(photo above courtesy of Tom Shahan)

JungleDragon likes photos of bugs, but not system bugs. I am very eager to solve any bugs you encounter so please report them from the contact page. I just deployed the first fixes and improvements, here they are:

• The age calculation of some members was incorrect. Fixed.
• Users signing up via Facebook could not edit their “about me” field. Fixed.
• The Join Now button on the homepage is now hidden when you are signed in.
• The community page now shows 48 members per page instead of only 12.
• The user counter on the community page was wrong. Fixed.
• Issue with counting comment replies fixed.
• Upload button on a user profile is only visible now if it concerns your own profile.
• When clicking “view all sizes” below a photo on a photo page, you now see the large photo format.
• Improved logging of 404s and the captcha check for easier troubleshooting on my side.

Here are some known/open issues that I will pick up as soon as I can:

• One particular user from New Zealand had trouble joining, due to session problems. The issue has been worked around now, cause still unclear.
• The Flash multi uploader does not work in Chrome 10. Under investigation. Please use the single file uploader in that Chrome version until I fix this.
• Some small iPhone rendering glitches. Lower priority but will try to pick this up later.

Thank you all for your bug reports, keep them coming!

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.

Dear friends of nature,

For what seems like forever, I have been bothering you with my project JungleDragon. I have been developing it on top of a day job for a long time now, and I understand it must be hard to follow along when it is not publicly visible. Today, I am proud to announce that JungleDragon no longer is a hobby concept. It is now real, alive and kicking in the real world. JungleDragon.com is now live!

http://www.jungledragon.com

There will soon be additional posts following this one describing tons of details, but to keep this one brief, I will only discuss elements that are important immediately. Please read this to the end.

Changes

A lot of things have changed since the JungleDragon public alpha at the staging environment. Some have been described on this blog before, some have not. Later this week I will give you a detailed overview of things that have changed. For now, just keep in mind that some things work slightly differently or are simplified.

If you are a new JungleDragon user, or intending to become one, the FAQ explains pretty much everything.

Issues

The code deployed in production did not have the extensive public testing as before. Therefore, it is possible that you discover issues. When you do, please report them on our contact page.

Content migration

I have loaded a base set of about 200 photos. Take note though, if you were an alpha user, your user profile and content are not migrated. You need to register again on the live site. My apologies for this, but the structure of JungleDragon has changed too much to justify a complex migration. I will be sending out additional communication to all alpha users later this week.

How can you help make JungleDragon a success?

I am really going to need you to make JungleDragon a success. I hope I have enough goodwill left Later this week I will write a post showing how with a minimal use of your time, you can maximize your contribution. I will be awarding cash prizes!

You do not have to wait for that competition though, you can already start:

• Share the www.jungledragon.com URL with your family, friends, colleagues, social networks.
• Join JungleDragon. Even if you dont have anything to upload, joining allows you to comment, vote, favorite content, do social tag editing, create photo lists and more.
• Upload photos of wildlife. Remember to only upload photos you own or have permission for.

Moderation

Perhaps needless to say, but this is the real thing and it should not be used as a test environment. Please do not do things like uploading offtopic images, or test long strings in input fields. I will moderate those things away. Soon I will upgrade the alpha environment with the latest code should you want to test things.

Communication, marketing, next steps

I have a lot of follow-up steps to perform and a lot of people to inform and collaborate with. The next few weeks will be about communication, marketing, bug fixes, and stabilizing the environment. Please bear with me in these exciting yet busy times

Enjoy

This concludes the things I wanted to share for now. A lot will be forthcoming. As allways, please do keep that feedback coming and enjoy your first stab at JungleDragon. Keep the dragon alive!

Users are typically wary of registering at yet another site, even if they like that particular site. Most often it means filling out a tedious registration form that asks for way too many personal details. And there is yet another username/password combination to remember. There may be trust issues as well, what will this site do with my personal details?

