I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The homepage is now complete, it's very simple, but like the 'Gig Details' page (see below) I was never happy with it.

The final pieces are about to drop in to place. These are namely:

Widgets

I have an idea of where I want to go with these. An example of one of the widgets is below.

It's a simple one showing a users 'next gig'. If they don't have an upcoming gig then it'll flip back to either 'Last Gig' or 'No upcoming gigs' depending on what the user selects.

RSS feeds

These are pretty straight forward to set up and I have the 'infrastructure' in place. The main problem is knowing what the users want available so I'll include basic feeds such as users/band upcoming gigs and listen to user feedback with regard what they want feedivised.

Gig Details Page

This has been the most difficult page for me to accept as complete, I can't seem to get it right. I'm going to strip out all the existing rubbish on the page and keep it simple. Again, I think this is a page that will need a bit of feedback from users. I've seen it a few times too many.

What Have I Been Doing?

You may have noticed I've been pretty quiet lately. I haven't even gotten around to reading blogs - never mind writing!

I've been working on the gig website, it's now so so close and I really want it to be at the public testing stages so that's been my priority. I'm going to have to hold back some of the 'features' as to begin with I want to make sure the 'gig adding' process is as smooth as possible but to be honest I can't remember the last time I made changes to that.

Agloco Comment Spam

I'm slowing starting to see Agloco comment spam working its evil way into my blog comments. I'd leave in the link to their "ALL ABOUT AGLOCO" blog if their name wasn't "Agloco" - so… use your real name.

One of my sites contains a forum and I use PhpBB as the forum software.

For the past 3 months I’ve had to delete lots of spam posts every day. I tried a few ‘plugins’ gathered from the PhpBB forums but they didn’t seem to do the trick.

Anyway, when upgrading to the latest version of PhpBB I went looking for a ‘no spam’ solution and discovered Anti-Spam ACP from Lithium Studios.

It includes better captcha on registration, allows you to take away certain fields and allows you to ‘only allow urls/website’ etc. on a certain number of posts. (It does more than this… check the readme)

It works a treat… no spam whatsoever and it’s simple to use (I’m no Php coder… I use ASP)

To download it and for help with it visit Anti-Spam ACP on the Lithium Studios forum.

For my upcoming social networking website I've built a custom forum and I'll be replacing the PhpBB forum with my own once I think it's ready and tested.

I read on via TechCrunch and Vecosys today that Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, has announced they’ll be supporting OpenID in the near future.

Digg users will still be able to create a unique Digg ID, but they’ll be able to log in to Digg using their OpenID identity.

What Is An OpenID Identity?

"OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity"

An OpenID identity is a URL that you can use to identify yourself at compatible sites around the web. All OpenID does is provide you with a way to prove that you own this identity (URL) without sending your password, email address or anything you wouldn't want it to.

There are various OpenID providers including MyOpenID but the beauty is you can setup your own site/blog as your identity. For further reading I recommend Simon Willison’s post: How to turn your blog in to an OpenID

Further Reading: Do You Actually Use OpenID?

The name and title pages of IMDB have been redesigned and I don’t like them.

IMDB say it’s the first phase of an overall site design that “will take place in measured, incremental steps” - good move, it would be foolish to completely redesign a site of that size in one step.

Before…..

After…

What I like
New font will take a bit of getting used to, but that will be for the better
Colours are fine
Comments down i.e. message board snapshot looks much better
I think the pages for people look better

What I don’t like
Film ‘poster/box’
Too much white space
The big yellow buttons ‘View Photo Gallery’, ‘Add to My Movies’ etc.
Rating is top right, odd place.
Link colour too light, hard to distinguish (maybe underline?)
Photo Gallery too prominent
‘Recommended’ too big

Hmm… err.. yes. So I guess I don’t like it too much huh? I'm sure I'll grow to like it. Was a shock to the system!

You can change back to the old style by checking “Use former title & name page design” in ‘Site Preferences’ under Personalize in your account options.