http://bpontius.com/xml/BPNews.xml News about this web site. en-us Copyright (c) 2009-2011 BPontius.com Mon, 23 April 2012 12:00:00 GMT Mon, 23 April 2012 12:00:00 GMT BPontius.com: News Mon, 23 April 2012 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/ Back around 2000 I was doing quite a bit of ColdFusion (CFML) based web application development on Windows based IIS servers, on GoDaddy hosting services, when I began to realize the incompetency of Windows IIS based server in a shared hosting environment, I moved the sites to Linux Servers. A few weeks ago, randomly browsing sites I have made in the past, I noticed that one of the sites was broken, and started trying to contact the client, then the other one looked like it had been disabled by the client. So I contacted him and he said that GoDaddy stopped supporting ColdFusion. I don't really know the details, but I do know that GoDaddy should not just cut of it's customes like that. I do not know if we will relocate the sites, and the broken one is waiting for a response from the client for me to do something about it. Tue, 04 April 2012 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/ Its more of a complete rewrite of the photogallery library objects, I did most of the work in 2011, but had become very busy working a development contract for Honda RD. I found some time in the last few weeks to get it up and running again and started testing it for launch, it is now integrated into the latest release of my site on its new server. I also added several new images. Tue, 04 April 2012 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/ In my effort to convert much of my site to pure JS I have rewritten the home page slideshow in pure JavaScript, I left it running in the global scope for now, until I establish a solid JS framework for the rest of the site. Tue, 04 April 2012 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/ I moved the site to new servers, and reviewed it for potential updates. The site could keep me very busy for a long time, but here are a few updates I plan to get to within the year 2012: AJAX the photogallery, and contact forms, replace this RSS with a blog, replace most of the jQuery with pure JavaSCript, create a new skin using more HTML5 and CSS3 methods. So far this year I have rebuilt the photogallery, created a modular comments class, and rewritten the home page slideshow in pure JS. Sun, 20 March 2011 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/photogallery/ When I wrote the gallery scripts, it was designed to support two types of views, single and multi. Multi view displays thumbnails and images on two seperate pages, where single view displays both thumbnails and images on a single page. Anyway, the gallery is now using single view mode. Sun, 06 March 2011 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/photogallery/ I was not satisfied with the rating systems I was finding on the web, so I spent the time and made one. My goal was to create a complete, self contained, unobtrusive ajax rating system in jQuery and PHP that could be granularly configured to any object on any site. Works with JS Disabled, Degrades CSS Gracefully, Option to allow only one vote per IP, Does not output the item ID to the user or in the html, allows multiple rating objects per page for the same or diffrent items, allows granular configuration of each rating object instance. Tue, 08 February 2011 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/photogallery/ Added an AJAX star ratings system to the photo gallery. Wed, 02 February 2011 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/ Upgrading from jquery 1.3.5 to jquery 1.5 seems to have gone well. Fri, 28 January 2011 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/ Now that it is 2011, and Microsoft will soon be releasing Internet Explorer 9. I have decided to no longer test this site for compatability with IE6 and below. IE6 makes it difficult and in some cases impossible to create the kind of dynamic interfaces uses demand these days. Mon, 07 December 2009 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/photogallery/ The old clunky lightbox has been replaced! Sorry, I have not found the time to integrate the zoom viewer into the new lightbox. What's Exciting ?.... Larger images, Better looking, Fast Loading, Pagination and Looping inside the lightbox, and did I say, IT LOOKS BETTER! Mon, 30 November 2009 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/ The latest version of bpontius.com upgrades the back end systems for better url handeling and file management. Form handeling has been updated on the server side, in prep for AJAX integration to provide a better user experience. The photo gallery API has been rebuilt on the server side to provide greater output options for building client side galleries in JavaScript, Flex, and Flash. Thu, 19 November 2009 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/photogallery/ Recently started on the Front-End, where we expect to spend most of our development time on this project, part one in this phase is creating a simple and consistent user interface that is cross-browser compatible for both non-JavaScript and JavaScript enabled browsers. Thu, 19 November 2009 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/photogallery/ The new gallery features are designed to provide a seamless pixel perfect user experience to all common browsers with or without JavaScript or CSS enabled. The project started by creating a data base of images and each images relative data in MySQL. We then created the application model in PHP to function as an API that takes the image ID when passed and returns the images current position, page and category in the gallery along with all the variables required to paginate and display the entire gallery. The image ID remains consistent to each image and can be rewritten in .HTACCESS as "/file", for "Search Engine Friendly" urls. Wed, 11 November 2009 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/ It's been over a year since I made any updates to the bpontius.com web site and at about two years since I made any considerable updates. I set aside some time, and over the past few weeks have made some fundamental changes to the site that will enhance Search Engine Optimization and improve url handling. I have also started development on a new MySQL/PHP based photo gallery system designed to be JavaScript and AJAX ready. The sites design won't change much in this set of updates. Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:10:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/photogallery Along with the Lightbox update, I added a script to zoom in on an image when it is loaded in the lightbox. The script displays a small section of the full size image in a dynamic box that follows the mouse while it is hovered over the image. This solves one of the problems inherent with displaying large high resolution images on the web. Have some fun Looking for the seams in my panoramic photos http://bpontius.com/photogallery/panoramic. Sun, 05 Oct 2008 12:10:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/photogallery Replaced "Thickbox" for "Lightbox" I used a version of Lightbox 2.0 that was ported for jquerry. I like the effects in this version of the lightbox concept and I love jquery, though it seems that Lightbox versions ported for the Prototype framework take advantage of prototypes smoother animation, I may try that next. Before diving back into the prototype framework, I plan to implement a zoom utility to the lightbox on my photogallery http://bpontius/photogallery Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:10:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/photogallery Now, my data baseless image gallery reads exif data from thumbnail images and adds that information to the array of images. In short, that means that now alt="" and title="" tags for thumbnails can be populated with the images name or any other exif information. Loading images is still just as easy. a. Add your title to the images exif data b. Directly Upload c. DONE! Wed, 19 March 2008 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/photogallery NEW PICTURES: several new pictures added. Sat, 15 March 2008 12:00:00 GMT http://bpontius.com/photogallery NEW PHOTO GALLERY CATEGORY ADDED: revived a couple of my early panoramic images, painfully hand stitched. Recently I tested several photo stitching software packages which make the stitching process a bit less painful.