This is just a re-post, that'll be reposted again, regularly at the beginning of each month. While the original Some SVA Statistics post stays as it is, this one gets updated each time. So here it is: the statistics of the download rates of SimpleViewerAdmin from its initial release on May 24th 2004 until the beginning of this current month:

	1.3	1.2	1.1	1.0
2006/12	2483	-	-	-
2006/11	2678	-	-	-
2006/10	2825	-	-	-
2006/09	2576	-	-	-
2006/08	2933	-	-	-
2006/07	2837	-	-	-
2006/06	2700	-	-	-
2006/05	3334	-	-	-
2006/04	3581	-	-	-
2006/03	4278	-	-	-
2006/02	3556	-	-	-
2006/01	3862	-	-	-
2005/12	2912	-	-	-
2005/11	3667	-	-	-
2005/10	3443	-	-	-
2005/09	3476	-	-	-
2005/08	>2012	-	-	-
2005/07	1709	1504	73	42
2005/06		2648	130	69
2005/05		2789	163	71
2005/04		2773	103	60
2005/03		2732	128	67
2005/02		2352	111	73
2005/01		2476	106	51
2004/12		1645	73	28
2004/11		1711	65	24
2004/10		1552	86	57
2004/09		1295	53	14
2004/08		1345	62	34
2004/07		1081	56	31
2004/06		404	707	60
2004/05			32	161

Intro

After publicly announcing SimpleViewerAdmin 1.3, I immediately got requests about when the new version will appear on the scene. I have to admit, that was stunning. I did not expect that.

Statistics

If you take a look at the monthly download statistics, you'll undoubtfully recognize that SimpleViewerAdmin is a huge hit - at least such it is to me. The download rates grew and grew month over month, and I never ever expected SimpleViewerAdmin to become such a success in the beginning.

Support

As I already mentioned, the forum really was of great help, since it brought in the opportunity that users share their thoughts on and their problems with the software. Doing support via email, is first of all exhausting for me and secondly it is boring to answer the same questions over and over again. So the forum is of great help - especially the feature requests constantly being posted gave me an idea of what might be useful to implement to let the application become more and more convenient. Therefore, anything I can say: Keep it up!

Changes

Downloading older versions of SimpleViewerAdmin is no longer possible. The only archive available is the current one. This will make things a lot easier, since you haven't to choose which version to run. Take the latest and greatest, and you'll be fine. Beyond that rather marginal change, I've implemented almost all user-requested features. So here you go with an excerpt of the ChangeLog:

• [NEW]: More options to customize your gallery: The fields "welcomeText" and "extraText" have been added. The "title" for the gallery is now optional (as are "welcomeText" and "extraText").
• [NEW]: Added the opportunity to publish/unpublish an album.
• [NEW]: Added markup support to the image captions.
• [NEW]: Polished the interface to make it look slicker and act more smoothly.
• [NEW]: Added the opportunity to choose whether to display the album overview as a simple list (modified) or as a nicely marked up table sporting a random thumbnail from the respective album.
• [FIXED]: UTF-8 support is now finally fixed/enabled/enhanced (hopefully).

Testing

Version 1.3 of SimpleViewerAdmin has been tested with different browsers (IE 6 on Win2k and WinXP, Firefox 1.0.5 on Mac OS X 10.3.9, Win2k and WinXP, and Safari 1.2 on Mac OS X 10.3.9) on four different servers, running Linux and Mac OS X, with different version of PHP (4 & 5) installed.

This should make a pretty solid ground to run SimpleViewerAdmin in different environments, and ensure that it runs in yours as well.

Upgrade

When you do a fresh install of SimpleViewerAdmin, read the documentation and follow the install instructions, and you'll be fine. When you already run a previous version of SimpleViewerAdmin (and that is quite likely), make sure you follow the upgrade instructions. This is very recommended, since all your albums will have the status "Unpublished", and will therefore not be visible in your gallery, after copying everything from the archive to your installation directory. So, follow the upgrade instructions, and you'll be fine and up and running SimpleViewerAdmin in just a minute.

