Tiki Central Improvements!

Aloha everyone,

I'm proud to announce perhaps the biggest change to Tiki Central since it moved to Tikiroom.com!

A small list:

• Tiki Central's search has been completely re-written to be more powerful and is now blazingly fast!
• There's now text-highlighting of your search terms in the messages themselves
• Relative dates (ex: yesterday; 5 days ago) are displayed on posts made within the last 30 days
• Some minor cosmetic changes have been made to both forum and non-forum pages
• Tiki Central is now on a faster server! This should increase performance all around.

These changes have been in the works for some time now, and are actually just a small list of the changes that have been made. I'll be posting more about everything else in the future. A tip of the hat goes to Humuhumu for MySQL help!

I want to thank everyone for visiting and contributing to Tiki Central and helping make it what it's become today. It's a pleasure to improve it thanks to you all.

Mahalo,

Hanford

I thought the background was different and I noticed the speed difference. Working great!

Humuhumu make things hum ahhh...

:)
SES

Thanks for all the hard work.

Mahalo Hanford!
:tiki:

I like the minor cosmetic changes (that print background design behind us here). Lends a lot of atmosphere!

Wow! I used search before I saw that something was done!! It was so fast I was afraid to sit too close to the screen, for fear it might suck my face off!! Great feature!

Way to go Hanford and Humu. Everything seems to be much faster and I like the "Relative Dates" idea as well. Nice work!

A well oiled machine all the way around, mahalo ya all.

It still won't wash my car and tune my ukulele...
...so what good is it?

:wink:

Mahalo, Kahuna!

YES, Much faster all round. I used the search this morning and the page popped up so fast I thought it was a mistake, but it was real!I think this improvement will encourage us all to use the search feature more often. I know I will.
"It's the Little things that mean a Lot", Thanks Hanford and Humuhumu, You guys make us SO Proud.

TC is so much faster, I now have more free time for mai tais!
Thanks you two.

Whoa! Lightning fast results on search - thanks Hanford!!!!

Awesome job.

Love It! The search tool can pull up ALL of the past posts from each member now. Very thorough a great addition and with a speedy delivery to boot! Super Duper! Thanks :D

Thanks for continuing to put so much effort into this wonderful little place on the web. To take something that by all accounts is awesome, and continue to tinker with it (even though no one was complaining) and improve on it is commendable. Hanford, you deserve a some sort of medal.

What riptide said...

and may I add this site is my escape from dulldrome, without it I might go postal.

:drink: Cheers! To all you do for us!

So a little more information here:

The old server was simply not cutting it anymore. Tiki Central had outgrown it. It often lagged for general browsing. Searches took 10 to 20 seconds to complete, and I always felt a little bad telling new users to use search before posting when I knew it would take that long and probably lead to frustration.

When I got TC running on the new server as a test last week, I saw search times cut in half or more, which was major, but it still was not what I wanted, so I started doing research as to how I could improve it.

So now I've completely rewritten it and I'm very happy with the performance. Let's hope this new server keeps us up and running for a while!

~Hanford

Love the changes hanford, the new faster search make it much more inviting and i realize the it
is very useful . example... I sumtimes forget where i have posted in other threads and this has helped. Also i can figure out if any one is talking obout me,hehe jk, or if some one has responded to me in there thread. you know what i mean...

WOW This is GREAT!

Now if tiki central could become an ISP for tikiphiles, I'd drop my current one like a bad habit.

Great work guys! Mohaller! :wink:

Damn! Them Searches is Fast!

On 2005-07-06 11:25, DawnTiki wrote:
The search tool can pull up ALL of the past posts from each member now.

Yeah, I noticed this as well. This will help in finding old posts for which you can't remember a key word. Nice.

Also, I went into the Member List and clicked on a letter and was waiting (per usual) to go to the filtered list and realized I was already there the second I clicked! Very fast.

hokey smokes! blazing fast... thanks for the upgrades!

I didn't think is was possible to improve on perfection...

but of course, H+H, anything is possible if you 2 are involved!

Awesome changes! I went into Benzarts history of posts just to see if everything came up - it did, all 49 pages of posts! I'm gonna do a seach next just for the hell of it.

I didn't realise how hooked i was till I logged on yesterday, and got the "under maintenance" message - I was lost!

Thanks again Hanford for a top site.

Wow, Hanford. I innocently asked about the whole "military time" thing last night at the Tiki Ti and "Voila" today it is changed. There must be something really special in those Ray's Mistakes!

You are a wizard...no, the king... no, the GOD of programming.

Thanks everyone! I'm glad everyone likes the new changes.

Riptide: Yeah, it's something I wanted to do anyway. You can hover your mouse pointer over the dates to see the old formatted date as a tooltip.

Hanford,

The search speed is simply amazing now. Thanks so much!

one thing I'd like to point out: The Anti-Double post gizmo in Shout! didn't work earlier today. I'm not sure if I did something out of the ordinary or if that feature was lost in the move. It's saved me from looking like a schmuck many times so I'd hate to see it disappear.

May your next mai tai be free...

