Sunday, March 9, 2008

New Features - thumbnail refesh, new gallery urls and more

I have made a few updates to myvidster. Nothing ground breaking, but these enhancements will help improve the overall experience of using myvidster.

Invite link added to top menu bar.
While the invite function has been available for awhile only a few users have used it. Adding a link on the menu bar will encourage its used. For more clarity of the invite function, it is a way for you to invite your friends to checkout and join myvidster just like inviting friends to join myspace or facebook.

Thumbnail refresh
This was an update that I personally wanted for awhile, but did not have the time to code it till now. This feature will only work for videos where the thumbnail is a screen shot of the video itself (and not a thumbnail image acquire from the source site). This all may sound Greek, but I will provide an example. Let’s say you bookmark a video that is not from youtube and myvidster could not find a thumbnail on the source page. A few minutes after you have bookmarked the video you will be given 3 thumbnails which are screen shots of the video player. There will be times when the generate thumbnails are just a blank images this is due to the video not loading during the screen shot process. When editing your video bookmark you will be given the option to refresh your thumbnails. This will send a request to myvidster to retake the screen shot with the hope that the video would successfully load.

More visibility of video permission (Public / Private / Adult)
A few of my beta testers felt that this ‘feature’ was not needed, but I will defend it as follow. I have ran into issues where I wanted to share videos with my friends (using the share video link under the video), but they were not able to view the video. The reason was because I set the video permission to private. Displaying the permission next to the video (I also color coded it) will serve as a friendly reminder of what permissions you set for your videos.

Gallery url update
You have the option to select a gallery url (ie. myvidster.com/mysite) if you opt out on selecting a url, the gallery id would be used (ie. myvidster.com/123). I notice a potential problem with this method if a user creates a gallery url with a number. If you are a coder you know this will conflict with other galleries. To solve this conflict a new gallery url format will be used.
No gallery url selected: www.myvidster.com/gallery/123
Gallery url selected: www.myvidster.com/mysite

For those who have not selected a gallery url you will need update any web bookmarks you may have created. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have created.