What stops a good site from being great.
Monday, January 22, 2007 by FlawlesStyle | Discussion: Community
I visit a lot of customizing sites these days, and I've noticed the ones I tend to stick to the most are those that look good, as well as having a great selection of skins/themes/walls. Prime example, DA, it is usually the first place I look for a dock icon, for example. The reason...
Gallery Previews are not horribly compressed. They're not PNG's, or 100% quality JPG's, but they look that way to a casual user.
When I link people to a theme here, though, most of the time they say it's ugly without even trying it, and I'd attest that to the fact that they glance at the small preview, subconsciously judge the compression as being part of the theme, and decide it's ugly, even though it may be one of the most popular themes on the site.
I understand that improving their quality would increase the amount of bandwidth used, but I think it would also increase traffic to the site. The redesign looks wonderful, and as soon as I found out about it, I rushed over to see it...only to be disappointed by the same quality thumbnail previews as before.
Just my 2¢
Gallery Previews are not horribly compressed. They're not PNG's, or 100% quality JPG's, but they look that way to a casual user.
When I link people to a theme here, though, most of the time they say it's ugly without even trying it, and I'd attest that to the fact that they glance at the small preview, subconsciously judge the compression as being part of the theme, and decide it's ugly, even though it may be one of the most popular themes on the site.
I understand that improving their quality would increase the amount of bandwidth used, but I think it would also increase traffic to the site. The redesign looks wonderful, and as soon as I found out about it, I rushed over to see it...only to be disappointed by the same quality thumbnail previews as before.
Just my 2¢
Dark-Star
Reply #2 Monday, January 22, 2007 2:18 PM
Reply #2 Monday, January 22, 2007 2:18 PM
| The redesign looks wonderful, and as soon as I found out about it, I rushed over to see it...only to be disappointed by the same quality thumbnail previews as before. |
Older items still show the poor thumbnails. All brand new and newly updated items are using a much improved image quality settings. Hopefully, once more skins/themes/icons that are updated on the site, this problem will work its self out. As it stands right now, most images in the gallery (beyond the first couple pages) are of the older quality, but that will change as time moves on.
For a hint on how to improve any old skins that you may have uploaded in the past, simply update it and re-upload a new thumbnail, and the new thumb should be noticeably better.
Excalpius
Reply #3 Monday, January 22, 2007 8:11 PM
Reply #3 Monday, January 22, 2007 8:11 PM
Why not have the server re-compress the old thumbnails with the new settings, say as an idle priority task in the background so as not to affect the server performance unduly? These are such tiny thumbnails, I'd think it would happen surprisingly quickly.
andrew_
Reply #4 Tuesday, January 23, 2007 8:07 AM
Reply #4 Tuesday, January 23, 2007 8:07 AM
It's the sheer number from what I understand. I'm sure this wont stop people from speculating about our situation and what a server can handle and yadda yadda. Everyone likes to speculate as if they have some intimate knowledge of our backend systems. Or they base their argument from a corner of having some experience with web servers. The number of graphics that need to be reprocessed and then checked, and then double checked... it's more of a task than people may realize.
Excalpius
Reply #5 Tuesday, January 23, 2007 5:24 PM
Reply #5 Tuesday, January 23, 2007 5:24 PM
I appreciate your point Andrew, but let's be clear...
This is NOT a homegrown blogger site. It's a commercial site with commercial resources.
We're talking about THUMBNAIL (re)generation here, not SETI calculations.
At 1 second per thumbnail (if it takes you longer than that there is something wrong with the algorithm), any modern PC can (re) convert every graphic on this site into a new higher quality thumbnail at the rate of 86,400 images per DAY.
Instead of doing this all at once, one could insert a line of code to check each thumbnail upon request. If the thumbnail is before X date (the date of new algorithm), regenerate it. This would just happen to update the date immediately and automatically. From that point on that thumbnail would never need to be regenerated.
So this is only done once, for the first NEW request of a thumbnail, and so after a few weeks of (presumably) slightly longer searches, you could even remove this one short routine I suspect.
This would avoid reconverting everything even once, which I still don't see as a huge issue.
It's just a suggestion. Feel free to ignore.
This is NOT a homegrown blogger site. It's a commercial site with commercial resources.
We're talking about THUMBNAIL (re)generation here, not SETI calculations.
At 1 second per thumbnail (if it takes you longer than that there is something wrong with the algorithm), any modern PC can (re) convert every graphic on this site into a new higher quality thumbnail at the rate of 86,400 images per DAY.
Instead of doing this all at once, one could insert a line of code to check each thumbnail upon request. If the thumbnail is before X date (the date of new algorithm), regenerate it. This would just happen to update the date immediately and automatically. From that point on that thumbnail would never need to be regenerated.
So this is only done once, for the first NEW request of a thumbnail, and so after a few weeks of (presumably) slightly longer searches, you could even remove this one short routine I suspect.
This would avoid reconverting everything even once, which I still don't see as a huge issue.
It's just a suggestion. Feel free to ignore.
Excalpius
Reply #7 Tuesday, January 23, 2007 10:23 PM
Reply #7 Tuesday, January 23, 2007 10:23 PM
I'm devolving into programmer speak, sorry about that Bandit4edu. 
thepcdude
Reply #8 Thursday, January 25, 2007 3:43 AM
Reply #8 Thursday, January 25, 2007 3:43 AM
Its fine i have no problems, if i think it may be questionable if i like or not i jsut download and try, doesnt take but a sec.
Frogboy
Reply #9 Thursday, February 15, 2007 1:30 AM
Reply #9 Thursday, February 15, 2007 1:30 AM
I actually think regenerating the thumbnails might be worthwhile. I tend to have the same opinion about the quality of the older thumbnails.
Bebi Bulma
Reply #10 Thursday, February 15, 2007 2:42 AM
Reply #10 Thursday, February 15, 2007 2:42 AM
Since we're talking about thumbnails...how come the thumbs on the main gallery page and on the personal pages looked cropped? It's like it's only showing the top corner instead of a resized version of the entire image. Once you actually view a gallery they look normal.
Fuzzy Logic
Reply #11 Thursday, February 15, 2007 3:22 AM
Reply #11 Thursday, February 15, 2007 3:22 AM
Yeah, I noticed that too. Does look a bit odd.
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Reply #1 Monday, January 22, 2007 2:02 PM
Previews have been generated with a high quality for about two weeks, about a week before the new site was launched. I'm sorry that you dont care for them, but the overall reaction has been positive.
//Post moved to General > Community