ANNOUNCEMENT: even MORE New Tiki Central features

Hi Guys,

Over the next few weeks I'm going to be tweaking various parts of Tiki Central.

Big Change: Google Search bar
The first big change is the Google Search and the quick-links that are on the TC homepage, here:

http://www.tikicentral.com/

(Notice it just below the Tiki Central logo).

The search box does a google search (in a new window) and the buttons below it are quick links to popular sites.

I added this to help out people who have TIki Central set to their homepage, and to perhaps encourage more people to do the same.

Another cool change: Goto New Post
When reading a topic, you'll notice at the top of each page is a link that looks like this:

If you you're on a page with NEW messages, you can click on this to hop down to the new new messages and read from there.

Note: this only works if the new messages are on the current page. If you're on page 2 of the topic and all the new messages are on page 4, clicking this button won't do anything.

However, it is now VERY EASY to spot new messages: just look for the new post Icon on a message:

See, it's all nice and bright and easy to spot. This makes finding the new messages much easier.

PLEASE NOTE:

When eBay or Yahoo makes a change to their website that you don't like, there's not much you can do it about it. But here on Tiki Central, I like to expirement, and when I have something I think people will like, I'll add it. But if people don't like it, I have no problem removing it or changing it. In other words, if something happens to TC that you absolutely hate, don't worry over it, just send me an email.

As always: feedback on the changes can be posted here or in email! I want to hear what you think.

~Hanford

[ Edited by: hanford_lemoore on 2003-09-23 17:51 ]

I think you're a god Hanford!

Jab,

The drink contest is over, and you won 3rd place; you can stop that now.

~Hanford

Oh yeah, I take it back

Hanford,
With the Google search feature added I have Tiki Central as my new home page. Great
additions as usual.

Anychance that a Tiki Carving forum could be set up, or perhaps a Tiki Artisans forum???

Just an idea...
TG
http://www.exotic-tiki-gardens.com

I've had a couple of requests for this. What if we made it for Tiki Projects (Carving, building, sculpting, painting, etc)?

Do you think we'd get enough posts in it?

Let me know people!

~Hanford

Hey Hanford,
The updates looks great and thanks for putting such effort into the project (We never met, and there is nothing (I can think of)to take advantage of our acquaintance), so take that as a genuine compliment.
I would like to see a forum where all these talented TC artists display their works for show and sale. I think the artists would feel these work of arts would find a better home here, instead of a sterile Ebay buyer.

A compassion for an artist's work is better than a few more bucks (do you think they bought it Unga?)

Just a tiki thought for what it's worth.

A Tiki Cheers To You!

[ Edited by: Unga Bunga on 2003-09-23 23:06 ]

[ Edited by: susane on 2004-01-20 06:26 ]

"We never met"

I met the elusive Mr. Lemoore once, I believe it was Vegas, 1967, but could have been the mysterious backroom of a well-known Polynesian establishment. I do recall having to talk to him through a vent in a door, while wearing empty Kleenex boxes on my bare feet. Plus, I had to bring several chili- cheeseburgers as an "offering". I was given a mason jar in return, something about purity of fluids and such...I don't want to talk about it.

"H.L.", as the group of dark-suited minions that surrounded him always addressed him, was everything one would expect: The lore, as much as I can determine, is all true. High tech guru, raconteur, seer, massage therapist, genius. They say he owns half of Daly City (the good part), designed the world's largest Bonsai treehouse, and can kill a man 30 different ways.

I don't doubt any of it.

On 2003-09-23 21:05, hanford_lemoore wrote:
I've had a couple of requests for this. What if we made it for Tiki Projects (Carving, building, sculpting, painting, etc)?

Do you think we'd get enough posts in it?

Let me know people!

~Hanford

Look at the number of posts in the carving tiki post! its freakin huge! I think if there were a tiki artists forum where the whole artisan thing could be broken down into seperate posts of "how to carve","look at my carvings" First time carvings","Paintings", etc would make for a very lively,well ordered, and extremely educational area.

Heck i want to learn more about carving! The feW foamcore tikis I've done tell me I need more help!

I think building a tiki bar posts could fall into this area.

TG

[ Edited by: TikiGardener on 2003-09-24 00:09 ]

Excellent idea Hanford and TikiGardener. I think we would get more than enough post.

I think a Tiki Projects forum is an excellent idea. Personally, I don't have the space yet to build a tiki bar and I don't have the urge to carve a tiki, so I find myself skipping over such topics. However, someday when I do build my own tiki bar I'll find the experiences and information posted here extremely helpful. It would be nice to find it all in one place.

Here's another "Yay" vote. I find cramming all that info into one thread on carving or painting a little difficult to deal with for some reason. But I'm slow like that.

Also, I think a separate forum would encourage a deeper level of discussion.

Another yes vote on the Tiki Projects section. I've often wondered what goes on in the overstuffed Tiki Carvers thread, but I've been too intimidated to venture in there and get caught up. I'd love to take up carving at some point.

