BL+G - The Gridlove Blog

How was 2007 for you?

2008-01-15T10:20:00.001+11:00

Me, I was out for the whole thing -- in a coma. When I snapped out of it a few days ago the first thing I did was call my accountant to see how much Google had acquired us for. Well, you can guess the news wasn't good...

So hey, we're back in businesses and ready to get a few more features together for the application with no point, Gridlove.

One thing I am doing is working on an import feature to take a movie, generate a thumbnail every second, and spit out a grid. I have a sample to show you. It's Fat Freddy's Drop's video for Wandering Eye.

What do you think? Hopefully I'll get the functionality opened up to everyone soon.

Happy 2008!

New Featurage

2006-09-19T11:40:00.000+10:00

Hello. Here I am, quickly noting some new features.

Image Zoom: Probably the most requested feature is back and better than before. Clicking any image in a grid now provides a zoom option, offering a zoomed image up to 500 pixels on a side.

Grid Editing: On any of your grids you'll now see an "edit" button on the bottom left "grid info" panel. Use this to alter your title or description. Tag editing is not far behind...

That's all folks. Tune in to the RSS feed (right) to keep in the loop. I'm planning to roll out a few more features shortly...

Big Gnarly Update

2006-07-03T21:54:00.000+10:00

We've just updated Gridlove with bunch of new features (with a side of bugs, no doubt). A lot of reworking has gone on under the covers, so please get those bug reports in!

A few new features then. Grids now update while you're looking at them! This will make collaboration a lot less broken ;). You can now create a Yahoo image search based grid. Perfect for making chaotic stream of consciousness grids with a few buddies (and a few beers). Webshots is now integrated so users of that service can transfer images directly from their online albums.

Coming up -- We're going to focus more on social tools (RSS feeds, maybe a friends type status, favourite grids, invitations) as well as getting a decent image zoom back in there. Of course performance and stability might get a look in while we're at it.

Take it easy!

Live Resize Arrives!

2006-05-31T19:36:00.000+10:00

You can now re-crop and scale any image you've uploaded to Gridlove. Make sure you're logged in and click on one of your images. You'll see an option "re-crop image". Clicking this will allow you to live-edit your image. You really need to try it out to see how simple it is.

Server Down!

2006-05-10T11:44:00.000+10:00

OK - our hosting provider is an asshat. It's a long story but the result is our server has been down for the last 3 days or so with no guarantee of when it's coming back. Apparently it should be in the next 24 hours or so. Keep an eye on this blog and I'll let you know as soon as I do!

And yes, I'm looking for a new hosting provider.

Update May 29: We're back live with a new provider!

Sharing the love

2006-05-01T14:11:00.000+10:00

Gridlove launches! (shhhhhh)

I've dropped the beta crap from the site and sent out a note to a few of my favourite blogs. Hopefully I'll get a manageable stream of intrepid users slowly dropping by to see what Gridlove is all about.

Code seems to be stablish, so fingers are crossed the server stays up for a change. Honestly, I've had to learn far far more than I ever wanted to know about database connection pooling, virtual machines and object relationship mapping during this project. If I hadn't seen that weak flickering (Flickring?) light at the end of the tunnel I would almost certainly have jumped ship and switched the project from Java to something far more bandwagon-compliant (Ruby on Rails) by now.

Gridlove updates

2006-04-12T10:28:00.000+10:00

+ You can now delete any image you upload to any grid as well as images uploaded by other people to grids you create (click the image and select "delete"). The only images in these two categories you can't delete are ones in a linear grid where deleting the image would leave other images detached from the grid.

+ Uploader UI has been significantly improved.

+ Grids can draw instantly from the home page. The explore pages (which need to be updated) will also provide this feature soon.

+ You can create grids using a Flickr group as a source (such as the long line group etc.)

+ Flickr and Amazon images now link to the Flickr photo page and Amazon album page respectively.

+ Design updated and better support for IE.

Not just another statistic...

2006-02-28T20:33:00.000+11:00

The BL+G makes it to post number 2!!! In doing so we surely now leap ahead what must be millions of cheap one-post-pony blogs that litter the sides of the cyber-highway like the cyber-roadkill they cyber-are.

But to the business at hand -- work progresses on The Love. A new design is taking shape and much-needed functionality is slowly winding it's way into the product: deletes, user-accessible flickr pool integration, and maybe even some basic image cropping/resizing tools.

On the back-end... end... of things, I'm planning to install new versions of MySQL and upgrade my MySQL driver -- I think these could be the culprits behind some shakey server behaviour some of you have seen.

When will you be able to see this stuff, you ask? Well between now and then would be my guess!

The love below...

2006-01-22T21:37:00.000+11:00

Welcome to the Gridlove blog!

I've set this up as a place to announce important milestones in the Gridlove world take-over plan and to talk shop with Gridlove trial users.

But first a little backgrounder...

I came up with the idea for Gridlove back in March 2005. The idea was to create a collaborative space where people could find new ways of interacting using their growing stashes of digital photos. In its simplest form, Gridlove would be a game of dominoes played with images instead of numbers. Each grid would be started with a single image and then users would add to that grid by placing their own image next to either the original image or subsequently placed images. These images should be related in some fairly tangible way -- that is, each image should reflect the theme, form or colour of its neigbouring image.

It was supposed to be a small 2 or 3 month project to get me inspired and producing stuff. Shit - as I write this it's over 10 months since that time and I still have a to-do list as long as my arm.

But things are now far enough along that i've decided to open the application up to a few invited testers. For the rest of you reading this, you'll probably have to wait another month or two before I'm ready to kick off a public beta. If you're interested in trying it out, you can at least go and register your email address to be notified when the beta release begins.

Cheers,

Anson