Archive for the ‘Updates’ Category
November 22nd, 2009 by Brad
It’s been a long time coming (more than a year) but you are now looking at the brand spankin’ new Indie Threads. Let me give you a little bit of a run down on what’s new, what’s different, and what’s still to come.
What’s New
To put it short, everything is new. Indie Threads is now completely powered by WordPress. I’m using WordPress MU along with Buddypress to run the new community. Before Indie Threads was running on a poorly built CMS that I haphazardly threw together without thinking much about the future. Now, it’s pretty much future proof.
What’s Different
Because everything about the site is new, pretty much everything about the site is different. …Sort of. The site still has the basic concept – Find your favorite independent shops and make friends with them. The things that are different are the way things are run. The blog is now run via WordPress and is much more flexible. The user profiles are much more flexible and that if you users want a new feature it won’t take me months of hacking away to implement it (hopefully).
You can link to your website, your twitter, and your facebook vie the ‘edit profile’ page. You can, if you really want to, delete your account. You can decide what kind, if any, notifications you’d like to receive from your ‘settings’ page. And you can display your latest tweets on your wall via the ‘settings’ page.
What’s Still To Come
One of the things that I was a little disappointed with about this new system is that there isn’t currently a way to have photo albums. It’s a feature that should be released soon, but until then, you won’t be able to display your photos.
Another thing that I’m working on getting to work is having other people keep this blog updated. As you might have noticed I’m not the most consistent blogger in the world. So, if you’re interested in helping out with this blog, please let me know.
One last thing: if you notice anything weird that you think might be a bug with the site, please let me know.
April 28th, 2009 by Brad
Apparently, during the big site move, the mod_rewrite rules for the site got lost. As a result, a lot of the links around the site weren’t working. And I just discovered that a few minutes ago. It’s fixed though.
In other news, if you’ve been holding out on getting one of SEIBEI’s Taco Dinosaur shirts, I suggest you get to it. They’ll be extinct on May 5th. GET TO IT!
April 26th, 2009 by Brad
Indie Threads has changed hosts and we’re on a new server now. Everything seems to be working fine for me, but if you happen across a bug please let me know and I’ll try to fix it.
In other news, I’m getting married in Vermont in twenty-some-odd days, so I haven’t had a whole lot of time to work on the new site. Once I get back and wedding stuff settles down I should be able to get back to work on it though. I haven’t forgotten.
August 6th, 2008 by Brad
So, we kind of fell off the map, eh?
Not for much longer though. I’m working only one job again and I’m tinkering with Indie Threads related things again. Mainly overhauling the entire site. I’m re-coding everything from scratch. Making it look tons better (different from the previous post, by the way). I’m also working on adding completely new features. I’m keeping that one up my sleeve for awhile though because it’s still just in it’s idea stages.
One of the things I’m trying to do with Indie Threads 3.0 is take the focus off the blog (because you see how much it’s getting updated) and put it more on the community. I want people to come here and find new friends and contacts. There are a ton of t-shirt blogs if you need your fix. I’m going to re-do the forums all together and integrate them into the site instead of the way it is now.
It’s just going to be all around better. I’ll update with more info as things progress so keep checking back.
January 8th, 2008 by Brad
I’m not going to promise anything really soon, but I don’t think that it’s too early to start this.
I’m making pretty good progress on the new site and I want to have a new interview when I launch it, hopefully soon (weeks or months… not days). I’ve got a few ideas in mind that I wouldn’t mind seeing, but I want to know yours.
Who do you want to see an interview with on Indie Threads?
January 7th, 2008 by Brad
Well, I hope everyone’s holidays went well. I figured that it’s time for me to get in gear. Sorry about the very few updates the last month or so.
I’ll be honest, I’ve not made a great deal of progress on the new site since the last time I updated about it. I’ve been focusing on Quixotic, work, and the holiday season that was approaching. However in the last few days I’ve been hacking away it and improving the photo gallery portion of the member profiles.
