Some little website improvements for you

General
#1

Hey all!

It’s Luke, your humble webmaster. I’m really excited to see how active Bachido has become! I just put up a counter on the forum index page: 302 members and 1453 forum posts, in a little more than half a year! Sugoi!

Because I finally finished a big ToneWay.com project I was working on, I was able to synchronize the code base between the two sites (both are run by a Ruby on Rails app I built). This fixed some bugs and introduced new ones; hence the problems with the store last week, which are hopefully fixed for good now. Most of the bug fixes are probably unnoticeable…hopefully!

A few new features I thought I’d mention:

  • Local events and gatherings! Yes, you can post ideas for shamisen get-togethers, jams, study sessions, whatever. It’s kind of like posting something on the local message board (right column of the community page), only much cooler. Currently you can only see events within your search radius though (i.e. 100 miles or whatever) so it’s not ready to advertise the shamisen world convention yet. But for a casual get-together, maybe it’d be useful. You can leave the date blank and wait for people to RSVP and decide on a date later.

  • The Community Update has been improved a bit. Event announcements are sent out separately soon after the event is posted. These preferences can be changed in your account settings.

  • Like I said, the current member count and forum post count are on the community page now.

  • Your forum post count is now shown next to your name on forum posts for that “street cred” factor. (Apparently, I need to build some street cred.)

  • YouTube URLs in forum posts are automatically embedded. Just make sure it’s the first thing on the line and it will be embedded. Yes, http://youtu.be links work too.

  • Finally, and perhaps most importantly: Bachido has a favicon now! I figured only I would notice, but amazingly somebody emailed Kyle about it shortly after I installed the favicon; they had been wanting to see one, and then there it was! That seriously rocked my world. :slight_smile:

Hope you enjoy! Keep on thwacking!

Luke

#2

Nice work Luke!

#3

yay for the Webmaster

#4

great job thanks so much for you hard work.

#5

I was noticing the favicon too although I was like is this actually something new or was it there before and I didn’t notice? great favicon would you be using some simple graphics tool for creating one that you could recommend btw?

works great and this clip really deserves a lot more views so

#6

yay for Kizuna :smiley: always happy to hear it

#7

Happy to be of service! :slight_smile:

I created the favicon graphic in Photoshop (well, Corel Photo-Paint X5, same thing), resized it to 16x16, saved it as a png with transparent background, and uploaded it to the first favicon generator I found on Google, favicon.cc. Same way I made the favicons for ToneWay.com, CenterTao.org, and AbbottFamilyBlog.com.

#8

That’s my brother!

#9

which reminds me that I can still look forward to seriously checking out these looking great sites sometime . . . and thanks for the pointers I am a graphical idiot I mean untalented in that department and almost no experience with any graphics software except for an old corel draw version and some photoshop although I don’t have neither software right now so I am looking for freeware as for just doing a favicon so thanks for the pointers 16x16 good to know too . . . thanks

#10

I can’t see the favicon in Google Chrome. Anyone that can?

#11

Is favicon the little icon on the tab? if so then yes :smiley:

#12

Yeah it works now, guess it was a cache issue. It looks nice!

#13

Hi all.

Great work Luke. Every project has a thorny path to perfection :slight_smile:
I’ve spotted some bugs.

The first is that in some browsers (namely Safari on iPad) in Learning center I can watch main videos fine (I mean Introduction, Know your shamisen etc ), but I cannot watch subsection videos (like Assembly, About Strings, About Bachi etc): link navigates to empty page - no video popups. Both types of video work fine on desktop PC though.

And the second issue is about forums. Consider the situation when you’ve browsed to a page N of forum and opened a thread. Then you press Back button. On ipad it works fine and link goes to the forums page N, while desktop Firefox navigates to the very first page of the forums which is a bit inconvenient.

I hope this information helps to make site better.

#14

Hey KH,

Thanks so much for the feedback!

The first issue is a bit tricky to diagnose since we don’t have an iPad, and it works fine on Safari/PC and all the other browsers I’ve tested. So, if anyone wants to send Bachido an iPad… :wink:

The second issue is an easy one and a great observation. I have fixed it in the development version of the site, which should be going live in the next couple of weeks (along with a bunch of other little improvements, especially for mobile platforms and event postings.

Luke

© 2020 Kyle Abbott