Happy xmas!

xmassy image from Scott’s flatsize=160&pic=5522.jpg Happy Xmas to all you freaks!

Hopefully you’re all stuffed with mince pies, awaiting the excitement of arguments over television, having to hide the gin from parents and the ritual horror that is “The 300 best christmas hits ever” on Channel 4. And 5. And E4. And various variations.

So, friends, have yourself a grey cristmas and enjoy the holiday time. Don’t stress too much and look forward to 2009 with excitement, a little dread and possibly incontinence, depending on how much sherry you’ve managed so far.

Scott x

Welcome to Summer
We’re expecting it to be great. No really

As for us, we’ve some fun things happening in our 5th year — there’s our usual camping fun happening over August Bank Holiday along with some other bits and bobs that some of the members are doing. There’s going to be some new merchandise and new wallpapers. At some point there’ll be a barbecue or two and there’s also some changes to the site coming up in the pipeline too. Hopefully they’ll be finished by christmas but I’m always a bit rubbish at stuff like deadlines

Freakcity.net has a new daddy!
http://Freakcity.net, the alternative gay web community founded over 4 years ago by Scott van Looy has been sold to the Millivres Prowler Group (MPG). Scott said of the deal:

"This gives the site a great opportunity to grow beyond what I can provide for it. I will be sticking around in an advisory capacity and to smooth any growing pains, don’t worry, not much will change at first."

Peter Vermillion of MPG was quoted as saying “This brings an added string to the Millivres bow. Our first foray into the world of online communities. We think we can offer the members of the site something truly different”.

"We are planning on bringing our magazine format to freakcity as an additional feature for members, giving them up to the minute news and information about all aspects of gay life. We think we can, with your help, create something truly special".

Handover of the site will happen at the end of the month. Members will be invited to re-register on a special enhanced version of the website in early May, which incorporates an adult gallery, phone access and voice messaging as well as all the features you currently know and love.

Small change in a big world
Spring is sprung. Predictable cliché. Freakcity is five this year, there’ll be something exciting in the summer to celebrate this fact. We might actually get around to doing the boating trip this year. I’ll also be making some changes to the profiles and the forums as it’s getting a bit quiet round ’ere and it’s less fun when there’s no conversation. There’s a new chat thing and there’s a new auto event notification thing — fill in the form and be notified whenever anyone sets up an event that you might be interested in according to your preferences.

Toasted toes and crystal clear nights
size=120&pic=Scott4972.jpg The nights draw in. We cuddle our computers for warmth, whole families snuggled around a flaming laptop, cocoa in hand. Happy SAD, all you freaks — look out for the traditional anti Christmas gathering, to be announced soon, your antidote to all things christmassy. I might even wear shorts

scott

Welcome to. Er. Summer
OK, so it’ll be sunny again soon. Hopefully. Maybe. Heh. We’re going camping again in August over the bank holiday weekend. Current favourite is Glasto again, so if anyone wants to come, see event 808. We’re also going to Brighton Pride, possibly staying overnight, if you’re interested in going to that see event 788. Octoberbash is also approaching, Danny is rumoured to be doing something special as he’s 32 this year.

Happy birthday to us!
On the 21st June 2003, freakcity became sentient. It was soon after this that Belgium fell and the rest of the world quaked with fear at this dark power risen from the depths of hell. Well, this is what would have happened had I listened to others and written freakcity in an open source language, fortunately for Belgium I didn’t. Anyways, to mark this stupendous event we’re having a bunch of things happen. See event 758 for more info. Scott

Freaks on a beach

Freakcity camping comes around again, this year we’re planning three trips, the Stiffkey camping trip followed by the much anticipated boating trip, which, although not strictly camping, probably counts. Then, in August, we’re going somewhere bank holiday weekend. In the past it’s been Glastonbury but this year we may go somewhere else. Feel free to follow the event links and let us know if you’re interested in coming!

Spring is springing
Welcome to spring!
Here, have a lovely Springy wallpaper!
There’s going to be a few updates happening shortly, amongst other things:
Editable front page
Rich Text editor
Blog integration with external blogging feeds (Atom)
Photo albums
Rants
and a few more things too! Any suggestions please to Scott for consideration.

part two live
Part two of the three bits of the new site is live. Took a bit longer than I’d expected it to, but still...we now have picture comments, a picture toolbar, the ability to view all pictures you’ve ever uploaded, the ability to do funky things with pictures in the forums and in messages (akin to having private pictures to send people, but unlimited). Lots of piccy goodness. Also the ability to be texted when you receive messages and aren’t online. As well as the ability to keep a track of event updates by subscribing to them per event. Hopefully over the coming week/weekend we’ll have the amazing new events stuff finished. As well as video blogging from mobile phones.