Many of these issues can be solved by offering users a way to connect using an existing account, such as  a Facebook or Twitter account. That is exactly what JungleDragon supports as of now, and it does so in quite a friendly, flexible manner.  This post explains how it works for users. In a second post I will discuss some implementation details.

Using your Twitter account to signup with JungleDragon

Let us walk through the scenario of a Twitter user joining JungleDragon. Meet YodaDragon, an eager fan that is ready to join:

Yoda chooses the join option:

Which launches the all-new simplified Join page:

In this screen, the user can choose to create a JungleDragon account based on an existing Facebook or Twitter account, or choose to just create a “classic” account, managed within JungleDragon. Yoda clicks the Twitter button. If he is not yet logged into Twitter, he will need to authenticate first. Next comes a one-time approval screen from Twitter where Yoda needs to grant the application (JungleDragon) read access to his account:

In a sweep of optimism, Yoda allows this. Twitter then redirects the user to JungleDragon:

We’re now back at JungleDragon and know who the user is. Yoda is new here, so JungleDragon asks for a final step in the registration process: asking for an email address:

This email address has to be valid and activated by Yoda to complete the registration. You may wonder why I put in this step. The primary reason is that oAuth providers do not give applications access to a user’s email address. Technically I could let the user join without an email address, but this is the only time in the lifecycle of a user where I can ask for it. I’ve had a look at some big websites with oAuth support and they seem to do the same thing.

Anyways, Yoda opens the activation email and clicks the activation email inside it. This finishes the registration and a welcome page is presented:

And there is one more cool thing. JungleDragon has read some of the personal details of Yoda from Twitter, such as location, avatar and bio and copied those to his JungleDragon profile.

You can imagine the Facebook scenario working similar, it’s just that the application access approval screen is different. The other difference is that Facebook offers more profile details that are automatically copied to the new user’s profile.

Using your Twitter account to sign in to JungleDragon

Now that we have a registered user, how does the signin via Twitter work, assuming the user is not logged into JungleDragon already? I can be brief about that:

The user clicks the Twitter button. The end. That’s it, there’s no redirects, approvals, logins, it’s a one-click login. The same holds true if you would have created an account based on Facebook.

What about JungleDragon accounts?

The fun does not end here. Users can still create native JungleDragon accounts in case they have no Twitter or Facebook account or feel more comfortable seperating accounts. In this case, all the existing user management capabilities of JungleDragon continue to work: password resets, editing your email address, sign in, sign out, etc.

And there’s more. If you already have a native JungleDragon account yet also want to make use of a Twitter or Facebook account (or both!) for the sake of easy login, that scenario is supported as well. We’re going to switch to the user “fchristant” who has a native JungleDragon account. He goes to his user profile page, clicks “Edit details” and then chooses the new option “Manage signin settings“:

Here we are at the signin settings of a native JungleDragon account. From the “Current signin accounts” we see that this native user has three ways to sign in to his account: JungleDragon (email/password), Twitter and Facebook. For each the username is provided of that service provider.

The second heading “Connect more signin accounts” allows you to link existing Twitter or Facebook accounts to your JungleDragon profile. You can even add multiple accounts of the same provider.

Conclusion

It was kind of a nightmare implementing this, but I am eager to endure the hardship to take away any barriers users may have in joining JungleDragon. The current implementation should satisfy the needs of most users I feel (other than offering more providers, such as Gmail). What do you think?

The next post will share some details on the implementation of this. You can start using this today, it is deployed on the Alpha environment. If you have an existing account, use the instructions above to link additional signin methods to your account.

At the end of July this year I opened the JungleDragon alpha environment for public testing, and set a prize of 100$ in cash for the best tester. Today I announce the winner.

To be honest, it was not hard selecting a winner. One user topped the charts in every aspect imaginable:

• Contributing over 200 images to the alpha environment, a vast majority of the content in there
• Describing the actual images in detail by title, description and tags
• Thoroughly testing JungleDragon resulting in over 60 bugs, suggestions and questions reported
• Following up on these reports in detail by chat and even in real life
• Not counting for this contest, but offering a free alpha hosting environment

I’m talking about Bas Peters, not by chance the user with the most karma. Thank you for all your effort Bas, a prize well deserved!

