tabulas

First off, thanks to all of those who tried out the Flickr integration! I know there were some rough spots, but this weekend, I spent some time polishing off some of the features.

If you go to the Flickr sync page, you can now one-click delete all images that were imported from Flickr. I've also gotten rid of that nasty bug that had the Flickr images import into the root-level folder.

One of the "smart" things that Tabulas does with the Flickr sync is to not actually delete images that were imported from Flickr. Since the system resyncs your images from Flickr every few minutes, if I actually deleted your photos, they would just come back again!

So in order to work around that, Tabulas will store your deleted Flickr images into a recycling bin - if you want to force images to re-import, you need to empty out your recycling bin.

The "recent images" on the homepage of Tabulas has also been updated to be a bit more visually fun - I hope you discover some talented photographers on Tabulas!

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What's very important to me is in keeping that sense of community spirit of Tabulas alive. And over the past few months, there has been a back and forth between the spammers who keep creating fake sites and myself. I've create tons of tools in the back to help deal with the spammers, but even they can't catch everything.

Well, you can now help me out!

Whenever you visit a Tabulas site, there is now a link that says "Report spammer:"

Simply click this button, and you'll have logged a vote against this site! If enough votes are captured for this user within a time period, we'll automatically ban them. (Patron accounts will automatically ban that site!)

Hopefully this gives more power to YOU to help keep the Tabulas community clean, and will let me focus more time on developing better features for Tabulas!

A little while ago, I asked you why you don't use Tabulas for more gallery. Your response? Well, I hate uploading to multiple sites!

Well, now the first step towards that is now gone. You can now integrate your Flickr account with Tabulas. To begin, set-up your Flickr account integration. Then, sync your account.

What does syncing do? It pulls in all your Flickr photos and creates a copy of them in your Tabulas gallery (don't worry, your images are still hosted on Flickr; we don't download the actual images).

You can view an example of it here. We link back to the original Flickr photo, but they show up in the same stream as your Tabulas photos!

We'll also poll your Flickr account every once in a while and pull down new photos you upload to Flickr... automatically!

To help support these changes, some additional modifications were made to the gallery feature: we now paginate views. While you used to be be able to view 100 images at once, that seemed like overkill for bandwidth; we use the pagination controls and show 25 images at a time now.

Let me know how you like these changes - these are only the beginning to a series of great changes that we can make to make the gallery/journaling experience inside Tabulas much smoother!

Hey all - good news and bad news.

The good news is that I have spent some time redoing the gallery feature - I have really focused on making it look good for the new default template. It's much cleaner now, and uses larger sizes for the images.

The album view is much simplified now - a lot of the extra information has been removed, and a more grid-like layout is used:

When you click an album, you'll see much larger images shown in order. Try clicking on one of them; you'll get a lightbox with a LARGE sized image!

With this view, you can quickly use the left/right arrow buttons to go through a gallery. No more clicking constantly to see next/previous!

The bad news is I had to fix up the markup for this new gallery; this will cause styles for custom skins to break. 

I really hate to break markup, but I felt this was necessary in moving forward with Tabulas - you can rest assured that the markup as it stands should be pretty final for the immediate future, though!

I have lots more exciting features coming into the gallery over the coming few days - be on the lookout for it!

tabulas

Hey all -

As most of you know, I'm the sole developer who is working on Tabulas. While there is now another site owner, I'm still the one who is driving the day-to-day product direction.

One thing I've always felt could be improved about Tabulas is the default layouts. However, it's been hard for me to add new features because I've had to support so many templates.

In order for me to build better features and make YOUR sites look better, it's important for me to be able to focus on one design.

So, starting today, all sites have standardized on a single layout. If you were using a custom layout, you have not been affected. Anybody who was using a standard Tabulas template has now been switched over to the new default one.

I will be spending the upcoming weeks prettying up the pages - especially in the gallery area.

I know this kind of sucks, but it's one of those things that are necessary for me to continue improving Tabulas.

Thanks for understanding!