What's left?

There are several features yet to be implemented, like the opportunity to choose a custom background image for each album respectively (which will hopefully come in the next version), and there are features, that will probably never see the light of the day, like batch-uploading via FTP. But please, do not hesitate to post your feature requests to the forum, so that they can be discussed and evaluted publicly.

So meanwhile I hope, you'll like the new version (Come on, grab your copy now!) as much as it was a pleasure for me to code it.

Colin Lewis bought me Futurama Season 1 from my Amazon wishlist! Thank you very much!

Here is the little story of how everything came to be: After sending him some modified files (that mainly enabled UTF-8 support) of SimpleViewerAdmin via email, I started developing version 1.3 (which is very due to release, so stay tuned) very soon after (although it was the very next day, to be precise, it was more or less rather unmotivated).

Anyway, the first few steps were fast, so progress took place rather quickly. And I thought, I'd better tell him about my efforts, and to avoid him doing unnecessary extra work.. about that circumstance he was just that happy, that happened what I mentioned right in the beginning of this post. Cool, hu?

It's been more than one year, that SimpleViewerAdmin 1.2 was released, and it's been cool times, exciting times, and sometimes also exhausting times. I had a whole lot of stress at university, and at work too.

During last fall and winter, the sentiment of no more releasing a new version of SimpleViewerAdmin settled; I did not expect to have yet another release, especially during this summer semester. I got a big bunch of emails requesting support for SimpleViewerAdmin, when I came to have the idea of setting up a forum to let support take on itself, which didn't happen in the beginning (which was my expectation, but I was wrong), but in the end it caught on. And that in a way, that motivation grew to pick up work on SimpleViewerAdmin again (after I received a mail, having attached several modified files offering UTF-8 support).

This was the moment, when the fever rose again... This just was three weeks ago. So, without any further delay, I'm very proud to announce that the release of the next version, namely 1.3, of SimpleViewerAdmin is very imminent. I hope to release the new version during the weekend. If not, it will hopefully take no longer than the beginning the middle of the upcoming week. So be excited, and expect several cool new features to appear! I hope you will enjoy it!

There has been a trend on the net for quite a while. I read about it, saw other people use it, and thought it was boring. I mean, I really didn't get the idea, what's really behind it. But after getting my iPod shuffle just two months ago, I recently came across podcasting again (well, in fact Steve Jobs pointed me to, during his keynote speech last week), and I got infected.

It really is unbelievable! There are so many funny, but also incredibly useful podcasts around, that you really have to make a choice. And while the documentation around podcasting isn't that bad, since websites like ipodder.org or podshow.com or podcastalley.com exist, there is still one special podcast left, that I would like to recommend very very much, and that's the one all of you PHP guys out there have to know about. It's the Pro::PHP podcast, hosted by Marcus Whitney, who really does great great work.

After being an avid longtime fan of Wolfgang Bartelme's NetNewsWire Package, I recently discovered Jon Hicks' astonishingly genuine Tiger style for NetNewsWire (Lite), and now use as my default theme.

If you happen to have the opportunity to grab a copy of Jeffrey Zeldman's fantastic book Designing With Web Standards, go for it (meanwhile Joe Clark's book Building Accessible Websites is back on my Amazon wishlist, because there's so much more to know). Okay so, while I was reading chapter 14 "Accessibility Basics", I stumbled across the following paragraph:

If you use color to denote information (such as clickability), reinforce it with other methods (for instance, bolding or underlining links). If you've turned off underlining via CSS, consider making links bolder than normal text. If you do this, avoid using bold on nonlinked text, lest you hopelessly confuse the colorblind user as to which bold text is hyperlinked and which bold text is simply bold. [..]

You will also want to visit http://www.vischeck.com/, which lets you see how your web pages appear to people with various types of color blindness.

