Rephotography and postcard site online - users needed

[flatpete]

Hi there everyone, my name is Peter, I'm a PhD student at Lancaster university. I have set up a website for users to upload postcards and photographs, that also allows users to create rephotographs to see the visual changes.

It is very much in a Beta phase and I would like some people to join up and take part in using the tool and get some feedback as to issues that may be raised. I have also set up a forum for discussing a variety of topics, one of course will be copyright and I will need quite a bit of a hand in dealing with some issues and concerns that I may have overlooked.

It would be great to get some input from people as I have only really been using it myself.

The address is http://www.historicrephoto.co.uk.

Thanks for your time and I hope to see some suggestions soon.

Regards,

Pete

[flatpete]

Has anybody been able to have a look at the site?

[eastlondonpostcard]

Has anybody been able to have a look at the site?

I've had a quick glance - yes, the concept is good + the intro works well: creating then/now views to display publicly - hmmm, not sure postcard collectors will take to it easily or readily with the amount of work involved. I know many cards in my own collection would be difficult to get a modern day view or would be so unrecognisable because of the changes in the view!

In my opinion, there is not enough to get people started/interested in the project yet + development is needed to make it compatible across platforms: eg I am using Firefox10 on a linux-based platform.

I wish you all success with a very good idea. Well done.

[piggolo]

This looked quite interesting until I tried to register !

Has anyone else registered ?

Thanks

[flatpete]

Has there been a problem with registration?

[flatpete]

Has anybody been able to have a look at the site?

I've had a quick glance - yes, the concept is good + the intro works well: creating then/now views to display publicly - hmmm, not sure postcard collectors will take to it easily or readily with the amount of work involved. I know many cards in my own collection would be difficult to get a modern day view or would be so unrecognisable because of the changes in the view!

In my opinion, there is not enough to get people started/interested in the project yet + development is needed to make it compatible across platforms: eg I am using Firefox10 on a linux-based platform.

I wish you all success with a very good idea. Well done.

Hi eastlondonpostcard, thanks again for the response. I managed to find time, between the 2 jobs and the phd to have a look at the site in my old ubuntu (11.04) system and read up on silverlight support for linux, which i'm surprised to say it is. So i'm installing monodevelop which will allow me to port over from my current silverlight implementation to moonlight for Linux. So hopefully, i'll be able to implement something close to the experience that I have on the windows environment.

If you manage to get a look in a windows environment let me know what you think with a few postcard uploads, I also plugged into panoramio (that google uses for images) to allow you to browse local geotagged images and create a rephoto that way.

I've also implemented a bare bones event tag interface, so when a building changes that can be tagged, and subsequently the same event can be tagged in other images.

It's been a major learning curve developing this beast through self teaching (I come from a geology background hehe).

But yeah, I'll try and implement some stuff for Linux, test on one of my laptops specialized for Ubuntu. What linux distribution/OS are you using?

Regards,

Pete

[flatpete]

This looked quite interesting until I tried to register !

Has anyone else registered ?

Thanks

Hi piggolo,

I was able to see that you managed to get registered okay, but it would be great to know your exact experience of using the site (no matter how awful). I tried various environments (ie, firefox and chrome to be precise) from my own pc at home and came across problems.

I'm very sorry I didn't get back sooner, but thankyou for informing me about this. I suspect it was difficult to navigate, see where to input information (if your using Internet Explorer). As well as that, there might not have been an email verification sent. I looked up on the server the appropriate settings of this and re-tweaked and got it working (albeit through my own laptop), so it would be great if you could come back and have a look.

I have implemented some more features, but I have been developing in order to do some site analysis for my PhD, so the features I have implemented have been geared that way. As a result of this, I have a direct workflow and can often be blindsided to potential bugs. Your help with this would be greatly appreciated.

I also managed to tweak the way the data is sent so that it is more efficient (i.e. less kB/MB downloads .. a concern if your on a budget with the isp).

Let me know what you think. I have also added information to the about section of the website, so you can get an idea of what the site is about. In the next few weeks I shall be looking to fill the f.a.q, possibly with some video to show what a user could do. What do you think?

Thanks again for your help,

Regards,

Pete