We in Stuffed Guys are lucky to be working with an outstanding designer nickoose. He is the person who have originally come up with an idea to physically create a real stuffed doll for our new site that he was designing in 2005. That doll is mr. Stuffed, you can see him in our official logo and in the header of this blog (by the way, the image in the header of this blog is not computer-generated if you were wondering, it’s a photo of a real custom-made doll in custom-made clothes).
Well, nickoose strikes again! This time with the main art concept for the new Stuffed Tracker site which we’ve launched several weeks ago. Here it is:
The main ideas:
- A tree — is your site.
- You cherish the tree and water it; and look how it grows every day.
- The magnifying glass is of course Stuffed Tracker itself. You use it to carefully examine the tree (your site) in order to understand how to grow it faster and keep it healthy.
The tree can as well be your advertising campaign which you analyze with Stuffed Tracker :)
I think the concept and the art are just amazing.
The new version of WordPress as you might already know features a fancy new file uploader. It actually uses a hidden Flash movie to allow you to choose multiple files at once for uploading and displays a progress of uploading.
The thing is — it doesn’t really work.
There are numerous reports of people for whom the new uploader just hangs forever in a so called “Crunching” final state. I’ve tried it on two different computers with two different browsers and it didn’t work for me ANYWHERE. The files were actually uploaded on the server, but the uploader didn’t seem to understand that this actually happened.
I am mentioning this mostly because we’ve actually tried to use a Flash-based file uploader in Factory Nova more then a year ago. It is very tempting to finally be able to show the progress of a file upload in the browser without any server-based tricks (which get much more trickier if you are using PHP on the server).
But we’ve eventually got rid of it as not ready for real-life use. There were (and as WordPress experience shows — still are) two major problems with Flash-based uploading:
- The progress of uploading doesn’t show what’s really going on. Usually it quickly gets to 100% and then hangs there for a long time. As I understand this happens because as far as Flash is concerned it has already sent all the bytes of the file to the network (so it shows 100% completion), but it has no clue if all of the bytes actually arrived to the receiving party or not.
- We wanted (as WordPress also does) to communicate with the Flash-based uploader in the page in order to do some stuff when the upload was finished, but this seemed to be buggy as hell, sometimes this worked, sometimes not, this also depended on the machine where we tried, the browser, the exact Flash version — a complete nightmare.
Unfortunately, as the latest version of WordPress shows, Flash-based uploading is still not ready for production server/software use. Which is a pitty, it could have been a great addition to the Web experience.
While examining the most frequently used keywords on Google which were used to arrive to this blog (as reported by our own Stuffed Tracker, of course), Ivan has discovered that lots of them are related to porn for some reason. That was strange, since this blog has nothing to do with porn in any way, so we started investigating.
It turned out that WordPress which powers this blog had an unfortunate security hole in one of the previous versions which allowed anyone to modify already existing posts via XML-RPC interface. Our version was newer that the one that was affected, but apparently someone managed to use this exploit on our blog while we still used the older unprotected version of the blog software. So we had links to porn sites in a hidden layer on the front page in the latest 5-6 posts, they were indexed by Google and we got first places on some specific porn-related searches.
The amusing thing is that the people who modified the posts kept the original posts untouched (thank you very much!) and just added their hidden HTML in the end (yeah, I know they did it to stay unnoticed, but still that was good of them). Getting rid of this stuff was trivial of course.
And Stuffed Tracker saved the day!
BTW, we’ve launched a completely new stand-alone site for the new 3rd generation of Stuffed Tracker not long ago.
