Infield Parking Blog

The new media upload function on Infield Parking will feature a number of enhancements over the current system. In the first place, it allows for the upload of photos, video and audio. The current site only allows for the upload of photos. Once uploaded, the files can be added to posts in the main forums. So, you won’t need to link to files stored at a third party site like Photo Bucket.

From the desktop, there is also a bulk upload that allows you to select multiple files at once to upload. During the upload process, you can add titles, descriptions or tags to each file or the whole set. This should prove to be a valuable time saver for managing your media.

Once uploaded, you can create a widget player of your files and share them with friends and post them on other websites or blogs.

You can also follow your other Infield Parking friends. Whether it is a driver or another user, you can receive an alert each time he/she uploads a new image, video or audio clip. This makes it very easy to follow your friends activities and stay up on all the current postings. You will also be able to comment on your friends media and vice versa.

The feature that I am most excited about is a new mobile media upload. You will be able to upload images or video from your phone directly to your own media gallery. Catch a great shot at the races or anywhere else, simply email it from your phone to your media gallery and the image is uploaded automatically. You can add a custom title by putting it in the subject line of the email.

Pretty sweet!

Let me know what you think.

-Mike

Before the holidays, I wrote about the groups feature that we are building in the new platform for Infield Parking.  I have some screen shots to share with you. As I mentioned in that post,

The groups feature gives a user (you) control to setup his/her own area for chatting about topics of interest to you and like-minded other members. You are then responsible for managing this group. As the administrator, you can decide if a group is public - open to all users, or by invitation only, meaning participants in the Group must be approved by you before being admitted. You can also share the admin duties with other friends in the group.

From the overview page you can see the basic features of a group and their location in the layout.

Each group will have a:

• logo or graphic uploaded by the group owner
• name
• button for “applying to the group”
• lock icon to show if the group is invitation only or public
• summary of the number of members, media uploads, and discussions
• intro text where the purpose or philosophy of the group can be stated
• list of the group administrators

Below the summary information are call outs for the group discussion board, group media (images, video and audio supported) uploads and the group members. Behind each call out on the group main page is a detail page. A couple of points on these features are:

• the groups discussion board is not as full featured as the public forums (no media upload into posts and no sub-forums).
• media uploaded to a group page will also be uploaded to the media section of a users profile.
• comments made on media will be attached to the media and viewable from the user’s profile who uploaded the image.

There will be a main listing of all of the existing groups on the main navigation. You will be able to browse or search for different groups. There is also a groups tab on the user profile, so you will be able to manage your groups from your profile, as well as see what groups your friends have joined.

There was a lively conversation after my first post regarding the Groups feature and its use. As I mentioned then, I am very excited about the feature and hope that it has a really positive effect on the IP community. I also wanted to mention that the designers had a lot of fun with the comps. The sample images and text are very tongue-in-cheek.

-Mike

Hi my name is Mike and I am a lame blogger. It has been 36 days since my last blog post (only 22 if you count comment replies :-). Sorry for the long delay. The development schedule, the holidays and a family emergency have kept me from the blog. I hope that everyone enjoyed the holidays and is psyched about 2009. I know I am.

The development team is completing the new forum functionality. In today’s post, I want to share with you some screen shots and descriptions of how the new forums will work. Over the course of the next week, I will do the same with the Groups, Profiles and multi-media sections.

The Forums have been the heart and soul of Infield Parking since launch. So, we spent a good deal of time synthesizing your comments and building the functionality for them.

The New Forum is broken down into 5 basic Categories with forums and sub-forums.

The community managers will be able to add forums and sub-forums as they are needed.

Some other exciting features include a new search and sort feature. Yes, you can actually search for threads.., and get back meaningful results. The sort will allow you to limit your view to see only posts by your listed friends or by all IP users.

There will be a WYSIWYG editor  for adding text styles to your posts. By popular demand, the edit button is back. You will be able to upload media (photo, graphic, video or audio) directly to your post, rather than having to link to it from another source. The media will also be added to your gallery when it is uploaded. In the “forum post” image above, you will also see a media quick view that gives you a way to scan all media uploaded to a post.

Let us know what you think.

And thanks for your patience.

-Mike

Infield Parking Team

One of the features that has been on my personal wish list is Groups. Anyone familiar with MySpace or Facebook will know immediately what I’m talking about. The groups feature gives a user (you) control to setup his/her own area for chatting about topics of interest to you and like-minded other members. You are then responsible for managing this group. As the administrator, you can decide if a group is public - open to all users, or by invitation only, meaning participants in the Group must be approved by you before being admitted. You can also share the admin duties with other friends in the group.

Each group has its own discussion board for its members. The group adminstrator can set the tone of that discussion and moderate it accordingly (within the boundaries of acceptable behavior as established by Infield Parking). Groups will also have a media gallery for members to share images and videos.

So, why am I so hot for this feature? There are several cool things. First, it lets individuals set the agenda for the group, allowing conversations to flourish around countless topics. Second, boundaries are created. Groups can be exclusive, so that populations can come together around topics without interference. Or if the group is not to your liking, you can vote with a mouse click and leave that group without it affecting your overall experience with the site.

Let me know what you think of the Groups feature, what Groups you might start and what other features you might like to see in Groups.

-m

There have been a lot of questions about the speed and reliability of the site. The term “tired hamster” was used to describe our current engine. The new site will be on a completely new platform. We are not attempting to patch or build on top of the existing site. This alone will fix many of the speed and usability issues that the site currently has. The platform that we have chosen is already in use at sites with high traffic volume and the results are impressive.

We have spent the last two days steeped in wireframes for features of the new site. The wireframes are simple layouts that show how each page is laid out and details the functionality. It becomes the blueprint of the site that the designers and engineers use to do their job (you can read more about wireframes here). So far, we have reviewed the wireframes for the Forums, Groups, profile and events calendar. As each piece gets signed off on, I can provide more details on the features.

That being said, I will say now that we are bringing back the “edit button” for Forums. This is based on the requests posted to this blog and on the current site.

-m