Thanks to all the other testers as well,I appreciate your efforts and honesty. I will continue to listen to you. The alpha environment will remain open so you can continue testing and sending feedback. I may launch another contest when JungleDragon gets closer to production.

Multi file uploading makes it much easier to contribute images to JungleDragon, as you will see. In this post I will explain this new feature in detail, ending with a video that demonstrates. You can also start using it live on the staging environment.

First, the new upload screen:

We see a button to select images as you would expect. There is also a link to the classic, single file uploader in case Flash (required for the multiuploader) is not available. Then there is a progress bar displaying the user’s upload quota usage (which updates in realtime when we start uploading), and finally some upload guidelines. Let’s select some images:

Nothing fancy to see here, just a file browse dialog that allows you to select multiple images. You can select 20 images per upload batch (a config I have set for now that can be altered), or less if you quota is less than 20 images.

The selected images will be added to a queue, the progress bar will update in realtime as the upload is in progress. Uploads will start right after selecting images, there is no need to start the process. During uploading, an upload may be cancelled. When the upload is finished, the status text changes to “Processing…”. During this time, the system will create thumbs, update database records and reward karma. When the image is processed, it will fade out and dissapear from the queue. The next image will then be uploaded and processed, until all are done. When all images in the queue are done, you can select more images or go to edit the uploaded images:

This page shows the number of uploaded images and the actual images. You can apply tags to the entire set of images by clicking the orange “Tag these images” button:

After hitting “Save”, all images in the batch will have the tags applied. You can also edit images one by one by clicking on them:

When you are done, you will be taken to your profile that showcases your newly uploaded and edited images:

That’s it. Apologies for the low quality, but here’s a video demonstrating the entire process:

To tell you the truth it has been a hellish trip getting all of this to work, a task sorely underestimated. Would you be interested in a making of? What do you think about this implementation?

This is to inform you that as of now, JungleDragon Alpha revision 5 is deployed on the staging environment.This is just a tiny update that deploys a few changes and fixes I had in the pipeline already:

• Below the JungleDragon logo text there is now a small tagline “Wildlife community”, so that new visitors at least have some clue what the site is about
• JungleDragon now better wraps long titles, descriptions and tags so that it does not break the layout. I introduced a small bug whilst doing this, I will revisit this in the next revision.
• The image metadata of the large image on the homepage is back, as requested.
• Fixed a broken image link on the tag history page
• Fixed a fatal error where uploading an image of 14MB would result in the image not being uploaded, showing a white screen instead.

In the coming releases, I will focus on much bigger and more important changes, as discussed in the new strategy.

With the holiday behind me and getting back to work, it is time to open another season of JungleDragon development. In this post I want to explain my new strategy for JungleDragon.

Right before I went on a break, I submitted JungleDragon for review on ConceptFeedback in an attempt to get professional feedback. Most reviewers posted comments about the design, overall very positive feedback. One reviewer, however, thoroughly questioned the user and content strategy of JungleDragon. He made such good points that I decided to follow up with him on a few Skype calls. I even hired him for a few hours to come up with an improved strategy. A very educational experience that provided me deep insight in where I went wrong.

Below is a summary of the critique and the things I plan to do to improve them:

Better usability

This is not a strategic matter but an important general improvement. An imporant example is that it should be easier to get your photos into JungleDragon, for which I will develop a multi-upload control and perhaps later a Flickr/Picasa importer. Other usability improvements include the inline editing of image metadata, better ways to connect with interesting users and easier ways to see how your content is doing. And let us not forget, it should be much easier to classify and find content, although this is far from a weak point currently. Another usability consideration is signing in with other accounts, such as FaceBook or Twitter.

