue aren’t visible as part of the database yet. When you’ve applied a Location, Focus, and Context to a photo it will be automatically moved from your queue into the public database so it can be searched for and found.

Why it took 2 days longer to finish this than I expected…

Originally I thought this would be ready Monday afternoon, instead it ended up being Wednesday morning. The reason is pretty straightforward: migrating the database from the old setup to the new setup involved moving a huge amount of data, and it was critical that we not lose any. We succeeded in making the move without losing anything, but there were some unexpected roadbumps along the way.

For techies who may be interested in the details:

The server processes images when you upload them and stores eleven copies of each image (all at different sizes). This is how the site displays your huge images as little thumbnails throughout the site.

At this point we have about 600 photos in the database, which means about 6600 images needed to be moved from the old file storage system to the new one. We needed to change file storage because the old file manager (Paperclip) accessed and organized files differently from the new one (Carrierwave). Specifically the old system was using two models to store photo information in the database and in order to do batch uploading it was more practical to only use one.

To actually move the file data from the old model scheme to the new one I patched the app to have both file managers installed at the same time, and used a rake task to pass files from one to the other. The problem is, because of the processing involved, this rake task kept running out of memory.

Each time I ran the rake task it would run for about 2 hours (and 1000-2000 photos) and then crash. So, I re-wrote it in such a way that it would check whether photos had been processed on the previous attempt and skip them, then automatically resume after a crash. The script took 6 tries (and about 6 hours) to finally finish running through images.

I thought the mission was accomplished, so I loaded up the site using only the new file manager to double check that all the images were in place. Unfortunately, they weren’t. It turns out that as the rake task was about to crash it would *attempt* to process a few photos (5 or 10) but not complete processing them. Therefore there were about 50 photos (out of ~600) missing when the first attempt was complete.

At this point it was Tuesday afternoon, I was already a day behind where I thought I’d be, and I wasn’t really sure how to make the migration work at all. So, I restored everything to its previous state and started working on a new plan.

Fortunately I had a faint memory of an ActiveRecord method called find_each which let me pull photos in small batches, process a few at a time, and clear the memory, so that the task could complete without crashing.

In the end everything worked as expected, but the slow, cautious pace I took to be absolutely certain that no data was lost made this a more lengthy process than I had expected. The good news is we have a great new feature on the site, and everyone’s photos lived to tell about it :)

…

That’s what I get for thinking I could finish this in a few hours :) It’ll be worth it, and with any luck you’ll see sometime tomorrow (no guarantees, I’ve learned my lesson).

…still in progress…

After about 14 hours working on this today I’ve got the bulk of the conversion in place, but some things are still in-progress. I’ll be at work on this again early in the morning and will be doing my best to make sure the changes are finished as quickly as possible.

Updates in Progress

Today the FourthEnvironment.org site will be down for most of the day as I work on implementing changes to the file system to allow some improvements to how uploads work.

The goal of these changes is to make it faster and easier for everyone to contribute photos to the database.

I’ll post a full announcement after the updates are complete. Thanks for your patience while I work on making the site better!

Features that aren’t features

Up until now I’ve had a custom, hand-written blog application embedded in the FourthEnvironment.org app. It worked fine. But, it meant that in the middle of the photo database code there was code for running a blog. That’s not really very useful.

This is the kind of thing I would call a “feature that isn’t a feature.” It means I’m doing work to create and maintain code that really has nothing to do with the product that the end-user cares about.

There are loads of well-established and useful blogging systems out there. I happen to like Tumblr, it’s nice and simple and easy to syndicate. So, from here on out, FourthEnvironment’s blog page is just a Tumblr blog — and that’s actually a good thing, because Tumblr is writing better blog code than I ever was going to.

The past two weeks I’ve been trying to pick apart the app and make sure everything that’s in it really needs to be there. The blog code isn’t the only part that’s on its way out, but I’ll elaborate on that more later. In the mean time, the app is getting better, and that’s what really matters.