The new homepage of the Penn State Snowboard Club.

Let’s start with the new design. For those familiar with the old site (photo below), you will notice some drastic changes. I set out to bring more color into the new site and I wanted to emphasize photos since they are often the best way to liven up a site. I decided to go with a custom designed header photo for each of the main pages. Each menu item has a unique header (and color) associated with it. I think this has made a difference in the user’s first impression upon visiting the site.  In addition to these changes, I also changed the primary link color from a maroon to a vibrant light blue color. I’ve been a fan of the light blue and black color schemes lately and I think it works great on this site. Finally, you’ll notice that I dropped the boxes around the elements on the right sidebar. Instead, I used a slight variation in the background color to differentiate these items from the blog entries in the center.

This is the homepage of the old PSSC website. It’s very boxy.

Officers page with new header image and the green color scheme.

In addition to these design changes, I made some other improvements to the sidebars on the homepage. The left sidebar is now displayed on each and every page of the site, instead of just the homepage. This will allow users to see who’s online while they’re browsing the forum or calendar and not just on the homepage. Big thanks to Ben Birk who provided the gorgeous photo for the left sidebar background. On the right sidebar, you’ll notice a new Upcoming Events section and a Recent Tweets section. The goal of the new Upcoming Events section is to present a clear and straight-to-the-point view for seeing what’s happening in the club. Previously, there was just a calendar with highlighted dates that you had to click on before seeing what the event was about. The new design explicitly shouts at you “This event is TODAY”. The Recent Tweets section is a way to get some of the new members familiar with Twitter if they aren’t already. Many of the most active club members are actively using Twitter.

Upcoming Events and Recent Tweets sidebar items.

Another huge feature that I rolled out with this release is a completely revamped Inbox/Messaging page. The old site allowed a very simple way for members to send Private Messages (PMs) to each other. If you had a message waiting for you, a notification in the sidebar allowed you to open a pop-up with that message. There was no central place to view your messages. To compose a message, you had to find that user’s profile page. Well, with the new site I’ve built a GMail-like Inbox page. This page is 100% JavaScript and allows the user to navigate their Inbox, Sent Messages, and even compose a message to other members. This was quite a task, but I think it turned out extremely well!

Brand new Inbox design to view your PMs.

I also spent some time working with the Video page. This page previously displayed a thumbnail (added manually) of each video and linked directly to that video which was hosted on the server. In actual use, this was very clunky. The team members were simply hosting their videos on Vimeo or YouTube and posting links in the forum or on the homepage blog. I wanted to create a dead simple way to add a video. I came up with a simple form where the team member or officer could simply post a link to the video hosted on Vimeo or YouTube and the code does the rest. For each of these links, I used the video site’s APIs to fetch all of the relevant metadata about the video (including the thumbnail) and then I display it on the video page. This allows the page to be completely dynamic and saves the user the hassle of entering all the information twice. To help speed things up, I used memcached to keep the video metadata in memory so I can quickly load the page without waiting on these APIs.

The new Video page.

Finally, I made a lot of performance enhancements under the covers which should drastically improve the performance of the site and keep the code looking modern. I started by moving the site over to my brand new server hosted by Linode in Newark, NJ. This server flies in comparision to the shared server where was previously hosting the site. I also made heavy use of memcached to cache a lot of the data on the site that changes infrequently. This allows me to make less queries to the database and in turn, I’ve seen an incredible improvement in speed. Speaking of less database queries, I introduced a brand new database class which should greatly enhance security against SQL Injections and similar attacks. Overall, these improvements have made a very noticeable difference in site performance.

As you can see, I’ve been very busy. I couldn’t have done it all without the help of my buddy and former PSSC officer, Kenny. He has provided hours and hours of his time to help me test out these changes and get the site ready to go live. His attention to detail and high standards have greatly affected the outcome of the site and the club members are going to benefit greatly. (Thanks Kenny!) I hope you enjoyed this little tour and feel free to ask any questions you might have in the comments. I’d love to get some more feedback. Also, if you want to check out the site for yourself, it’s easy to browse it without creating an account. I’ll leave you with one last photo, and a link.