Social Knowledge

If you would cynically assess JungleDragon as it is now, it is a fairly good photo sharing platform that happens to focus on wildlife. Although specific elements are optimized for the topic of wildlife, such as the design and reputation system, the added value compared to let’s say a Flickr photo group on wildlife is too thin.

Therefore, a strategic change coming to JungleDragon is the inclusion of wildlife knowledge. The idea is that this knowledge enriches the photos, allowing you to learn about wildlife. For example, photos can be linked to a species page, which shows you more information, partly imported from Wikipedia. This also enables better (hierarchical) browsing and the easier finding of related content. Other types of knowledge linked to photos could be a a Q & A, a National Park, Geotagging and more.

The exact details of this implementation are to be worked out, but this strategy will take JungleDragon from a general-purpose photo platform to a domain-specific, rich, deep social knowledge and media community. The experience is enriched from photo viewing to wildlife sharing and learning in a social experience.

Implementing this strategy is very well possible on the existing JungleDragon engine, as an enrichment. It does mean that the software becomes domain-specific and cannot just be copied for a different purpose, say “cars”. I accept this implication as it is, as I find this new direction too important to ignore.

Better reputation system

Besides usability and knowledge integration, JungleDragon as it is now has one additional flaw: it’s reputation system. A bitter sweet pill this is, as it is the part that I am most proud of. No worries though, it does not have to be rewritten from scratch, just enhanced.

As it is now, the reputation system is quite linear and general purpose. People earn karma by positive actions and literally walk a food chain. If you are a very active community member, you may be a Lion instead of an Ant. Being a Lion brings advantages, such as a higher upload quota, more influence in voting and the unlocking of exclusive features, and let’s not forget you wear the badge of honour of being a Lion throughout the community.

Fairly solid, but it is flawed in two ways:

• I took it a little too far, especially for common users. Sometimes the reputation system is too prominent and gets in the way of the site’s purpose: photo viewing and sharing (and later on, knowledge sharing). I don’t know how yet, but the reputation systeem needs to move to the background more, yet not dissapear for power users.
• It fails to award different kinds of users in different ways. A wildlife photographer may post a lot of pictures, a bird spotter may identify a lot of birds using his knowledge, a zoologist may add species knowledge into the mix. The effort and specialities of these types of users should be more explicitly rewarded, in a non-linear way. My idea for this is to add accomplishments to the reputation system. For example you may earn the photographer badge or spotter badge. These badges should be linked to the species most interacted with by the user, so that it becomes easy to see that somebody is a bird expert, for example.

General development

On top of these strategic changes, I also have a list of must have features to implement that are missing so far. Examples include Search and RSS, but also technical improvements such as an admin screen and better logging.

Business model and marketing

It will take me a few months to implement the above and I will do so in an incremental manner. Once I feel it is ready, it is time to prepare a first production launch. It will still be imperfect but it will launch anyway. At that time, growing a user base and business model becomes crucial to sustain JungleDragon.

For now it is suffice to say that I’m going to be busy, JungleDragon will become a lot better and that I will continue to listen to you, putting JungleDragon before my own ego. Please value this new path using the rating options below!

This is to announce that JungleDragon Alpha revision 4 is now deployed on the staging environment. If you are a JungleDragon test user, please read the below carefully as it may require some small action on your behalf, for example clearing your cookies or refreshing your cache.

This release contains a few small usability improvements, but is mostly a technical improvement. Below are the changes:

Better thumb hovers

In the previous release, I improved the homepage by showing more images and less image metadata. The solution is to visualize metadata only when hovering a thumbnail. This has been improved further, below is an image without and with hover:

I plan to deploy this way of visualizing thumbs to the other image lists as well in a later release.

Image voting made more clear

In previous releases, the vote up button on the image page was not clear enough, as it only showed a small green vote block with an up icon. This call-to-action is now more emphasized by including the “Vote” text:

Pagination usability improvement

JungleDragon uses pagination for large lists, this works as on other sites, using page numbers that you can click through. The change that I now made only shows a big “More” link on the first page, since you pretty much always want to go to the next page from there. On all subsequent pages, normal number-based pagination is used.

