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Submitted by caedes 03/14/07 10:18 AM GMT
A week or so ago I quietly updated the site to allow members to upload images of (almost) any aspect ratio. This means that you can now upload your widescreen desktop wallpaper as well as non-wallpaper 'artistic' images. I think that this change is very important to the site because wide format displays are becoming increasingly common. Also, it was not good for the site when our many very talented artists had to go elsewhere to share images that were not in desktop format. The current system will accept any images between 600px and 3000px on a side.
There were many parts of the site that needed to be changed in order to work with non-wallpaper shaped images. This included the main image information pages, all galleries, the voting booth, and the search engine. This is also why the image drop shadows have been removed and replaced with a thin grey border. The shadows may return once I figure out a good way to generate them. The change also called for the purchase of a new server dedicated to serving images. This is because the new system generates images on the fly (and caches them) once they are requested for the first time. This allows us to save disk space on the main server because it only needs to keep the originally uploaded image file (not the smaller image sizes).
Finally, I've made a small change in the way dates are displayed on the site. The system now guesses your time zone based on the time that your computer is set to (so the timezone field in your profile is ignored). This means that all dates (even those in personal messages) should display correctly for your current time zone as long as your computer's time is set correctly. The system has to use javascript for this functionality, so if you have javascript turned off you will see only the old time display format. I've also fixed the code so that the month/day order is followed according to the settings in your profile.
If you find and problems with these changes just PM me or post a comment to this thread or the Suggestions forum in the discussion board. Thanks!