New site
Part one of the new site is now live, with the rest hopefully following over the next few days. Database is no longer access and so there might be teething issues or it might all just work marvellously

Almost done
Been working hard on the beta, if you log in to http://beta.freakcity.net you’’ll see some of the themes have been updated a touch, the forums have changed a little, you can now agree/disagree with posts, you can add user comments to your linked friends’ profiles and you can vote quotes good or bad from the front page using the wonder of ajax...\n\nI shall be adding some stuff to the events section and some new bits to the front page (your events, moving the news bit, word of the day, new members) as well as enabling users to edit what they see on the front page so you can customise it for you. What I need from youse people is for you to test it. Log in to the beta, play with it, see what’’s broken and what’’s not and generally give me feedback. As of today it should all work fine apart from image uploading...

beta testing
There’s been a lot going on lately development wise. I’m almost ready to let people on the new code, but not quite. There’s still a fair amount to do though, especially on the mobile side of things. To get up to date news about what’s going on and access to the new code, join the beta group and help make this release of freakcity the best yet

Update
There’s been lots of little changes over the last couple of days. The new toolbar appears in most places where you might need it (I may have missed a few, will tidy these up tonight!). We’re on a brand new shiny and much much faster server. Pictures have changed a tiny bit. You can now chuck any sized pictures at the system and it’ll resize them when you upload them. This is part of the code that’ll enable avatars...which I hope to implement soon. Searching the forums is now a lot faster, almost google speeds. I have changed bits of back end code to make things work a little better. Overall, you should basically see things working a bit nicer and pages being returned faster. There’s a little page counter at the bottom right of every page that tells you how long it took to render the page on the server, typically this takes less than a second per page now.

New theme
Another new theme, called club. Check it out

New themes and groups finished at last
Finished two new themes (well, it’s more like one and a half as they’re both the same apart from fonts). These are the best themes yet, they look better and also show off some of the behind the scenes work that went into version 2 as they’d not have been possible with the old site. Hope ya like them. There’ll be more soon...Also finished groups, you can now add and remove moderators to groups. Moderators can invite and remove people from groups as well as authorise them to join invite only groups.

Flickr stuff
have integrated flickr a bit so if you have a flickr account you can put it on your profile. Also linked to the flickr group pool

Groups in forums
You can now create your very own forum groups, select forums from the menu then click groups for information on adding your own and/or joining groups created by other people

Beta is now live
After a long period of development freakcity v2 is now live. Expect some bugs, if there’’s any you find, tell Scott...

Beta testing on the server
New url for beta testing forums: http://beta.freakcity.net

V2 forums finished, just the rest of the bugger to finish now
I have finished the new forums, they’’re sat on my shiny test server, if anyone wants a play they should go to http://methuselah.ethosuk.org.uk and have a look. Post what ya like, it’’s a test database – mainly I want people to give me feedback and find bugs

Help Scott make some money for a good cause
A friend of mine is putting together a video about what’s been going on in Iraq since war broke out and as she’s only one person and not very rich she’s needing help funding it. I’ve put in £100 of my own money but would like to get the same from the website if possible too, so go visit thread 950 for more info and to ask any questions

RSS Journal feeds
I have created RSS feeds from the journals. To enable your journal to be an RSS feed as well, go to prefs and choose the ‘Public+RSS’ type of journal from the dropdown list. People will now get an RSS icon in firefox. If you wish to link to the journal directly, then use www.freakcity.net/rssjournal.asp?name=username, putting your own username in the url

Standards
Trying to make the site adhere to at least one web standard. Should make rendering of pages faster in browsers and iron out a few of the ickle quirks of the site

Updates galore
Well, where shall I start. I’ve done loads of bits over the last few months, most recently are the stats thing and the pretty pretty pictures. I have a few other things that I’m gonna get on the site soon – hopefully over this weekend...still looking for suggestions tho so let me know if ya think of anything!

links and quotes
You can now add your own links and quotes to the site, and other members can rate them – add away guys...as soon as there’s more links I’ll make them searchable and stuff...so it can be like a big set of bookmarks for everyone

More pics
You can now have more than one piccy on your profile. Check out the pic manager to add more piccies

Linked Freaks
You can now add your friends to your profile using the new “linked freaks” feature...just click on a profile and follow the link at the bottom

More updates!
Searchable profiles, new option in edit me, various other bits an bobs

Search
Forums are now searchable, and there are some new smileys

Even more stuff added
You can now edit your blogs/posts

more stuff added
Have added a preview button to blogs and posts, have added basic themes. Have also changed the way profiles work, you can view by different types of stuff. Have changed the blogs so they work better and all kinds of little things...

More blogness
Blogs now allow users to add comments – via the net, anonymously, if the blog is entirely public, via the site if a FreakCity user’s logged in. I shall probably implement something that uses the message system to let a blog writer know when he has a new comment (or maybe just a page linked to from “blog”? Not sure...that could be easier I think!)

blogs updated
Changed the blogs so they display a day at a time. Also have written half the ‘comments’ code for the blogs, will finish the rest tonight

hard at work
3265 lines of code since we started...cor, I’ve been busy!

improved forums
Have written lots of code to improve the forums. They are now listed in pages of 10, meaning you poor modem users don’t have to wait weeks for threads to download. You can now “reply” to people’s posts and it’ll automatically quote their post in your reply. The “ten most recent” box now tells you stuff in the correct timezone! Switching post direction now works better, etc...

Smileys
I drawed some pwetty ickle faces for you all

forums get better
Forums now remember what you’ve viewed – see thread 48 – also need blog help, see thread 44.

Public profiles
If you have a look in “edit me” you’ll find that there is now the option to have a public profile display

New Front Page
Redesigned the front page so it looks a little nicer – let me know what you think!

Updates
“edit me” working again
Added new options in edit me to let you set sex, sexuality and your homepage url – Also, you can turn on and off your blog here (if it is off, other users cannot read it)

Forums now work right, with thread tracking and a top five – so get typing
Any questions, drop me a note if something goes wrong, or just add it to the bugs forum under FreakCity.