Here is the Forum. This is the most popular section of the site.

Penn State Snowboard Club – http://www.thepssc.com

Note: All of these screenshots were taken from my ADMIN account on the site. None of the New/Edit/Delete icons will appear for regular club members.

]]> http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2010/02/12/introducing-the-new-pssc-website/feed/ 0 http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2010/01/26/quitting-facebook-2/ http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2010/01/26/quitting-facebook-2/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:19:12 +0000 Jason Wagner http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/?p=1455 Just over 4 weeks ago I decided to deactivate my Facebook account. I’ve had an account since freshman year of college (5+ years ago) and this was the first time I ever deactivated it. I used to be an avid user of Facebook. In fact, up until about 12 months ago, I would spend probably an hour a day on the site. I added photos, updated status messages, and tracked events using the service. I had some gripes here and there, but overall it was good for what I needed. Also, it provides an endless stream of content (“stalking”) for people who have too much time on their hands. Luckily, I can say that I rarely browsed Facebook to kill time. So what happened 12 months ago that changed my usage patterns? Two things: I graduated college and I became an avid user of Twitter.

College students love Facebook. Actually, it seems like everyone loves Facebook…at least until they start changing (“improving”) things. At Penn State there was an endless stream of parties, sporting events, meetings, and other things to keep track of. Facebook is great for inviting friends to things, or finding out what’s going on tonight. It’s also a great place to share photos and keep in touch with friends. I’m stating the obvious here, I know. The problem with Facebook is, it quickly becomes cluttered with people that you barely even know. Maybe you met the person once 2 years ago, or they are a friend of a friend…but regardless, you’re going to be getting constant updates on their life pushed into your stream. Sure you can choose to “Hide” that user from your stream, but you’re still going to get mass messages, event invites, application requests, etc. The easiest solution is to just unfriend them. This usually works, but there are always a few pesky stalkers who don’t get the message and keep trying to request you as a friend again. Facebook quickly turned into a game of cat-and-mouse where I tried to block out all of the clutter and keep up with the constant nagging of people that I don’t care about.

I believe that my core gripe with Facebook boils down to a single design decision. A design decision that Twitter nailed perfectly: one-sided friendships. Twitter allows me to “follow” other users but does not require that they follow me back. Even better than this, I can allow other Twitter users to follow my tweets without having to burden myself with their content if I’m not interested. This is critical. There are plenty of users who I am extremely interested in (popular tech bloggers, professional athletes, etc) who couldn’t care less what I did last weekend. Twitter makes it easy for each user to self-select the people they follow in order to get the most out of the service without having to waste time and effort sifting through all the baggage their “friends” bring.

So, to put it bluntly… I realized last month that the only time I visited Facebook was because I had to. I clicked a link from a friend, logged in, and then had to decline/ignore/hide 10 useless requests. It’s annoying, and I’m done with it. Will I quit Facebook forever? Maybe not. I could see some value in the service if I go through and remove a large portion of my friends. Other friends of mine take the approach of simply ignoring all invites/requests/etc. and just letting them build up. I guess that works, but it’s still a broken approach. For now I plan to continue living in the peaceful stream that is Twitter.

Ben wanted a simple design so the photos were the main focus. We decided to go with a plain white page with a simple header and menu. The site is entirely JavaScript and is fun to interact with. The photos are loaded on-demand via AJAX calls to back-end PHP resources. For many of the photos, Ben also has them uploaded to his Flickr page. His website knows about these photos and provides a handy “see this on Flickr” link to provide more details about the photo and help spark discussion. I used the Flickr API and created a tool which allows Ben to upload a photo to the site and have it automatically uploaded to Flickr as well. In fact, I used the PHP GD library to dynamically add copyright information onto the Flickr photos before uploading! It turned into quite a task.

