After several weeks’ work, quintonmarais.com launched this evening.
Hi-lights include
- .Net 1.1 to .Net 2.0 upgrade (long live the MasterPage)
- Amazon S3 for all image storage (dramatically reduced bandwidth and hosting costs)
- Google map-based location search.
- Creation of “Pusher”, a fire-and-forget image watermarking, batch uploading and data-entry smart client app (to create the 12+ thumbnail and preview versions of each image).
- Creation of “S3 Viewer”, a smart client app for viewing/maintaining the thousands of S3 items and buckets which support the site.
- ‘New Images’ atom feed (surprisingly easy to get going).
- SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 upgrade (Common Table Expressions are the goods).
- GeoRSS feed to (hopefully) ensure photographs appear in search results as geo-tagged objects.
- Tag-clouds for hierarchical image categories.
- Colour search (still beta, currently rewriting the search algorithm to favour colour coverage rather than colour fidelity).
- Cleaner UI design.
- Xhtml transitional doc type with vastly improved markup validity (flash still causing some issues here). Some tables remain, to be slowly phased out when I have time.
- Flash 9 homepage scroller (flash cs3 didn’t play nice with my old flash 6 swfs).
- Self installed and configured SSL.
- New hosting provider (discountasp.net, very impressed so far)
All told the upgrade took about 3 months’ worth of train trips, nights and weekends (around my day job). It’s meant an overall reduction in sleep, but ultimately worth it. Now I have just to force myself to stop tinkering with it.