gitdressed.com dev blog

We're still going strong

2009-05-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I've had a chance to post to the blog. Most of the development for gitdressed is done by college students and when final exams roll around we have very little time to devote to gitdressed.

Now that exams are over though, we should be able to redevote our entire work day to working on gitdressed. This means that you can expect some new and exciting features in the coming weeks.

Regards,
Adam Haney
Chief Developer

And The Winner Is...

2009-03-10T13:37:00.000-07:00

The upload/tag image contest has drawn to a close. Over 600 image were uploaded over the week (about 10 images per users). These uploads/tags give us vital information about the way users are using the site which should allow us to implement more features that utilize more intelligent algorithms which should make the site easier and better to use.

We have a few more new features in the works that should launch in the next few weeks so look for new and exciting things on the site. Until then have a great week.

Regards,
Adam

two things

2009-02-27T20:17:00.000-08:00

First,
You can now 'git' your images from Facebook. Using this new feature uploading images into your closet should be much easier. This new feature grabs all of the images from your Facebook account (note this only works for albums that you have uploaded not for albums you've been tagged in). This new feature can be found in the 'Upload Images' area under the 'Upload Images from Facebook tab'.

Second,
Beginning March 1st gitdressed.com will be holding a contest. We have noticed that many users are signing up for gitdressed but not uploading pictures or tagging garments. To entice users to upload more images we are going to give a $25 gift card to the user who has the most garments tagged (images uploaded and tagged) by the end of the week (Midnight Friday CST). The winner picks which designer/clothing merchant they would like the gift card for.

Update: There was a slight problem with the script that supports facebook upload, it's fixed now and facebook upload should be 100%.

So Start Uploading!

Regards,
Adam

Take a survey

2009-02-17T20:15:00.000-08:00

I've added a new fun feature this week, surveys. Every day there will be a new question related to either fashion or lifestyle. I think it will be interesting to see how fashion minded individuals (or organization minded individuals) think about various topics. This information will also help in the future as we move towards more new and exciting features that include customized content tailored to your taste.

I'm also happy to say that we've completely recovered from our power outage earlier this week and that everything on the site is 100% operational.

This week I've also been laying the groundwork for a few new exciting features. The framework for the site and back end (the part you don't see) has been exhaustively reworked over the last few weeks. This is paving the way for several new fun features that I hope to bring to users in the coming weeks. See you next Tuesday.

Regards,
Adam

If it's not one thing it's another

2009-02-12T07:25:00.000-08:00

It's been a frustrating week for gitdressed. The power went out at our data center and we were down for most of yesterday evening. Because the servers were shut down so abruptly there is also a possibility of data corruption (I'm still checking some scripts that are behaving strangely so it is possible that there are bugs on the site). I'm very sorry about the loss of power and the downtime I hope that we can have everything operating smoothly by the end of the day.

During this whole fiasco I also added the weekly updates, there aren't too many exciting things although I believe a few minor changes in the way that users change and retrieve passwords should make everyone's life (mine and yours) just a little bit easier.

Regards,
Adam

Gifts from Development Tuesday

2009-01-27T20:33:00.001-08:00

I am really excited about the new features this week. I because of the size of this weeks updates I was unable to do much last Tuesday meaning that this weeks new features are the culmination of 2 weeks worth of work. The changes include everything Suitcases (a new way to organize your clothes), To a new look and feel for the website (more round and shiny things), To code changes on the server side (things that won't affect you but will make my life much easier).

What Are Suitcases?
Suitcases are (like they sound) a way for you to take clothes with you. With suitcases you can create lists of clothes for specific purposes. They should make packing for things like vacation or business trips much easier to plan for, but they have many more uses. You can use suitcases to organize groups of clothes to give away or groups of clothes that are for a specific purpose (a suitcase of just seasonal attire). I have a few more cool things in the works for suitcases that I hope to launch next week.

The rest of the features are hardly worth mentioning individually, but I believe that collectively should make your experience more enjoyable.

Regards,
Adam

Dev Tuesday Updates

2009-01-13T09:33:00.000-08:00

There are only a few small updates this week although there are some major features in the works. I've been sick and in the process of moving back to school and thus unable to dedicate very much time to writing more code.

All of the features that I am currently working on come directly from user requests. If there is ANYTHING you would like to see changed or made better please email me at adam@gitdressed.com. I love making this site better but I only know what you want if you tell me.

I hope to be able to launch several new features next tuesday, until then enjoy gitdressed and keep the requests coming.

Regards,
Adam

About The Downtime

2009-01-11T13:33:00.001-08:00

First of all let me say that I am incredibly sorry about the extended downtime of the website. I know that many of you use the site on a day to day basis and I'm sorry that I was not able to fix it more expeditiously. Here's what happened...

A configuration file for the webserver was corrupted, when I restored the configuration file to the original the server still didn't work, I reinstalled the server and completely reconfigured the server (all of this happened in the first 15 minutes of downtime).

