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GAF, look at my website, "Treefingers"

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S

Sullichin

Member
We just finished the new version of "Treefingers," a site that lets you post a thought anonymously and have it "weeded" or "watered" by other users. It makes a lot more sense if you just look at it:

http://www.treefingers.net

New features on the new version include a complete AJAX overhaul -- the entire site updates in real-time -- plus big versions of plants with PNG transparency, keyboard shortcuts, and more.

We spent a LOT of time working on the site and since I also spend a lot of time on GAF I thought I'd post about it here. If you guys find the site interesting please tell people. The site is just more fun when people use it and post different things.

By the way we're disallowing internet explorer users in. We ran into way too many headaches with developing for IE and decided we didn't want people seeing the site unless they could see it right. So, it should work fine in any "modern" browser -- although I know there's a font size problem with Firefox on Vista and Chrome fucks with the drop shadows. The site's still in beta!
 
S

Souldriver

Member
I don't think advertising your own stuff is considered fine on gaf.


Edit: the site loads very slow. Because of gaf, or is it normal?
 
C

cloudwalking

300chf ain't shit to me
Sullichin said:
By the way we're disallowing internet explorer users in. We ran into way too many headaches with developing for IE and decided we didn't want people seeing the site unless they could see it right. So, it should work fine in any "modern" browser -- although I know there's a font size problem with Firefox on Vista and Chrome fucks with the drop shadows. The site's still in beta!
Click to expand...

does that mean ie7 too? as in, any version of ie? (i can't check as i'm on my mac)

if so, you might want to reconsider. if you don't support ie at all you're barring almost 50% of all internet users from viewing your site.

the site itself is a really neat concept and i do like the layout a lot. but it does take a while to load.
 
S

Sullichin

Member
Souldriver said:
I don't think advertising your own stuff is considered fine on gaf.


Edit: the site loads very slow. Because of gaf, or is it normal?
Click to expand...


Well, if it's not fine someone can delete the topic. I didn't think it was a big deal because I'm not trying to sell anything on the site or anything like that. We don't even have ads.

and it's slow sometimes because of a combination of shitty host + more traffic from the new version. Sorry.
 
M

msv

Member
Doesn't seem to load completely in FF and it takes very long, but Opera handles the page in a split second.

The concept's very nice, I'll play with it for a bit.
 
S

Sullichin

Member
Souldriver said:
15 minutes later, and it's still loading man. 3 dots going back and forth...
Click to expand...


That's strange. Our server is really terrible. We're on a Dreamhost plan (I think at the request of GAF) -- and it's pretty awful. The site is randomly down/slow from midnight-noon EST and then usually faster for the rest of the day. It's working fine for me now, though.


And those XHTML validation errors will eventually be fixed. When a site is almost completely dynamically generated, those errors tend to stack up. We had way too many other things to deal with when launching the site to go back and check the XHTML every step of the way. Just like there's some PHP code we could probably condense.
 
U

Unlimited4s

Member
Sullichin said:
That's strange. Our server is really terrible. We're on a Dreamhost plan (I think at the request of GAF) -- and it's pretty awful. The site is randomly down/slow from midnight-noon EST and then usually faster for the rest of the day. It's working fine for me now, though.


And those XHTML validation errors will eventually be fixed. When a site is almost completely dynamically generated, those errors tend to stack up. We had way too many other things to deal with when launching the site to go back and check the XHTML every step of the way. Just like there's some PHP code we could probably condense.
Click to expand...
Well, if it's going to stack up I suggest to take down the site for a day and fix all those problems. That could very well be the cause of the problems with IE, too.
 
S

sky

Member
What are the consequences of weeding/watering?
Do the most-watered thoughts just stay around longer?

Kind of an interesting starting point, though.
You should definitely support IE - nasty as it is.
 
I

iapetus

Scary Euro Man
Unlimited4s said:
Well, if it's going to stack up I suggest to take down the site for a day and fix all those problems. That could very well be the cause of the problems with IE, too.
Click to expand...

There's no need at all to take the site down - fix the errors in a local copy and then put the new version up. Probelem solved.
 
S

Sullichin

Member
Unlimited4s said:
Well, if it's going to stack up I suggest to take down the site for a day and fix all those problems. That could very well be the cause of the problems with IE, too.
Click to expand...

Err, missing 10 alt image tags isn't going to fix IE. Neither is the validator being picky with things like onclick instead of onClick, etc. Issues with IE are almost all CSS based, plus the fact that 6 and earlier don't support alpha transparency in PNG.

Weeding/watering changes its colors. Super-weeded plants get so dark on the frontpage they're nearly hard to read, while super-watered plants get bright colors and stick out.


EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions/compliments/feedback so far.
 
S

Scrow

Still Tagged Accordingly
cool concept, but you really need to get your technical side sorted out. fixing all the errors and warnings that Unlimited4s posted will be a step towards that.
 
D

Deleted member 22576

Unconfirmed Member
It's actually working fairly well for me.
But it looks way too busy.
 
