Latest news

General mutterings on the state of gallery:

'Scheduled maintenance 17 Nov 2007' on 16^th November 2007 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

Apologies for the short notice.

Gallery may be unavailable for a time over the weekend, most likely on Saturday afternoon and evening (GMT).

When it returns it will be stronger and faster than ever before, thanks to our new server setup.

'Gallery ugly?' on 22^nd March 2006 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

A friend recently pointed out that gallery's ugly.

Since he has a point, I'm going to make a concerted effort to straighten things out. As anyone who has hung around here for a while knows, these things are always continuous efforts, to keep getting better.

However, inspired by the CSS Reboot effort, I've decided to pick a date to have everything looking shinier - 1st May 2006.

Things that will change:

• Less text - descriptions (particularly of how-to-use-this-form) should be shorter, snappier and easier to plow through
• New navigation bars that are thinner and clearer; altogether less clutter.
• A few decorative graphics to point out key features.
• A simpler interface to tag things with keywords

Things that will stay the same:

• A devotion to not poking people in the eye.
• Works anywhere markup - valid and accessible, never needing Javascript or strange plugins.
• Long-term, stable Web addresses.
• A free-for-all, collaboratively organising information

If you have suggestions, please post them in Requests and we'll work on things people comment on. Or drop me a line to the address at the foot of the page, and we can chat about it.

Thanks to everyone using the site.

'Syndicated feeds' on 14^th November 2005 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

We now have RSS feeds of the latest pictures in any section of the site, just look out for the heart icons next to the 'Latest pictures' in any gallery or keyword combination.

Enjoy.

(If you don't know what syndication or feeds or RSS are about - try this intro from the BBC).

We welcome suggestions of how we can make these better, or provide more feeds you might like; please drop us a line.

'London' on 14^th July 2005 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

London's a great city, full of diversity and joy. We were bombed a week ago, but we carry on. My condolences to anyone affected by the bombings. I'm hoping we don't see a stupid, reactionary backlash against British Muslims. Let us all remember what makes us great - our diversity and the ties that bind us.

-- ashok

'New server' on 11^th May 2005 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

After a little longer out of action than I would like, the site is all together again, running a new shiny server.

Apologies for the time off, and there are a few pieces that are misbehaving yet but bear with us and it'll be better than ever.

'Merging galleries' on 2^nd November 2004 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

It's still going on, and with the maintenance work done it's broadly ready. A happy side-effect is that we can also now move galleries and pictures to other short-names and have everything forwarded. I'll likely move all the pictures with meaningless short-names to better ones. Expect things to look very different by the end of the weekend. There will be about 30-50 galleries, not hundreds, so voice your opinion now, if you are likely to feel precious about any of them. (Please include the word 'bandersnatch' in your subject line to ensure your mail is read).

'Maintenance tonight' on 29^th October 2004 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

Adding pictures, galleries, keywords and comments will be turned off for the next few hours while we run some maintenance. Everything else should keep working fine, apologies for the interruption.

'The big merge' on 16^th July 2004 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

We're about to coalesce a lot of the similar galleries, merging them into the first-created general one. Where short names clash they'll get new ones. To avoid breaking any links they'll remain reserved and will forward to the new home. Things that will merge:

• All the shakira galleries
• All the diving galleries
• The panama galleries
• Probably some others

I'd rather avoid making a new gallery require approval, as it bogs the whole process down, but something is needed to stop the massive duplication. Suggestions welcome. This won't really change anything, but it may mess with some people's notion of a gallery being 'theirs'. Get over it. If you have any questions about how this will work, please drop me a line to the usual address. If you want to make sure your message isn't lost in the sea of swill please include the word 'bandersnatch' in the subject line.

'Upcoming maintenance this week' on 3^rd November 2003 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

On Thursday night at about 23:50 GMT, gallery will be offline briefly while we upgrade some essential software on the machine. (For those who care, we're moving to a new version of PostgreSQL, the database on which the site relies. This will enable us to speed things up considerably, as well as supporting the oft-promised merger of galleries. There's a curious bug in the old version we're currently using that is getting in the way). Thanks for your patience. We anticipate it will only take half an hour, but we'll make the error messages informative in any case. (This maintenance was previously scheduled for Sunday night, and has been delayed)

'Bye-bye, Anonymous comments' on 14^th October 2003 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

In the interests of raising the tone for everyone, we're now hiding anonymous comments for everyone, unless you go and seek them out. Comments again, please, on the requests site.

'Anonymous comments' on 13^th October 2003 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

We've started hiding anonymous comments by default for anyone who is logged in. They rarely say much of any use. Talk about it on the requests site.

'Broken uploads' on 27^th August 2003 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

Due to a compatibility bug in PHP, uploads were broken for the last 10 days. It shouldn't have broken like that, but we should have anticipated the possibility and done more stringent testing, so apologies for the disruption to the service. Everything is working properly again now, and your comments are always welcome. If you have any feature requests for gallery please file them at http://requests.future-i.com/gallery/

'Keyword Nav' on 1^st August 2003 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

I've pulled my finger out so you can now navigate by keyword. Please play around with it. Follow the links under pictures for more pictures tagged with the same keywords, or browse a gallery in smaller slices by following the 'Refine further' links on the front page of the gallery. For now, please add more keywords to pictures. It will only work well with the collaborative help of a bunch of people. Thanks for being our test subjects...