The site still wasn't up, by now I realized that I wasn't going to be able to git the website up and running remotely (the server is stored in a secure location away from where I live and work). I would have driven to the datacenter to reconfigure the server but I was running a tempature and could barely see straight (I know my problem not yours, I'm simply explaining).

So when I was finally able to make it down to the datacenter to reinstall the OS the entire hardrive on the server failed (don't worry I had everything backed up and no data was lost). So I had to drive back home rob a hardrive out of my personal machine and drive back to install the new hardrive in the server.

After that it took a couple hours to restore the server files from the backup and reinstall all of the database files and software. Long story short this experience has taught me a valuable lesson and I have taken steps to ensure that downtime like this never happens again.

I'm so sorry the website was down for so long and I hope that it didn't affect your lives too much, rest assured that your data will always be safe and I will do my best to keep the website up 100% of the time.

Regards,
Adam

Dev Tuesdays

2009-01-05T20:28:00.001-08:00

I've been working on a few new features that should make navigation of the site easier. I've realized that while I'm working on the site continually it's not a great idea to launch them the moment that I'm done with them, during the time that I'm updating the site is unstable, and new features aren't announced or well documented.

Because of this I'm starting a new release cycle. I will start releasing new features, etc on Tuesdays. Of course, if there are problems or bugs I will fix them immediately, but the new releases will be rolled out on Tuesdays.

I hope to add features that make the site more useful but I can only do this if I know what you, the user, want to see. If you'd like to see a feature added or an item tweaked email me at adam@gitdressed.com and I'll do my best to make it happen.

I hope this new release cycle will make changes go more smoothly, while development will still remain agile.

Regards,

Adam

Image Manipulation

2008-12-26T12:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday as Jama and I were uploading her wardrobe we started to notice a few issues with the way that users are allowed to upload images. I've been trying to get a few of these issues fixed today.

Yesterday's Problems:

Large Thumbnail File sizes
Innability to Rotate Images
Thumnails Were distorted out of their aspect ratio

Today's Solutions
I've started resizing images in batch on the server side to reduce the size of thumbnail images.
I've written a php function to resize images to their proper aspect ratios within dimension constraints.

The Problems Of Our Children (what I still have to fix)
I need to get basic image mainipulation working for the users. I want users to be able to rotate, crop and tag image areas without reloading the page and that is going to take some work, so bear with me as this may take a few days.

Regards,
Adam

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

2008-12-25T08:18:00.001-08:00

The day is finally here. After a month or so of planning, engineering and developement the website is live! But things are far from over I've made the deadline and Jama will get to start using her Christmas present on time, but, there are still many more features that I would like to implement so that her present will get better and better over time.

Merry Christmas sweet heart,

I Love You,

Adam

It's alive

2008-12-18T04:04:00.001-08:00

I'm am SOOO excited to say that the website is now being served to the internet. We have left our humble beginings on the MTSU LAN and are now officially served on gitdressed.com. I have killed login for the moment, so that I can have all of the features debugged before users begin to beta test the site. I plan on launching user upload and search on the 25th and barring any unforeseen issues I have one more secret feature that I'm planning to launch.

So What's Left

There are a few loose ends to tie up before I can begin adding features. I have to get image tagging working and I have to get search and navbar working. After all of that I have to go back and clean up some of the backend code (the stuff that the user doesn't see). I'm hoping that all of that doesn't take very much time so that I can get to the fun features like outfit suggestion and possibly a facebook application. All of these things require that the code be clean and maintainable though, so bear with me as I deal with things like that.

Regards,
Adam Haney

I'm not a DBA...

2008-12-16T10:28:00.000-08:00

This week I've been getting more parts of the website talking to the database. I've always considered myself to be more of a computer scientist than a DBA or a web developer. So these tedious parts of developement are rather frustrating to me. I'm hoping to have the scripting done by the 25th and then not have to deal with php scripting to access the mysql server for a long time. I'm growing weary but the finish line is around the bend.
Regards,
Adam

File Upload is live

2008-12-15T00:24:00.000-08:00

Users can now upload files. This is a 50/50 victory because I don't yet have the database working in the backend to tag and organize files (that's what I'll be working on today). Once I have that going there are only three things on my list of todos before the website can go live.

1.Get Thumbnails reading the database
2.Get Search Working
3.Get navBar working as a subset of search

After all of those things get working I can start adding all of the nonfunctional sugar that will make the website interesting and fun to use. I hope that I don't have to touch the UI or the php database script for awhile but when I do it will probably be totally revamped.

Third star to the left and on until morning,
Adam

The Backbone of Machine Learning

2008-12-10T20:35:00.000-08:00

Getting Information for smart algorithms

gitdresed is designed to be more than just a place for you store images. We to create a website that can give you something back. We are currently planning to implement an intelligent outfit suggestor.