C

capslock

Is jealous of Matlock's emoticon
treeman.jpg
 
S

Sullichin

Member
Unlimited4s said:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/...rofile=css21&usermedium=all&warning=1&lang=en

couple of notes:
// is NOT valid for quotes, use /* and */ (this will fuck up your layout in IE because it will ignore the // and execute the rest
:hover does not exist in IE, but you can fix that with a small hack
opacity has a different name in IE
pxpx doesn't exist
Click to expand...


// -- didn't know that about IE

:hover / opacity: yeah, I know. We had IE hacks in place for those but since this version of the site doesn't work with IE we took them out -- why keep em?

pxpx is a typo.
 
C

cloudwalking

300chf ain't shit to me
png alpha transparency is possible in ie6 with a little trick called supersleight. i don't know if you've looked into it yet, but maybe it could work for you towards making the site work in ie.
 
L

Liu Kang Baking A Pie

Member
Sullichin said:
By the way we're disallowing internet explorer users in. We ran into way too many headaches with developing for IE and decided we didn't want people seeing the site unless they could see it right. So, it should work fine in any "modern" browser -- although I know there's a font size problem with Firefox on Vista and Chrome fucks with the drop shadows. The site's still in beta!
Click to expand...
Well of course it won't work in IE when you don't even have a doctype specified. It's all running in quirks mode. For example, I bet one of the IE6 problems you're having is getting those modal popups to center in the browser window in IE6. All that is is that you don't have a doctype.

Getting anything working in IE7 means making it work in Firefox and then probably fixing a handful of minor CSS quirks. You really should not be having headaches or you're just doing it wrong. IE6 is generally a pain in the ass with the amount of Javascript you have going, but I really don't see how it could be that big of a problem with the simplicity of the design.

To fix alpha transparency in IE6, use jQuery with http://jquery.andreaseberhard.de/pngFix/. You don't have to do anything but load the two scripts in the head section and png will just work.
 
S

Souldriver

Member
Ok, now the site works fine here too. No load times anymore.



It's a cool concept, but I don't see the actual value or merit of it though.
 
S

soultron

Banned
The anonymity of it burned you. Apparently there's one dude who thinks you sat on your ass while your buddy coded the entire thing.
 
S

Sibylus

Banned
It might be interesting to have different topical sections (sports, politics, games, etc) and then have a list of the most popular comments of all time.
 
-COOLIO-

-COOLIO-

The Everyman
Souldriver said:
I don't think advertising your own stuff is considered fine on gaf.


Edit: the site loads very slow. Because of gaf, or is it normal?
Click to expand...
if your a regular poster it should be fine?
 
J

Jasoco

Banned
My first reaction was "You named a website after a Radiohead song?"

But this is kind of my thing. You have done what I couldn't. I wanted to create a project like this. Sort of a social experiment. And this is pretty much what I expected from the results.
 
A

Ajemsuhgao

Member
Jasoco said:
My first reaction was "You named a website after a Radiohead song?"

But this is kind of my thing. You have done what I couldn't. I wanted to create a project like this. Sort of a social experiment. And this is pretty much what I expected from the results.
Click to expand...


GAF taking over, random internet shit, then other people complaining about GAF?
 
J

Jasoco

Banned
Pretty much. I'm just glad someone created my project for me. :lol

Seriously though, I like the idea. Only the morons who hate it and abuse it ruin it. Without them it's a beautiful idea. Really.

How long is the time between being able to plant again?
 
A

Armitage

Member
Just a suggestion, I'd move the "plant a thought" to the center of the top, it's kind of out of the way and not immediately obvious that it's something you should click. The transparent vines also kind of make it seem unimportant when it's basically the key to the site. Another solution might be to redo the transparent vines to redirect attention towards it instead of away.

I'd also add another "plant a thought" at the very bottom, so you can click it once you're done reading the other thoughts.

Basically the way I see it, if you can get a user to plant a thought, they'll start investing in the site, and they'll want to stick around to see if it gets watered or not. So the design should be tailored to entice as many users as possible to plant thoughts - which means it should always be as close as possible.
 
J

Jasoco

Banned
I have a suggestion too. Even though it's Anonymous, there should be a way to view all our own Plants. (Via the IP address they were planted from I suppose. You do record that, right?) So we can see how many vodes they'd been getting. Basically it'd be a page full of plants only planted by your IP address with its message and numbers telling you how many Weeds it got and how many Waters it got and its current "score".

Basically a vanity thing, but still, makes sense being a "social" place. If we're putting these thoughts out there, we should be able to check up on them.
 
N

nerbo

Member
I like the concept. Site has potential, I think - Not sure what for, but something. It need work though. Page is sluggish and posting is hit or miss in Safari 3.1.2
 
S

Sullichin

Member
Jasoco said:
I have a suggestion too. Even though it's Anonymous, there should be a way to view all our own Plants. (Via the IP address they were planted from I suppose. You do record that, right?) So we can see how many vodes they'd been getting. Basically it'd be a page full of plants only planted by your IP address with its message and numbers telling you how many Weeds it got and how many Waters it got and its current "score".

Basically a vanity thing, but still, makes sense being a "social" place. If we're putting these thoughts out there, we should be able to check up on them.
Click to expand...


Problem with that is that many people (on college campuses for example) share an IP address so it's not as unique as you'd think.
 
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