-Z

Just like drinking a well made mai tai while looking into the eyes of a beautiful wahine under a tropical sunset.....smoooooth. :wink:

On 2005-07-07 18:16, Feelin' Zombified wrote:
one thing I'd like to point out: The Anti-Double post gizmo in Shout! didn't work earlier today. I'm not sure if I did something out of the ordinary or if that feature was lost in the move. It's saved me from looking like a schmuck many times so I'd hate to see it disappear.

I just tested, it appears to still be working as normal. It's not able to catch all double posts, for instance, if your last shout is no longer on the screen and you hit refresh, it'll repost. But it should catch very nearly all of the little buggers. If you can give a few more details about what you were doing, I might be able to recreate it and see what happened.

great job!

Tremendous!!!

The improvements have fixed my problems with remaining logged in (since switching ISPs I've been having to log in everytime I've posted or opened a new page)! I can even browse the Grand Members Forum again.

Good Job, Hanford! Mahalo!

On 2005-07-07 17:36, hanford_lemoore wrote:
Thanks everyone! I'm glad everyone likes the new changes.

Riptide: Yeah, it's something I wanted to do anyway. You can hover your mouse pointer over the dates to see the old formatted date as a tooltip.
LOVE the new high-speed search - muchas gracias Hanford and Humu2! (Wow! I've got whiplash!)

I gotta admit, though, that I kinda, um, well, hate the new relative time vs. the date feature. It's probably cuz I can't keep track of what day it is and I'm really bad at math, so saying somebody posted something 187 days ago won't help me know if they posted it before, during, or after a tiki event, for example - something which I enjoy knowing.

And I'm afraid I'm not getting the part to which you alluded above, Hanford, about hovering the mouse over the dates; what dates? I have only the relative date and it doesn't pop up with a real date when I hover.

Sorry I'm so clueless - plus, since I've been SUCH a lazy slob and STILL haven't renewed my Grand Membership, I really have no right to complain....but I guess I am anyway :wink:

I gotta admit, though, that I kinda, um, well, hate the new relative time vs. the date feature. It's probably cuz I can't keep track of what day it is and I'm really bad at math, so saying somebody posted something 187 days ago won't help me know if they posted it before, during, or after a tiki event, for example - something which I enjoy knowing.

First off, thanks for being honest. I need honest feedback. I wasn't sure at first if I liked the relative dates either.

Relative dates are only displayed for the last 30 days. After that it reverts to the original date format.

I have only the relative date and it doesn't pop up with a real date when I hover.

On both Firefox and IE you can place your mouse cursor over the relative date and hold it there for a second ... the classic-style date will pop up.

Cool. It's like magic.

Ooh, cool! It IS like magic! (I was impatiently hovering before. Curse my impatient hovering tendency.)

I guess I can deal with 30 days. (But you have no idea how very, very badly I suck at math.) Thanks for having the foresight to not make it go beyond 30 days, though!

All the other recent updates and improvements have been nothing but FAB, BTW. I'm constantly in awe at how you manage to make something perfect, um, perfect-er. Thank you!

F

On 2005-07-15 13:34, Formikahini wrote:
I guess I can deal with 30 days. (But you have no idea how very, very badly I suck at math.) Thanks for having the foresight to not make it go beyond 30 days, though!

I'm really bad at math too, which is why I implemented this. Since I'm not good with dates it was much easier for me to see that a reply to a topic was posted "yesterday" than if it were in absolute date format.

Hanford you are the Manford...and son. :lol:
Cool additions, really like um.
yup,
Chongolio

I just noticed the personal message button at the bottom of each users posts. Another cool feature.
Thanks Hanford.

hey hanford!

i usually hate & ignore ad banners, but i gotta say, i really like the Product of the Day and also the Tiki Advertisers on Tiki Central.

its like a little game of Banner Roulette every time i go to a new message.. and i like that!

thanks for Banner-o-Matic..

shopaholically yours
elicia

Thanks Dogbytes ...

I for a long time have promised banner-space for many users on TC to promote their stuff for free. There was no "banner system", so the best I could do was put up an image and then after a while, take it down and put up the next one. As Tiki Central grew in popularity there became a backlog of people waiting for their banners to run. A perfect example of this was the NW Tiki Crawl and Chicago Exotica. Both events were coming up quickly, but only one could be displayed. Plus, there were other members patiently waiting in the wings for me to list their banners like I had promised.

It occurred to me that a banner engine would kill 3 birds with one stone: it would allow multiple ads to run on TC at a time (via cycling), charging users for ads would reduce the number of ads at any given time, and it would make me some extra dough.

I want to make sure that area at the top of Tiki Central continues to work for both advertisers, and for the people who use TC everyday. To that end I only want banners for things I think Tiki Centralites will want to see, and I don't want so many ads in the system that it feels diluted or that Advertisers don't feel their banner is being seen.

Please continue to give me feedback on how this is working.

You can advertise on Tiki Central by clicking here

I only read TC for the ads...

On 2005-07-26 22:08, bananabobs wrote:
I only read TC for the ads...

I thought it was for the yearly Pigskin Preview Issue.....