Page rename

I was trying to be cute by calling JungleDragon terms and conditions the “Law of the Jungle”. It is now simply called “Terms and conditions” to avoid confusion.

Hierarchical tag browsing

JungleDragon supports a unique and innovative feature: hierarchical tags. It combines the best of free format tagging and a strict taxonomy of categories. However, the way this is visualized to users needs a lot of improvement, therefore I have temporary disabled the visual part. This part will be redesigned in a later release and then re-enabled.

404 fixed for comment voting

If you were not signed in and tried to vote up a comment, after signing in it would throw a 404. Fixed.

Configurable statistics tracking

I can now configure the Google tracking code for statistics per JungleDragon environment.

Session management drastically improved

JungleDragon uses the CodeIgniter Session setup to manage sessions. It works as follow: You get a client-side cookie that stores a unique session id, your IP and your user-agent. The cookie is encrypted and recycled every x seconds to avoid session theft. The actual session data is stored in a database table.

I had a lot of problems with duplicate entries in the session table. These problems are now fixed, if you are interested in the technical details, go here.

Important: As a result of this change, I had to clear all sessions in the database. If you had a persistent session, it is now lost. Please clear your cookies (or only the one for JungleDragon) and sign in again.

Avatar upload feature dropped!

Before, I gave you the option to use an avatar from gravatar.com or to upload an avatar image to JungleDragon. My avatar upload feature was of course not as good as the gravatar service and it does not make sense to spend a lot of development time on it. Therefore, I decided to drop the avatar upload feature. Your avatar will be picked up from Gravatar.com if you have an avatar configured there for the email address you use for JungleDragon. If you do not have it configured, you get the default avatar. If you uploaded an avatar to JungleDragon, sorry, but it is gone. Use the gravatar service instead.

Javascript improvements

Another technical improvement. I consolidated a lot of javascript libraries so that I make less HTTP requests now. They are loaded at the bottom now to further speed things up. Please clear your cache (shift+refresh) to get the latest javascript!

Concluding

The last 4 revisions have gradually improved JungleDragon based on test and concept feedback. Next week I will discuss how I plan to go from here. Stay tuned!

Where revision 1 and 2 fixed and improved dozens of things reported by testers, this release does one thing only: it repurposes the homepage, the entry point of JungleDragon. Here is a somewhat outdated screenshot of the previous homepage:

Many of you recognize this style of homepage from sites like Digg.com, and the many sites that follow this popular pattern. It shows a stream of content on which users can vote. The content is described using a title, a truncated description and other metadata such as the submitter of the post. Finally, there is the possibility to directly vote on an entry.

I’ve come to realize that such a design does not make sense for a photo site like JungleDragon:

• It takes up a lot of vertical space, which means scrolling. This does not match the common audience of JungleDragon who just want to view photos.
• The extra metadata of a photo takes up a lot of space, much more than the actual thumbnail itself. Although the metadata can be interesting, it should not dominate the layout so much. Not on the homepage.
• Allowing for direct voting based on thumbnails allows for fairly superficial voting. It may increase the quantity of votes, but not the quality. If a user is lured into a thumb, I imagine they click on it to see the full size. From there, they can vote on it if they want to.

In an act of simplicity, the redesigned homepage now looks like this:

Much cleaner and simpler eh? A strong emphasis on the photos and much less scrolling. The top image is still large and then followed by a grid of images. The number of rows in the grid depend on your reputation. It starts with 5 rows and could grow to 11 rows based on your class in the food chain. Note thatthe screenshot still shows 3 rows.

The image metadata is not completely gone; upon hovering a thumbnail, a quick inline box shows basic information:

The new homepage: less nonsense, more photo viewing. Agree?

Watch it live at http://staging.jungledragon.com