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[Comments are down at the bottom of this page, by the way] Features all pulled out dynamically Dynamic display of 'Features' - database driven, has a back end administrative section where text can be edited and keywords added, and images can be uploaded (includes automatic thumbnail creation). Features are displayed in different ways depending on context. Search Features - customise the homepage! This is based on the iTunes search style - it looks for stuff everywhere. Ready-rolled Feature-searches Icons (hand-drawn!) do pre-loaded selections from the Features Database Search site uses Google's Custom Search API Not ideal as the google-bot only makes its way round here every month or so. Good for finding old articles. PayPal donations - I can dream can't I? Make a donation - encrypted link to PayPal so donations can be made by generous regulars... Randomly selected advertisements! "Scumshot" - shows a system for randomly displaying advertisements (these are joke adverts, because we don't like advertising on cinestatic). There is a text based backend to edit and quickly add new ads. Images can be chosen from a list or new ones uploaded. Could easily be adapted to show graphical ads (bitmaps or Flash animations). Local blogs - keep up-to-date Shows "Freshness" if the page has been changed since you last visited. Also shows the date that each blog was last updated. Latest comments shows what everybody's talking about today Shows comments taken from the database with links directly to the articles. Taken from my own hand-carved comments system. Who's linking to Cinestatic? Each session is recorded in a database when a new user accesses the website. This data can be presented in a number of ways. I thought it would be cool to make this really transparent (the polar opposite to Deepmetrix' approach where you have to log on and you can't even get at the raw data and it's Windows XP slow processor-hungry style - rubbish). The Top Referrals list shows where the most people are coming from - referred traffic is quite useful - people are more likely to stay if they've had the site recommended. When is Google linking to Cinestatic? Basically, I filter down all the referrals containing ".google" and then use various VBScript string functions to extract the text of the search from the querystring. It's been interesting and funny to see the many ways that people have come to cinestatic - it's also testament to the volume of content here! Who's got the most popular page? This is useful because it shows which pages are most popular - obviously I'd rather everbody came to the site via the homepage rather than going straight to one blog - hence the "Freshness" stuff. I will probably make a couple of changes to encourage this. (Statistics are only useful if you actually use them to make improvements!) Interesting Topics from the History This uses the comments database. Not the most interesting, because flurries of interest in a particular post don't happen very often. Plus there are often mistakes so people end up putting lots of short little comments. I think I might change this so it counts the number of words commented... Who's online right NOW? I always wanted to know how many people are simultaneously online. Now it's there. Involves using the ASP Application Object and Session OnStart and OnEnd events. When the usual number of concurrent visitors hits a certain critical mass I have a plan to make it so that they can communicate in real time... The maximum visitors display was more difficult than it looks! I was using the application object to begin with, but it kept getting reset at random intervals (I use a hosting company - I think the server's actually in Chicago or somewhere - something to do with fault-lines. Adds complication to date-displays...) Visitors per week Don't get too excited - this is just a picture taken from the Deepmetrix stats. I only recently started manually logging the visits, so I still use it for some stuff. There is a COM object of my server that would allow me to construct graphs as bitmaps, so I'll probably end up trying it sometime soon... |
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| Cull Homepage | ||
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Scumshot. Looks. Different. Note the differently formatted 'Scumshot' XML Mayhem! Hand coded RSS/XML Aggregator The 'Latest Posts' thing here works by deconstructing the XML (Atom Feed) created by Blogger when a post is published. The function is capable of varying the number of posts shown, but we thought it looked nice like this.
Microsoft's ASP XML parsing functions are ridiculously verbose. But it's gotta be done. I reckon XML's much better for humans than computers so far...
There is another function for displaying latest posts from external sites too, but at the moment it is too slow (as it isn't cached locally). Accessible from the homepage or index through the "Show RSS Feeds" link. Whorecull features from same database as Cinestatic Note the different set of features pulled from the same database as used by the Cinestatic homepage.
I should mention that Bruce did the layouts for these pages - I just did the ASPy hard-core programming stuff. |
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| The Blogs | ||
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Blogger Templates
Just thought it would be worthwhile pointing out how the comments are integrated into the text of the blogs. Can't do that with Enetation (etc..)!
The Blogger template integration goes quite far actually - all the Cinestatic blogs are dynamic pages, with modular elements that can be plugged in, switched on, or tuned out.
Plus I keep thinking of new cool things that can be done. |
Care to comment?