Jungledragon Blog

JungleDragon Alpha revision 2 is now deployed to the staging environment: http://staging.jungledragon.com

This release brings the following changes and fixes:

• When using the “View Sizes” option to view images in their large or original format, part of the image will be cropped when the image is larger than your browser window. This is now fixed.
• JungleDragon now also records and display the FocalLength EXIF parameter if available in your images. This change only works for images you upload as of now
• You now get extra karma for uploading an image that includes EXIF data
• You now get extra karma for uploading high resolution images. For each 1000 pixels on the dominant axis (depending on image orientation) you get 5 extra karma points. There is a maximum to this extra reward so there is no need to upload insane resolutions.
• Fixed a bug in the karma log: It was limited to show only the 200 most recent entries. Now it shows all of them, albeit paginated like before.
• On the homepage, all thumbs are now in a fixed width box that makes the layout more consistent when portrait and landscape images are mixed in one overview
• Typo in FAQ fixed, some other pages updated.
• Firefox now also shows shadows around specific images (such as the main image on the homepage)
• Before, when you had only a very small karma progress bar in the header, it was too small to trigger the tooltip that displays you karma score. This is now fixed, you can hover the entire bar for this tooltip, no matter at what % of the level you are.
• Some images showed “Edited 40 years ago”. This happens after editing the license of an image. This is now fixed. You may need to edit and save old images where this is still the case.
• Already fixed in Alpha rev 1 but now confirmed: There are images that do not have a tag yet do not appear in the “Untagged” overview. This too happens when the license of the image is edited. This was fixed in Alpha rev1 but you need to edit and save the old images to see the fix.
• Auto completion is now disabled for certain forms where this is insecure, for example the “Change email” form.
• I was using a hacky plugin to control the styling of the upload control but it has unwanted side effects. For example IE8 has a new security “feature” that shows “fakepath” in the upload control instead of the real path you selected. I decided to drop the styling hack. The upload control now uses the default rendering of your browser/OS combination. It is less consistent with the styling of the rest of the upload form but at least it is more robust.
• I have undone the change of Alpha rev1 where I stopped using tables for tag formatting on the “Tags” page. The tables are back. For the “picture” display mode of the Tags page I switched to 2 columns instead of 3. The image counters are slightly better too. In a next revision I will likely improve the Tags page even further.

Combined with the changes from Alpha revision 1, this solves the majority of the findings so far. Nevertheless, there are things left to do. On to developing Alpha revision 3!

Reminder

Remember, I always am looking for more testers, users and feedback. You can even win a 100$ prize! Here are a few important links:

• JungleDragon Alpha (test environment)
• FAQ (For those new to JungleDragon)
• About the test environment and test contest
• How to give test feedback

Help me out, I need you

Whilst JungleDragon is not in production, there is a parking page at the production url (jungledragon.com). With the alpha released, this parking page needed to be updated. I decided to create a new, simple site from scratch:

Not much to see here, just a temp page. I will soon start on revision 2 of the alpha, there is still a lot of feedback to process. Nevertheless, keep it coming.

It’s been 5 days since I launched JungleDragon Alpha. I just deployed revision 1, which contains a number of improvements and fixes. Before I discuss those, allow me to give a short status update:

• There are currently 10 registered testers. This passes the minimum of 5 needed for the contest (where you can win 100$) to be valid. I am happy with a test base of 10 for now, it actually exceeds my expectations. People do this voluntarily in their own time, I was not expecting a mass audience. Still, I am looking for much more testers so feel free to join us (http://staging.jungledragon.com)
• There are roughly 60 unique test findings so far. I agree with 70% and will fix those soon, 15% needs more discussion, 15% I disagree with or have a low priority. This proves that I am really listening to you.
• So far I have encountered no shocking revelations. There is a few bugs, usability ad styling problems, but no serious issues that break or undermine the application.
• There is a nice base set of content uploaded, roughly 200 images that are accurately tagged and described, a great starting point for other testers to work with. It it worth mentioning though, that most content was uploaded by one tester.

I find it always both scary and very exciting to see other people using something you build. It is a humbling, yet very educational experience. Although this test approach adds substantial work to my todo list, it is meaningful work that will improve the whole.