The gallery I used is called JqGalScroll which was created by Benjamin Sterling and based on jQuery. I heavily modified the gallery to speed things up and allow for multiple galleries to live on the same page. I fell in love with the simple animations of the gallery and as a result I decided to write the rest of the site using jQuery as well. It was my first time working with jQuery and I really like it so far. I definitely plan to use it for future projects if possible.

Ben and I are both extremely happy with the way his site turned out. I’m still working on some tweaks to speed up load times and some other usability improvements. The project was a fun one for me and a great learning experience. Please head over to Ben’s site and experience it for yourself.

Ben Birk Photography – http://benbirkphoto.com

]]> http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2009/12/31/new-ben-birk-photography-site-launched/feed/ 2 http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2009/11/02/why-do-baseball-players/ http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2009/11/02/why-do-baseball-players/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:37:57 +0000 Jason Wagner http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/?p=1325 I’ve been spending a lot of time during the past two weeks watching baseball. This is pretty unusual for me since I’m not typically a baseball fan. There’s just something about the playoffs that gets my attention. Since I’m not a huge fan, there are still a lot of things about the sport that are new to me. I’ve even learned about a couple rules this week that I never even knew existed! There’s a lot more to baseball than just running around the bags it seems. Anyway, my quest for baseball knowledge has (obviously) led me to Google. Tonight I was trying to find out why baseball players use wooden bats instead of metal ones. As I started to type my question, Google Suggest provided a bunch of other questions that people have asked. Ironically, many of these same questions have crossed my mind while watching the game. It’s amazing what you can learn from Google Suggest!

How many of you have wondered the same things?

Pontiac G6

So we got to the Avis place to pick up our car. The lady at the desk says “I’ve got 2 options for your car class. Either a PT Crusier or a Chevy H…” I interrupted her. “I’ll take the Chevy.” I didn’t know what the Chevy car was, but I knew it had to be better than a PT Cruiser…or so I thought. Look at how ugly the PT is!

PT Cruiser

So she told me the car was at spot “G6″ (Ironic isn’t it?). We found our mystery car in the parking lot and to our disappointment, it looked like this:

Chevrolet HHR (our actual car)

I think this might actually be WORSE than a PT Cruiser!! It’s quite possibly one of the ugliest cars I’ve ever seen. Not only is it ugly, but it has all sorts of weird engineering quirks that left us puzzled. No wonder GM is bankrupt.

]]> http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2009/07/11/pontiac-g6-or-similar/feed/ 1 http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2009/06/11/when-it-rains-it-pours-into-my-sunroof/ http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2009/06/11/when-it-rains-it-pours-into-my-sunroof/#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:49:04 +0000 Jason Wagner http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/?p=609 Last night it started raining around 9pm in Raleigh. It was a hot day and thunderstorms were forecasted for the evening hours. Caitlin and I had just returned to our apartment from a massive trip to Walmart a few hours earlier. This was before it started to look stormy. We had dinner and I began to watch the Pens game (GO PENS!). It started to get VERY stormy outside and then the sky finally opened up with a torrential downpour. It continued to rain until I went to bed at around 1AM. According to weather.com, it rained 1.54″ overnight.

This morning I woke up, got breakfast, and headed out to work. As I approached my car parked outside of my apartment, something looked weird. MY SUNROOF WAS OPEN! Ohh man. I thought back to last night was I was saying, “Geez, we must have gotten 2 inches of rain last night. No biking for awhile…”. Suddenly biking this afternoon became less important. I quickly unlocked my car to find a good 1.5″ of water in my center console cupholders. The seats are leather and didn’t look THAT wet. Luckily I had closed the windows so the water didn’t appear to get into any of the electronics on the doors or dashboard. There was still a considerable amount of water in the center console and on the carpet. I grabbed two towels out of the trunk and cleaned up some of the puddles and headed to work. I decided to leave my car in the parking lot with the windows and sunroof open to let it air out. Of course this led to religiously checking the Doppler radar to make sure more rain wasn’t coming. That’d be ironic, ey?