I know that this doesn’t look all that different, but I promise that it is. First off, let me say that I’ve never been all the happy with the way that I coded them. It was first made using an html form which if you clicked it, it would take you to the correct photo, which is what I wanted, but if you decided that you needed to refresh the page you got that annoying pop-up thing saying that it contained “POST DATA” and “Are you sure yadda yadda yadda…”
Well, now that’s gone. I’ve taken the time to make it work the way that it should. Now, it’s like clicking an image and the link taking you to the bigger version of it. It shouldn’t have been as difficult as it was to get it to work, but it was and I’m glad I got through it.
Some other things I intend to do with the galleries is to tinker around with some php and dynamically create thumbnails of all the images so they don’t look all wonky being resized in the sidebar. That shouldn’t be too hard… I hope. Also, I’m going to add comment features to all the pictures, so now you can talk about them.
November 30th, 2007 by Brad
Okay, so I’ve been trying to think of new features for the upcoming site overhaul and one that I feel is a good one is an entirely new section for the site. Since there are a lot of shops on the site and new ones starting every day, I thought it would be a good resource if there was a database of print shops available. There would be the option for members to comment on them and rate them so if they were an awesome company, people would know it and if they were terrible, people would know to stay away from them.
I haven’t started work on this because I wanted your opinions on it. Do you think it’s a good idea or do you think that it could be better with other features? Are there completely different features that you’d like to see on the site? Let me know.
November 15th, 2007 by Brad
It’s been a year since the first blog post – Nov. 15th, 2006.
I wanted to thank all of you for keeping Indie Threads going and making it what it is. Without you, this probably wouldn’t be here still and I’d be doing something …that isn’t this. I have no idea.
Even though the site has been relatively slow lately, I hope you can make Indie Threads last at least another year. Hopefully many more than that. I’m trying to get back into the game of t-shirt blogging but with the new site I want to put more attention into the community aspect of this site. If you have any ideas on how to make the site more community focused rather than blog focused, I’m all ears.
Thanks for one year, everyone.
November 5th, 2007 by Brad
I figured I’d let you all see what kind of progress I’m making with the new design. I’ve been working on it quite a bit lately and there are two things that I’m happy about – the rest is still just meh right now.
First off, the members page. It’s not too different than the way it is right now, but it’s a little simpler. I’ve opted not to have the huge borders around the user pictures and go with a little bit cleaner of a look. Also, the shop icon in a semi-transparent .png overlaying the userpic so it doesn’t interfere but still lets you know that that member has a shop.
Second, we have the new profile page. I’m pretty happy about this because it almost could be seen as the members own personal website… sort of. It looks a lot more organized than they do now in my opinion. Things look like they’re supposed to be where they are.
I’m not completely sold on the look of the header right now. I like the idea of it but I’m not too sure on the execution. I also need to find a way to implement the upper ad. ..Although, I’d really like to not have ads but I need to have the site at least pay for itself, if not earn me a little bit of pocket change.
What do you think? If you think it looks horrid, let me know. I want this to be a community decision.
October 29th, 2007 by Brad
Remember me mentioning the whole new site thing? It’s okay if you don’t. It was kind of just tacked on the end of a post last week, so I’ll understand if you didn’t catch it.
In case you did miss it, I’m working on a new site. I’m going to be redesigning the whole thing from the ground up. I might be recoding some things too. I’m not sure yet. …Actually, that’s a lie. I will more than likely be recoding at least some of the site.
I’m not going to try and rush this and have it up real soon or anything. I want it to be awesome and rushing things sometimes doesn’t get that result. This doesn’t mean that I won’t have it up soon for sure though. It will be done when it’s done.
Anyway, I’ve come up with a new logo for the site. I’m changing fonts for the text of Indie Threads and I’m changing the spool of thread. I don’t think that the spool really represents the site or what it’s about. I mainly chose that because I didn’t want to pigeonhole the site into just about t-shirts but I’m not going to fight it anymore. That’s what it’s about. All the members have something to do with t-shirts, so I’m accepting it. Indie Threads is a t-shirt community. ‘Nuff said.
Well, here’s the new logo made into a snazzy little image for you. As you can see, it’s got one of those old slogans under it. That is because THEY’RE COMING BACK! YAY! Come up with more.