'Duplicate galleries' on 2^nd December 2002 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

It's getting out of hand. I can see how galleries are going to overlap a bit, but there should at least be differences. There are now a number of Shakira galleries, for example, with no real difference in what they are for. I'll be adding some features over the coming holidays that should help several people manage galleries, but for now may I respectfully request that if you have pictures that fit into an existing gallery then upload them there. I'll forcibly coalesce some of the duplicates shortly, so if you have an opinion about this then send mail to folk@gallery.future-i.com. There are also a few people who have things organised in separate galleries to add some structure. There has always been a plan for a better way to do this (with keywords), so I'll be reorganising things there too. Don't worry though, all the existing links will keep working - it's something we do fanatically. Also, as more pictures go up, more people are deliberately linking directly to the images from other pages or bulletin board postings. I realise random folk will do this sometimes, but there are a fair few examples where the person uploading is doing it too. Knock it off, read the linking guidelines (they are linked at the bottom of every page) and beware that we'll use bigger clubs to make it harder to do if need be.

'Deleting comments' on 25^th May 2002 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

I'm sad to say that I've started deleting some of the anonymous comments. The creator of a gallery, or the sitewide administrators can now delete any anonymous comments. This should mean that we'll have fewer gutter comments on pictures of Kristin Kreuk and others, but it's a shame. Still, I've never been sure about taking anonymous comments at all - but hopefully with this change they'll be a bit more workable. If you don't want your comments to be subject to the whims of some despotic admin make sure you are logged in. At least then the administrators can have a conversation with you before blowing away your contribution for good (if it ever really comes to that). If there are any other comments that should go, let the address at the bottom of the picture page know. (In other news, there's a shiny new logo and the incredibly keen Shakira-fest is inducing new features to cope with the flood).

'Go-faster stripes' on 8^th May 2002 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

The front page was getting pretty slow - especially for long-time users. I made it about 3 times faster a week or so ago. Today I made it a hundred times faster still. If you find anything on gallery isn't what you expect, don't hesitate to mail folk@gallery.future-i.com and we'll set to putting it right. The other good news is that the changes I've made today will help a whole raft of new, shiny features for registered users without beating the poor server to death in the process.

'Downtime' on 15^th April 2002 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

Sorry for anyone who has been unable to reach anything within future-i.com over the last few days. We made what should have been a seamless change, but our domain registrar didn't follow the instructions, so screwed everything up for a little bit. Normal service has now resumed.

'2kth picture' on 22^nd January 2002 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

Congrats to TomF for putting up the 2048^th picture, which has the dubious distinction of having a typo in the Short Name. Since I'm also guilty of this myself (Kristin Kreuk not Kruek) I shan't complain too loudly, but instead realise it happens and folk should be able to fix it without breaking existing links, doing anything nasty or allowing a malicious person to destroy the namespace by messing about. After another day's thinking I should have a nice solution.

On 7^th January 2002 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

A bunch of new features have come through in the past couple of months (quitting a job will leave you with plenty of time to do interesting stuff). As of today you can complete your uploads by whomping up a single text file, exported out of your favourite spreadsheet. More information on mass completion. The ever-imminent first release of all the underlying code is still on the cards, but put back due to a few bits of paid work which have wondered along. We haven't forgotten though. Oh, and Happy New Year - it'll be palindromic. Unfortunately the TSV file highlights a bug in the code. Pictures that are uploaded at exactly the same time in a gallery screws up the previous/next links. Ash promises to straighten it out in the next day or so.

On 19^th October 2001 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

Cheers to Tom for getting the new version of postgres working. (Postgres is the database everything on gallery is stored in). Everything is whizz-bangly fast now - I've put some more details in the about tech page, for other geeks to peruse. We're also getting damn close to packaging up all the code into a useful toolkit, which I've blathered about on the about tech page too. Once I redesign the Future i site, there'll be a place to talk about this stuff properly.

On 7^th October 2001 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

Well, you can now log on without cookies. I'll be looking at it in various browsers to make it more polished, but things are looking bright for our 'working title' toolkit for building smart-ish sites well and quickly, without a painful start-up overhead. For now it is restricted to developers on this machine, but it'll be freely available (under an appropriate open source license) before too long.

On 12^th September 2001 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

My condolences to anyone touched by the terrorist acts in the USA yesterday. People in New York City might want to look here for a list of numbers, blood donation facilities, &c.

If you are elsewhere on the east coast of the States, you should check your local media, as there is likely a blood drive near you.

-- ash

On 2^nd September 2001 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

Congratulations to James for putting up the 1024^th picture (that's a one and ten noughts in binary) on gallery. (What can I say, I'm a geek - in truth James put the thousandth picture up too).

On 30^th August 2001 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

I'm a fuckwit. I shouldn't do things in an crazy way, in a hurry, without paying attention. So I've blown all the comments away. My sincere apologies. Note to self, actually make backups. Damn! Tom Ayles - on the other hand - is not a fuckwit. He has suggested I fish the comments out of Google's cache. Smart guy. Just goes to show these students from the Department of Computing, Imperial College are pretty smart... I've done this now, but there was a bit of manual oomph - if you find a comment misattributed/wrong, kick me (--ash).

On 27^th May 2001 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

Cheers to JP for giving me a boot and getting me to put previous and next thumbnails in. The idea came from JP, Gef and some beer as I (somewhat fuzzily) recall...

On 22^nd May 2001 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

Hey-hey, a new feature! You can now upload whole zip archives of pictures. More pictures for all...

On 22^nd May 2001 by Ashok Argent-Katwala^[ash]

Keywords are now there for all registered users. You can tag pictures within a gallery with keywords, which will form the backbone of all the navigation for the entire system. OK, this is the experimental bit. There are a few things wrong with the way keywords are at the moment, I will shuffle around the way it stores everything after I have got a few bits of coursework done. Notably, it seldom makes sense to tag something as being not a certain thing, unless you are disagreeing with a prior assertion. I think I have a good plan for this, just bear with me...