Today I’m releasing version 3.1.1 of vSlider, which is a small update with a new feature that quite some people have asked for. Now you can fully hide the header image when displaying Gallery2 pages through WPG2. This can be used to allocate more screen space to what’s really important: your photos!
To turn this feature on, go to the “vSlider Theme Options” page, and in the Header section enable the checkbox for “Disable the header in WPG2 pages?”.
That’s it - hope you like it

Tags: vSlider
Categories: Maintenance
No Comments »

The eagerly awaited version 3.1 of vSlider is at last ready and available for download. As usual, you have both the WP version and the companion G2 theme. Get them from the usual place, in the Cool Stuff section.

So, what’s new? The single biggest change is the new “pre-rendering” feature for the rounded corners. If you recall, the main driver for creating version 3 was the ability to have configurable colors and sizes, but still have nice touches like rounded corners and shadows. The solution to achieve this was based on a lot of Javascript code being executed once the page was loaded, which worked great. Unfortunately, it became apparent that in long pages, with a lot of posts or comments, this slowed down the rendering of the page considerably. Version 3.1 introduces a new technique - when you choose new colors for your theme, vSlider pre-renders the matching rounded corners and stores them as normal image files on the server side. This is done only once. Then the theme templates will use these to assemble the post frame, using regular HTML. This results in no Javascript code, and it is much, much faster. The image generation is completely done in PHP and adjusts to any selection, so any color combination is possible. The only restriction is that you must have the GD library enabled in your PHP installation. I believe this to be the case for most people, but in case you don’t have it, you can either enable it or ask your host provider to do that for you. vSlider will tell you if you can use this feature or not. If you can’t, you can still use the previous Javascript way - for most websites, this is also a good alternative.

On Gallery, the most important change is that Lightbox spans across multiple pages. Before, you could only do Next and Prev on the photos that were actually visible in a single page. Now it includes all photos of the chosen album.

There are also new features, such as configurable number of open posts, showing the post author under the title, support for the native WP tags, new subnavigation bar, better support for WPG2 and quite a few bug fixes.
You can get more details from the download pages.

Hope you like this new version - if you do use it, then I strongly encourage you to donate to our OneWorldToSee project. Now only 10 cents a pixel .

Tags: vSlider3
Categories: Maintenance, OneWorldToSee
14 Comments »

Here’s a useful tip: if you barely have enough time to maintain one website, don’t try to maintain two!
That’s a lesson I’ve learned kind of the hard way So I migrated all the content over from OneWorldToSee to this one – seemed like the logical thing to do, considering this is the most active blog…

Also, for the first time since I started iRui.ac, I’ve decided to change the width – I’m still quite fond of the original 800 pixel base, but I have to admit is quite narrow for modern resolutions. And the extra space does come in handy.

In other news, I’m now running the latest vSlider 3.1, which I will be making available for download shortly. I’ll go into detail about what’s new when it’s ready, but the most obvious and important change is that the speed of rendering the pages should now be drastically higher than before. If you are a regular here, you probably already noticed it

Finally, the “Sale” initiative for squares on the OneWorldToSee map has now become permanent. That means that from now on, the standard donation for every square is just $10. If you have no idea of what I’m talking about, read this

Categories: Maintenance, OneWorldToSee
1 Comment »

Quoting from OneWorldToSee.com:

We’ve decided to have a big sale on our World For Sale map. The first 1000 squares will now cost only 10$ each! C’mon, that’s really, really cheap. Certainly you are not going to miss this opportunity to leave your mark on the world And once the map starts to get really full, you’ll be glad that you seized this opportunity while it lasted
What are you waiting for? Jump to our donation page right now.

We also want to reward the pioneers that already donated small contributions - they also get one square for free to place whatever image they wish.

If you haven’t heard of our project yet, read about our dream, and how you can help making it real.

If you are using vSlider3 and wanted to get your own logo on the One World To See map but thought that 50$ was too expensive, this is your chance.
I want to thank Jonathan for suggesting the idea. Thanks man, hope it works

On other news, there is a new Swedish translation of vSlider available. Thanks to Thomas for this.

Categories: OneWorldToSee
No Comments »

You might have noticed that the site was unreachable the last two days… it was working fine, but the domain name wasn’t
My registrar screwed up big time - they didn’t renew it with the central authority of the .AC domain, even though I payed for it weeks ago! And even worse, they simply don’t reply to my mails - I had to solve the problem with nic.ac directly, but that meant I had to pay TWICE.
That’s one customer they lost - now I only need to get my money back…

Categories: Maintenance
6 Comments »