So far the update. Hereby the list of updates deployed as part of Alpha revision 1:

• The tags associated with an image were cleared when editing the license of the image. This is now fixed.
• A slight styling bug in the About section caused anchors to be underlined. Fixed.
• Favicon is improved and more consistent with JungleDragon branding.
• Options in the footer are now highlighted when selected.
• Social image editing is now enabled starting from the Bullet Ant class
• You no longer earn karma for editing your own images, as that encourages to not supply image details during upload.
• Time indication of content uploads was sometimes “one hour ago” and sometimes “1 hr ago”, this is now consistently “1 hr ago”
• Tag names are now propercased for the first word, lowercased for all words following
• Tag names are now truncated so that they do not break the layout when they are extremely lengthy
• On the tag page, the tags are now displayed after each other, not in a table. This fixes a lot of layout issues, although I am considering undoing this change. What do you think?
• Description of King Cobra made consistent with defense capabilities
• When you reach your treshold of image edits per hour or day you now see this upfront, not after trying to make an edit
• Styling issue: on lower resolutions, the top header image is intersected with vertical solid green bars. Fixed.
• There no longer is a restriction on the amount of image edits performed on your own images.
• FAQ page now has “back to top” links for easier navigation
• External links now open in a new window
• Naming of terms and conditions page is now consistent
• Redirect error when cancelling a sign in is fixed
• Content tree of About section is now complete, no more “hidden” pages

Thank you for your feedback so far and keep it coming. This revision fixes only a subset of the total list, so I will now proceed to implement the remaining changes into a set of additional revisions.

Update: I made a small deployment error that caused all images uploaded so far to be promoted to the homepage. This is now fixed. In case you were wondering what is going on in your karma log

Dear friends, loyal readers and newcomers,

For quite a while I have been working on my pet project JungleDragon, a social image sharing community that focuses on nature and photography. Today, the very first public test version is launched and I need your help to test it. Everybody is invited, including your friends, coworkers and family. The best tester can win a cash price of 100$!

It does not matter whether you actively test or just peek around, all feedback is welcome. Please do consider the following important resources:

• staging.jungledragon.com (the permanent test location)
• About the test environment and contest
• How to give test feedback
• JungleDragon FAQ (gets you acquainted with the project and features)
• JungleDragon Facebook fanpage (where you go for feedback and discussions)
• JungleDragon blog (behind the scenes development updates)

If you are in my network, I may bother you via other ways as well.

Special thanks to Bas Peters for sponsoring and helping to setup the test environment, and of course many thanks to you in advance for helping out!

Enjoy. I need you.

For the past two years, my project JungleDragon has dominated this blog. I very much realize that although I have shared all progress that I made, I have failed to truly involve you all. This will change very soon.

Within a matter of days I will launch a public alpha test environment of JungleDragon. I will invite all of you to test it and give me feedback. I invite you to bring friends along as well, the more the merrier. I will even reward the best tester with a 100$ reward.

The alpha test environment will consist of what I call the JungleDragon core functionality. It is pretty much what you can expect from a social image community. Nevertheless, I want this base thoroughly tested before I move on to production code and more sophisticated features. The alpha environment is for testing only, its URL and data are temporary.  I do intend to keep a permanent testing location open so that I can keep on getting your feedback. It is about time.

I’m currently in the middle of some unholy tasks such as cross browser testing and fixing, and writing help documentation. Next awaits the configuration and preloading of data. As I said, all should be ready within a few days.

I need you more than ever. When the alpha environment is ready, I hope you want to be involved in testing, whether it is 1 hour or 10. If you cannot find the time or interest, what about your friends?

Stay tuned…

For my JungleDragon project I was facing an enormous information architecture challenge. Starting out with a classic tagging model for content classification, I had strong desires to overcome some of the drawbacks of such a folksonomy:

• Tags have no/weak relationships with each other since they are just user-invented text labels. This means that it is not possible to use tags to position content in a hierarchical tree
• Tags have no meaning or rich context other than the label itself. If I tag something as “Africa” the system does not know that this is a continent. If it would know this it could for example display Africa on a globe.
• Due to the flexible nature of tagging, they introduce data quality problems: tags not used or not used correctly, misspellings, synonyms, etc.

I needed to bring the worlds of folksonomy and taxonomy together. To combine the strengths of both, whilst minimizing their cons. If this is not difficult enough already, I needed the added strength of a taxonomy structure to be loosely coupled to the community software (ImageDragon).

A challenge so it is. But I managed to do all of the above, and in this article I am explaining you how. Given the length of the article, I have published it as a PDF:

Download Tagonomy: Taxonomy meets Folksonomy

Solving this challenge and writing this article has been a lot of work. I hope you will find the interest and patience to absorb it. I am convinced that the solution beholds a lot of power as I will show you over time. For now, enjoy, and don’t forget to rate and comment back here. It keeps me going in writing more articles.