The algorithm behind these suggestions will required to know a lot of information about the users of gitdressed, as such I have spent much of the day today creating the framework of a system that will record various (anonomous, non-specific) information about our users and how they use our site.

Isn't that like big brother?

No. We aren't spying on you, we're simply trying to understand how our users interact with the site. For example: if we notice that users are logging on a particular time that can help us to understand how our website fits into their lives. Again, we aren't talking about individuals we are talking about users as a whole.

We're trying to make the best product for you,

Regards,

Adam

Houston, We have login

2008-12-10T01:12:00.000-08:00

The site is now offically closed to non members, the only way that a person can access the main portion of the site is to login (or use some clever trickery, but even then they can only see empty code with no data). The user authentication system is working and we are now storing data about our users, as they log in.

ToDo:
File Upload
Image Manipulation
Item Tagging
Search
Navbar

I feel good about these last tasks, as I can reuse some of the code from the authentication system, and because most of the database is already built to handle this functionality. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it feels good

Regards,
Adam

daemons feel more like demons

2008-12-09T22:20:00.000-08:00

User management has been somewhat more frustrating than expected. We are currently able to insert users into the database but due to some sanitization issues it is difficult to get password strings to match. I'm currently working on this problem after taking a short break and I'm hoping to have user management up so I can start working on the meat and potatoes of the project uploading inventory items! Must of the dataase has already been designed and as you can see from the site the style and formating of the webpages themselves are pretty solid. The ajax engine has been pretty well debugged. So now all we need to do is start inserting some inventory and we'll be in bussiness so to speak.

The silver lining has been the backend, I've always considered myself to be more of a systems programmer than a web developer so today I whipped up a quick script that should make scaling later much easier. The script allows us to insert files into one directory and then parse them into an appropriate user directory. This design will allow a cluster approach to be implemented more easily in the future.

Regards,
Adam Haney

Coming Up Fast

2008-12-08T20:08:00.000-08:00

Database engine is go. I now have database and website communication (although not all of the functionality is implemented). Now all I have to do is implement the blob file management system and search and WE CAN GO LIVE.
This has been a realatively short run to get a system like this up and running and I'm very excited that things are going as well as they are. I am anticipating that we can launch the alpha version of the site by Christmas (for Jama) as anticipated.

What's Done:
xml engine
mysql tables built
administrative scripts written
style 2.0 pretty solid

What's left:
user management (we're SO CLOSE a couple more hours hopefully)
file upload
add item (db end)
tagging already uploaded items
lost password retrieval (wheels are turning)
search (which includes navbar, since navbar is basically search)

What's on the horizon:
item sharing with other users
build an outfit drag 'n drop
outfit suggest
facebook app (rate your friends style)
advertisers outfit suggest
and many more...

I'll keep the updates coming as more features come online, but right now it's finals week at my school and time a commodity. I do anticipate that we will go live with all of the non horizon features, and that the horizon features will trickle in some time during Q1 and Q2 of 2009. This should be an exciting journey.

Regards,
Adam

debugging the bug reporter

2008-12-07T03:44:00.000-08:00

tonight I have a bit of a short update. The database is up and running and accepting php queries which means that the registration and inventory system should be less than a week away.

Obviously the style has been hammered out, the style is pretty solid and any suggestions can be forwaded to adam@gitdressed.com

The really exciting news, the domain is registered! As soon as all the server parts go through we will be able to "go live" so to speak and leave the LAN network testing of MTSU and not a moment too soon. I'm anticipating that they alpha release will ship on time.

The last major update that I have for my beta testers is the addition of an error reporting system framework. Now instead of the system simply breaking it will throw an error that should make trouble shooting the system much easier. This system will also be tied to a bug reporting database that will allow users to more easily interact with developers.

This should be fun,

Regards,
Adam

Everybody wants to look pretty

2008-12-06T18:11:00.001-08:00

As of today the website has a new default theme. I've ditched the rounded corners and pastel corners for a sharper set of divs with nice shiny gradients.

I also have the mysql backend up and running and should be able to register real users within the week. I'm having to learn an entirely new scripting language to do this so growth should be exponential (once I get it down things will grow quickly).

I also have developed a new xml parser for xml feeds and other information that should make future collective intelligence algorithms much easier to empliment (more features for you).

Regards,
Adam

Is this thing on?

2008-12-05T02:22:00.000-08:00

Welcome gitdressed users,

As you may know this website is still under heavy development, this blog will serve as a way for me to update users as to what is working and what isn't as we approach the alpha 0.1 release which is scheduled for December 25th, 2008.

Currently Working:
xml page generator
error reporting for bad xml requests
navbar animation
zip code finder for users
website layout and forms

Currently Not Working:
registration (currently working on)
login (soon to follow)
add Item
search
thumb nail generation

I'm hoping to have many of these features working by the begining of next week. In the mean time if you'd like to give feed back as to any layout/xml parsing bugs or any style suggestions you are welcome to do so in the comments section of this blog.

Regards,
Adam