The Future of the Road Runner Nest

[mopar71]

Ok, sent. thru paypal!

[gary]

Sent some $ to Dave via paypal, Keep up the good work everyone. Thanks for a great Nest!
Gary 19.71 GTX , Goldleaf Met.

[71Beeper]

I too just made a contribution. Keeping the nest up and running is a great benefit to all of us here.

[Hugh]

I've been away for awhile but enjoy the 'nest! Just sent through PayPal!

[road chicken]

So whatever happened to this?

[gary]

I was kinda wondering too.

[Eric]

Sorry, I don't have any info to give...trying to reach Dave for an update

[bruce]

I've not heard from Dave about this either.

[Dave]

Everyone,

I have to say that I'm sorry this has been so long in coming. When I kicked this whole thing off last year, I fully expected to have the time to grind through the setup and have the conversion to the new software done pretty quickly. Well, as luck would have it just after getting things moving, my professional life took a turn from "really busy" to "holy crap, I don't think I get time to sleep this week". For those that don't know, my day job is as the CEO of a software innovation studio, and one of two owners of the company. 2014 saw me putting in 70-80 hour work weeks for almost the entire year. So I wound up totally dropping the ball on this project. Something had to give, unfortunately.

The good news is, that things are settling down a bit, and I'm back down to only 60-70 hours a week. You know, a "light" schedule. Over the weekend I did a fresh install of the new software, and started the configuration. Bruce and Eric are helping me get some things configured there. We do have one thing that we will be waiting on before we can turn it on, however:

The new site will be based on Invision Power Suite's brand new version 4.0. It's brand new, and one thing they haven't finished yet are the conversion utilities to migrate all our existing data from here in phpBB. I'm doing some research right now as to if we could turn the new site on, and then later convert everything. It would mean starting "fresh" in the forums for a little bit - but that all the old content would stay around for reference until I was able to convert it.

Thanks for sticking with me through this. I totally didn't anticipate that my world would get so busy so quickly - but we are honestly pretty close to getting the new site off the ground!

[bruce]

And I gotta say, the NEW Road Runner Nest looks pretty dang cool. You're gonna LOVE the functionality of being able to have your own photo album hosted on site and being able to pull from that album to post in the forums. It will take a bit, but the overall improvement to the site is going to be tremendous!

[rr6pak]

And I gotta say, the NEW Road Runner Nest looks pretty dang cool. You're gonna LOVE the functionality of being able to have your own photo album hosted on site and being able to pull from that album to post in the forums. It will take a bit, but the overall improvement to the site is going to be tremendous!

Can't wait to see and use it, Bruce. I have a ton of pictures I want to post. Also, will there be a limit on the size of pictures? Does anyone know. I kniw that is one , and probably the biggest issue members have here.

BTW-Nice to see ya, Dave. Don't have to tell me that you're busy and all. Hope all is well in your family

[bruce]

Dave will have to speak to the size of the images you can house there… after all, this thing lives on HIS company's servers. But I've uploaded some photos of my own, and while they are not LARGE by print standards (I'm a graphic designer by trade), they are fairly large as far as online images would go...

[bruce]

Oh, and I gotta add, the software we'll be using on the new site won't arbitrarily crop the righthand side off your images as we've seen happen here. Yea!

[Dave]

As far as image size, I've got it set right now to only allow 4MB files max. We do have disk space limits to consider, but 4MB *per file* should be good to start, and there is a good bit of space on the drive that we can fill up.

[sdweatherman]

Dave,
I would think that there should be some software out there that looks at an incoming image file size and automatically adjusts the size and resolution to whatever limits you set up?

For those that want to adjust your picture size yourself - there is a free program called Paint.net that you can use on your computer to adjust your pictures. It is a pretty basic program, but I use it a lot for adjusting picture size/resolution when posting pics to the web. My IPhone takes a 2592x1936 pixel picture (about 2MB). I use Paint.net to reduce my IPhone pics down to 640x480 pixels to post on the Nest. (640x480 was about the right size to post on the Nest without losing the right-hand side of the picture). The 640x480 pics are one tenth the file size (200KB) of the originals - so they don't take up precious server memory space.

With the new Nest site, it looks like the limit will be 4MB - that is actually quite a bit. A 1280x960 pixel photo will take up most of the space on a 15" monitor - and is plenty big to show most anything on a website. And the file size of a 1280x960 pic is only about 1MB.

Scott.