Okay, the first issue seems to be none, since I underline my links, but maybe the link color lacks a little contrast. But the second one - that made me think, so that I've been there and downloaded a plugin for Adobe Photoshop to test how .redSPLASH appears to people suffering from the three kinds of dichromacy.



Although the screenshots are rather tiny, you'll get the idea. If you want to know more about colorblindness, Wikipedia offers help.

Apple just updated its Mac OS X-web pages, which now announce the official release date of the upcoming Mac OS X 10.4. "Tiger will hit the shelves" on April 29th.

The completely overhauled site now sports more information about and screenshots of Tiger: New Features, Overview, Developer Tools and Tech Specs, while the old site (the Mac OS X 10.3-related one) is completely gone.

300 Free Truetype Fonts You Should Have.

I found ColorCombos.com - Web Color Combinations Tool and Library (a very handy and crafty tool to help you find, compare and choose color schemes for your own personal or corporate website) via Dan Cederholm's post. And one of the sexiest color combos is the above one, which will very likely become the color scheme for the next major update of .redSPLASH.

Since Google offered a specific web search interface for Apple/Macintosh related queries for quite a while. I recently became aware that Google X pays homage to Mac OS X, which sports features of Mac OS X's Dock (see screenshot below).



Source: Macworld

After several rumors (at least at first), and an announcement later, IE 7 seeming to become more a reality than a eventuality, Chris Wilson uttered about IE and Standards in Microsoft's official IE blog, and several well-known web developers wrote down their wishes: Anne van Kesteren, Roger Johannson, Steve Smith.

As some of you might know, I'm an avid longtime Serendipity-user, since the days of the good ol' version 0.3. Recently, I came around to in-depth test and (more important) compare the features, usability aspects, requirements etc. of S9Y, NucleusCMS, and WordPress. I evaluated which of the products is the most suitable for usage in our corporate website.

My base to start from was BlogBreakDown, which is a pretty comprehensible technical comparison chart of all major blogging tools. There were several software packages in question, which partly failed because of their requirements (like the used programming language as in "blojsom" or "bloxsom") or their license policies (like "MovableType"). So three out of many candidates remained in the competition.

After the more or less immediate starvation of NucleusCMS because of the relatively small amount of ("rocking") features, themes and/or plugins, I had the opportunity to compare S9Y (latest CVS checkout, which seems to be almost as stable as the final release) with WordPress (1.5, which is surprinsingly not bug free, while being tagged as stable), which showed up several issues I'd like to share with you.

Although S9Y already is a very competitive blogging software system, there are topics, which S9Y could improve on. Therefore, I want to bring in, what, I think, might be valuable information:

1. Of yourse, first comes the first impression. After the download of each software package, I took a look at the code. Result: WordPress has great quality of code on the client side. But S9Y has even greater quality of code on the server side. Therefore, one might get the impression, that WordPress is developed by web designers, that know PHP, and S9Y to be developed by PHP-Developers, that know HTML. Don't get this wrong, I'm definitely not complaining about anything. I just hope you get the idea.
2. Next comes the installer. WordPress and S9Y come with a relatively small amount of installed database tables, which I do honor for the sake of clarity and simplicity. Okay, but beyond that, WordPress' installer seems to be simpler than the one S9Y makes use of. Although the installation process was split into "simple" and "advanced", WordPress offers just one, but step-based, wizard-like installer, which I think is a lot more handy for end users, because the interface doesn't request so much information from them all at once. It's just easier to follow several simple steps than one huge.
3. There's only one feature the third system is mentionable for: NucleusCMS has an integrated help system, which I find very helpful, since one could think of a blogging system, that's altogether self-explaining. To achieve that, it should be considered useful to make every single action as simple as possible and offer help every when this simplicity's not enough.
4. Within WordPress, it's far easier to create and maintain static pages, which is a very useful feature, since it is built right in, and not only available via a plugin as in S9Y.
5. After you've discovered the options dialog to enable uploads within WordPress, you might still find it hard to think that including images in your posts in WordPress represents the easy way, since the upload interface only offers the opportunity to copy the URL of your last uploaded image to your system's clipboard. S9y on the other side offers a full fledged Media Management, which also features a wizard to include images in your posts. Media Management offers you the ability to store files of almost all types on your server and organize and manage your media in different folders (very handy for grouping things).
6. The start page within the WordPress administration interface offers "Dashboard", which lists a "Latest Activity" box and news from the development blog, which, I think, is a great and easy way to keep the users of a system in touch with the developers and to inform them about changes, security patches, etc. something like that. I liked that idea very much, since it would be very easy to implement that in S9Y.
7. Compared to WordPress' really astounding usability (I think, this is an important point), S9Y pretty much seems to need too much clicks to manage a certain task. Or from a different angle, there seem to be too much pages (in the process of creating, editing, managing posts, comments, media and so on), that implement too little functionality. Put that away, make the process simple and clean, and the whole interface will gain more and more slickness, and pertain a greater usability.