A wee suggestion: the primary way I'm able to consistently tell which threads I'm caught up on is the color difference between visited links & fresh ones. (The colored folders & new message icons aren't reliable, as I'm prone to refreshing the page & then toddling off to do something else before I actually get caught up.) The difference in the link colors works great, except for that the colors are verrrry similar... I kinda have to bob my head around and scrutinize to tell which are the fresh threads. If the fresh link color were a bit brighter yellow... oh my god, it would just so totally rock my world.

I'm easy that way.

The best tiki bar is the one that's within stumbling distance of your bed
The Humuhumu Room

[ Edited by: Humuhumu on 2003-09-24 15:20 ]

Yes, TIKI DIY.

I say, the better we subdivide the place, the easier it is to keep up with what you want. Messages roll off way to fast sometimes. I'd love to see a way to keep a new message from hitting the second page so quickly. More sections would help.

On 2003-09-23 23:28, midnite_tiki wrote:

They say he owns half of Daly City (the good part)

I don't doubt any of it.

Except that there is no good half of Daly City.

(With the possible exception of the Peppermill)

On 2003-09-24 17:50, martiki6 wrote:
Except that there is no good half of Daly City.

(With the possible exception of the Peppermill)

And Krispy Kreme, and In-N-Out Burger.

[ Edited by: cynfulcynner on 2003-09-24 18:13 ]

Thanks for all your hard work...I know myself and everyone appreciates it! I also dig the project section.

On 2003-09-24 18:11, cynfulcynner wrote:

On 2003-09-24 17:50, martiki6 wrote:
Except that there is no good half of Daly City.

(With the possible exception of the Peppermill)

And Krispy Kreme, and In-N-Out Burger.

And Koi Palace.

Hanford, I was just curious, I know you made some changes to encourage people to make TC their homepage, but do you have some kind of bandwith limit per month or anything? If so, wouldn't you want to discourage unecessary traffic unless the person really wanted to be on Tiki Central?

On 2003-09-24 15:17, Humuhumu wrote:
If the fresh link color were a bit brighter yellow... oh my god, it would just so totally rock my world.

Hi Humuhumu,

For now I want to keep Tiki Central's colors the way they are, but for you and others I've
created a new theme called "Tiki Central Highlights".

To use it, log in, then click on "Edit Preferences" then choose it from the Board Theme menu.

It's funny, I didn't even know there was a difference between link colors, and I didn't even understand how that could work (the URLs don't change when new posts are added). But then I realized that a little thing that I always thought was a bug in the code is actually what makes it work.

Let me know if these new colors are better of if they need more work.

~Hanford

OH MY GOD IT'S BEAUTIFUL!!! Thank you so so so so much Hanford... just when I thought I couldn't love you more... seriously, this is going to make TC so much easier for me.

Hanford, I was just curious, I know you made some changes to encourage people to make TC their homepage, but do you have some kind of bandwith limit per month or anything? If so, wouldn't you want to discourage unecessary traffic unless the person really wanted to be on Tiki Central?

Thanks for asking. No, I don't have a bandwidth limit on this server ... we would have surpassed it looooong ago. Would you believe that last month alone tikicentral.com served up 9.8gb of web pages, across 1,372,029 hits? That's gigabytes ... so 9000 megabytes, more or less.

~Hanford

[ Edited by: hanford_lemoore on 2003-09-24 22:58 ]

Love the new section, the only other thing I can recommend is a way to mark forums as "Read", so that way new posts show up more prominently. I'm on a couple of "EZ Board" hosted sites that use that feature, and it makes it easy to see what's been posted since the last time I visited.

On 2003-09-24 23:02, Hot Lava wrote:
Love the new section, the only other thing I can recommend is a way to mark forums as "Read", so that way new posts show up more prominently. I'm on a couple of "EZ Board" hosted sites that use that feature, and it makes it easy to see what's been posted since the last time I visited.

The best way to do that is Humuhumu's method (set your preferences Theme to "tiki Central Highlights"), then just read the topic to mark it as read. You'll notice that all unread topics are bright yellow, read ones are orange-yellow.

This will keep track of the messages you already read. If you're just looking for topics that have changed since the last time you visited (regardless of whether you're reading them), just look for the red folder on the main page.

This is the best I can offer for now.

The forum currently keeps track of new topics purely by date (in other words, it compares the date of the last time you logged in to the dates of Topics, then it marks topics that are newer as "new"). For me to add topic-by-topic marking functionality would require a complete rewrite of the way that works ... something I don't think I have the skill to do!

~Hanford

[ Edited by: hanford_lemoore on 2003-09-24 23:37 ]

Hanford,
Here's a thought for a feature that would be very handy...

Suppose I'm searching for something to try to find any old posts on a subject (eg, "pimento liqueur"). The list that comes up provides a direct link to the thread that contains a matching reply, but not a link directly to the reply itself. So sometimes it's hard to find the actual reply within a thread that actually matches the search term, especially in a long thread. It'd be really cool to have a "view reply" kind of feature or link for the search results, just like you do for emailed replies. Does this make sense?

Sorry if it's already a feature and I'm just blind.

And as always, thanks for the great job on everything, and congrats for the beautiful item from Bob and Leroy.

-Randy

Thanks for the suggestion, Randy. Unfortunately I don't know enough about this forum software to figure out how to do that ... yet. When I get more time I think I'll dive into that, it's been bugging me for a while.

~Hanford