What’s new in JungleDragon

JungleDragon, much like evolution, is constantly morphing based upon its environment. With the initial launch 2 days behind us (which is going great, thank you for your support!), it is time to tell you what has changed in JungleDragon recently. This post is particularly interesting to former users of the public alpha. I will keep this post light on screenshots, since you can look and feel the real thing for yourself. Let’s get started.

General design

The look & feel of JungleDragon has improved a lot. It has better, cleaner and more sophisticated styling. I hope you like it. So far you seem to love it. The design is also quite a lot wider, which gives a more spatious feel to the whole thing.

In the header, the global navigation has been simplified and given more meaningful labels. Furthermore, the widget that displays your avatar when logged in has been simplified. Your reputation is less prominently there, however you can still dive deep into it when you visit your profile.

The footer has been simplified too. Most links are now tucked away in the About section. What remains is the mascotte, a donation link and two quick links to follow JungleDragon on Twitter and Facebook.

The points of these design changes is to provide a cleaner, wider look, placing more emphasis on the content.

By the way, JungleDragon now has much more robust text rendering, meaning long values do not break the layout.

Better homepage

The homepage has been seriously redesigned. The carrousel showcases handselected top photographs and above it a clear call-to-action to join or learn more. Together this block serves as an invitation to explore or join JungleDragon. I will regularly select new photos for the carrousel. This also means that the karma event for homepage promotion is gone. JungleDragon is not a popularity match, so I realized it did not make much sense to carry on with the “Digg” approach. Everybody gets an equal chance on the homepage since it allways shows recently uploaded photos, regardless of their popularity. There still is an incentive to have top photos, since it will then be displayed on the most popular photos overview, which can be viewer per “all time”, “month”, “week” or last “24 hours”.

Other than recent and popular photos, recent and popular tags are shown, like before. Both these widgets allow for instant switching between both overviews, no trip to the server is required as they are preloaded.

The right column starts with the currently most popular photo lists. You can directly open them in normal or slideshow mode.

Finally, a lot of room is reserved on the homepage for community updates. This is supposed to give a feeling of activity to the user.

Photo lists!

As discussed earlier on this blog, JungleDragon now has photo lists. It works really simple. When signed in, visit any photo page and click “Add to list”. Next you can create a new list or add the photo to one of your existing lists. You do not have to be the owner of a photo in order to add it to the list. Others can vote on your lists, and this way you can earn karma. Photo lists are an awesome way to tell a story about nature, especially in slideshow mode.

Slideshows

Possibly one of the best features of JungleDragon is its no-nonsense slideshow way of viewing photos. This can be done on any list of photos: from a photolist, from a tag, from a user’s profile, everywhere.

Inline editing

Any photo you have edit rights to can be inline-edited, both from a photo overview as from the dedicated page of a single photo. This means you can simply click on the photo title or description and start typing away. No longer do you need to visit the edit photo screen, although it is still there.

Better user profiles

A user’s profile still packs a ton of options to explore everything a user has done, but particularly the start page of a user profile is now much more useful. In one screen, you see the user’s personal details, recent activity, uploaded photos, most used tags and reputation. At a glance, you can instantly know who this person is and what he/she is about.

Notice that the visual karma graph is gone. It was a nice visual touch but for the sake of simplicity I removed it. It really did not contain any information you could not see from your own activity log already. Less is more.

Reputation system

You may have noticed the pattern that I have placed less emphasis on the reputation system. It is still there but not obscenely displayed everywhere. All its power remains but it does not take precedence over the photo experience. There is one additonal change you should know about: levels are gone. JungleDragon used to have a 3-tier reputation system: you earn karma. with enough karma you get promoted to the next level. Every x levels you get promoted to a better class. The level layer is now gone. You earn karma and belong to one of the 12 classes. Much simpler and easier to understand.

Photo viewing

I have removed the ability to view photo lists in all kinds of display modes, and simply opted for one good one. In practice, the other display modes were hardly used. Another change is that viewing photos in their original size (which often are huge, over 3000 pixels wide) is no longer possible. I still have these photos but do not allow users to see them. The reason is simple: most photo owners do not appreciate their originals being publicly displayed. Furthermore, it does not make sense to show photos that large in a web browser anyway.

Better community page

The “users” page has been renamed to “Community”. An important improvement is that in the right side, you can directly see your friends and their recent updates.

Easier sharing

Both on photo lists and individual photo pages, there is now a Share button which allows youto share that page in any network you can imagine. Please make use of this if you want to help promote JungleDragon!

RSS

Photo overviews, tags, users, you name it…you can now subscribe to them using RSS. This way you will be automatically notified of new content you enjoy, without the need to actuall visit JungleDragon.

View recording

Since I foresee that many users will simply view JungleDragon content instead of interacting with it, I am now recording unique photo views. This is an additional way to earn karma for a photo owner. Every X views you get a karma reward.

Avatars

The ability to upload avatars to JungleDragon is now completely removed. I solely rely on gravatar.com now. If you have an avatar icon there associated with the email address you used tp sign up at JungleDragon, it will automatically be displayed. If not, you will get a random one.

Better welcome screen

Upon first activating your account, there is now a much better welcome screen that triggers new users to do a few essential things.

Statistics

On top of Google Analytics, I’m now running a daily agent that collects dozens of JungleDragon statistics. I don’t have any visualization yet, but at least I’m capturing this.

Better untagged image overview

When signed in and visiting the Tags overview, there is a link to the “Untagged images” overview. This page shows you all untagged images and is optimized for quickly tagging images and earning karma, much like a game. At the top of the page is a huge progress bar showing you the percentage of tagged photos.

Tuned front-end

JungleDragon’s front-end has been tuned a lot, receiving a score well over 90 in both Yslow and Google Pagespeed. This is no guarantee for performance everywhere, since currently JungleDragon is deployed on a single server and latency can be an issue. Yet, within my current constraints JungleDragon is as fast as can be.

Wrapping up

This concludes the changes made to JungleDragon since you’ve last seen it at the public alpha. Summarizing, JungleDragon is simplified, made more usable, looks better, and has key new features. Please keep talking, and I will continue to listen.

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