Which one is better now?

One should clarify that this is obviously no easy question, because the one right best system, that fits all users' needs perfectly will probably never exist. What else then might be a criterion? Well, to me is seems to be a bit subtle. Serendipity offers more features than WordPress, and what the latter really lacks is something similar as cool as S9y's Media Management, which really rocks. Including images in your posts can't be easier when using this very handy tool. On the other side, what S9y could really improve on are usability aspects.

Everyone, having ever switched from a PC to a Mac, might have had this special feeling when using Mac OS. It just feels right. Okay, it lacks features (probably, this strongly depends on your personal requirements), but the system with the smiling face in the Dock makes you somehow feel better when working with it. The same goes with WordPress, you get the idea. So, if I eventually can give you an advice, I'd recommend you take a deep look at both systems and compare them and decide afterwards which of both makes the point for you.

This announcement informs you about the freshly created possibility to direct your questions, feature or support requests to the forums!

If you used this site's contact section in the past, or are thinking about to do so to get in touch with me, I strongly recommend that you visit the forums now.

For me, it'd be essentially the same, because I'd be checking the forums as regularly as I do my emails. But for you, the forums provide a great difference, which makes up a huge benefit, namely to get in touch with other users of my projects. So first up register, activate your account after you received the confirmation email, and you are prepared. Then you could ask questions, while there are others that already know the answer. But you could also answer questions from others and so be of great help to the ones, that try to get their SimpleViewerAdmin installation running.

To be honest, the sheer amount of support requests from users, is getting a little bit exhausting by the time (infact it really is!). Therefore, I'm hoping that you (meanwhile thousands (but hundreds at least) of users of SimpleViewerAdmin) will take the opportunity to give something back to me and provide feedback, help and support for new users or others that are struggling with the software for whatever the cause. SimpleViewerAdmin started as a spare time project, which was initially built for purposes of fun and pleasure. This project's success is still overwhelming me on a daily basis. Therefore I'm really thankful to myself (for having the idea) and of course to all you users out there making SimpleViewerAdmin the succes that it still is.

Please do not hesitate to comment on this post, if you have questions concerning the forums cm cm@redsplash.de 2005-03-07T21:44:07Z 2005-03-07T21:44:07Z 2005-03-07T21:52:03Z http://www.redsplash.de/blog/wfwcomment.php?cid=447 0 http://www.redsplash.de/blog/rss.php?version=atom0.3&type=comments&cid=447 http://www.redsplash.de/blog/archives/447-guid.html

Yepp, that was kinda fast (I don't know, if there are already some bots around, crawling the web for keywords like "Gmail Invites").

Hm, anyway, since it only took you several hours to grab all ten of my Gmail invitations, here comes the next bunch of invitations: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Have a lot of fun!