After work (my car wasn’t stolen, thankfully) I noticed that the leather on my seats was very tough in spots. You can see in the photo below exactly where the water was because there is a distinct line in the seat separating the soft leather from the tough leather. I still need to research this more but I think I just need to condition it. I’m hopeful that it’ll be back to normal soon!

I managed to clean out my car really good and noticed that the majority of the water was on the floor mat in the back. As you can tell from the picture, this was dripping water like CRAZY! I’m going to keep this on the deck for a few days to dry out.

I loaded up the car with 7 Damp Rid moisture absorbers to hopefully prevent mold and mildew. The hanging kind worked pretty well and I also got some of the small bucket kind, too. I’m excited to take a look tomorrow and see how much water they absorbed.

Moral of the story- double check that sunroof before you leave the car. It can cause you A LOT of pain and suffering!

#roughday

Me

Chris

Me

Chris

Austin

See all the High Resolution shots over on my Flickr page.

I logged into my Account Online this evening and discovered this daunting message on my homepage:

Welp, that’s never good. This has happened to me before and I suspected it was a similar cause. I decided to give CitiBank a call and promptly received friendly help. I was informed that a merchant’s (I assume one that I purchased from?) database was hacked and Citi decided to cancel all of the credit cards that recently purchased from that merchant. Mine was affected. Part of me is happy that they are taking a preventative approach to handling this security breach rather than waiting until my card was used fraudulently. I understand that CitiBank would be the one to suffer the consequences of a stolen card since I am not liable for a penny of stolen charges. It makes sense why they are so vigilant about these things, but as the customer, it causes me A LOT of pain.

First, I cannot make online transactions until my new credit card arrives in the mail. This could take up to a week. Next, all of my auto-pay transactions for  bills will likely be blocked. I need to manually go to each of my bills and online shopping websites (there are a lot of them) and change my credit card settings. This entire scenario has happened to me before and it’s a major chore. Another issue that really leaves me puzzled is that CitiBank requires me to register an entirely new Account Online for my new card. This means that I must create a new username and password. I don’t understand why they cannot let me use my same account and activate the new card through this account. So silly.

I’ve experienced similar issues relating to CitiBank’s overly cautious fraud strategy a few months ago after graduation. I was traveling a lot and preparing to move to North Carolina. I was using my credit card more than usual and making a lot of charges online and in other states. On two occasions (within the same month) CitiBank locked out my card and didn’t tell me. I had to call the number on the back of the card and figure out what was going on. If you’re going to lock my card, at least send me an email or leave a voicemail in advance. This is no way to treat a customer.

Do other credit card companies treat customers this way? I’m not sure there’s much that can be done about it. It’s likely just heightened caution in this economy and very aggressive tactics to minimize the potential loss that they must incur each year from fraud.

</Rant>

So what happens when you combine my two loves? Let’s find out:

Wanna see more? Check out this other video of the action!

Red Bull Rampage 2008

<3 Vimeo btw.

I had been using an old bike (Trek 4300) that I got almost 7 years ago. It was a decent bike, but it’s slowly falling apart and not really able to keep up with this new level of riding. I’ve been thinking about getting a bike for a couple years now but never had the guts to do it! I finally saw that The Bicycle Chain was having a big tent sale today in order to get rid of the 2008 Demo bikes and other ’08 bikes they weren’t able to sell. The sale was 30% off which is HUGE if you’re familiar with the cost of bikes these days. 

I had my eyes on a Specialized Stumpjumper FSR for awhile now and found an awesome one today. It was the “Expert” model which would have been out of my price range (and still probably is…) without the 30% off. It’s a full suspension bike and has most of the bells and whistles of a nice mountain bike. It was a demo bike so it has been used for the last couple of months. Sadly it’s raining out so I haven’t been able to take it on the trails and really test it out yet. Hopefully when it stops raining in a few days I’ll be able to see what it’s all about!! I’ll keep you posted. But for now, here’s some pictures!