Gravatars On FreelanceSwitch, IE6 Fixed and More…
Collis Ta'eedHey folks, it’s been over a month since we updated the site and I spent a few hours today tying some loose ends and adding a couple of small improvements to the site…
IE6 Fixed
First of all, FreelanceSwitch now works in IE6. And guess what it took to make it work? I changed one class’ width by 3px and the site stopped breaking. Boy I wish I’d done that a month and a half ago, I expect all the IE6 people have gotten annoyed with me and gone somewhere else by now, but in case any are still here, my apologies 
Gravatars on FSw
The big news is that we’ve added Gravatars to the site. If you are not familiar with Gravatars, basically you get a free account, upload an image and associate with an email address, then when you leave a comment your avatar image will appear.
Recently Gravatar was bought by Automattic who make Wordpress (and are my favourite company!) which means they have a much brighter future and are going to be much more reliable with the extra server power backing them now.
Also if you are a PHP developer, I’m looking for someone to make a Vanilla Forums Gravatar Add-on so we can have the same system on our forums…
Other Improvements
Recently we decided to use OpenAds to start serving up the adverts, but due to the volume of ad spaces on the site, it was killing the page load time. So today I removed it again, at the end of the day user experience is more important that serving ads! Anyhow we have some new, secret plans for advertising which Cyan is going to announce soon.
I’ve also begun stripping out Adsense from our sites, though it’s going to take a while. Adsense is a bit ugly and not very relevant, so we’re going to switch to affiliate programs like Freshbooks and Arsenal which match our userbase and which will probably make more money than the woefully small income Adsense generated.
Anything you’d like improved?
There’s been a few other bits and bobs, but most of them are under the hood. But if there’s something you think could or should be improved, please do let us know in the comments as we have a big suggestion list which I go through whenever I have the time to update the site!
Collis Ta'eed
October 30th, 2007
And just to test out that my Gravatar is working, here’s a comment to show off my little monkey photo!
Benny
October 30th, 2007
Test….
Collis Ta'eed
October 30th, 2007
Hey Benny, it seems to take a little while to appear, I created mine and then had to wait for about half an hour before it actually showed up. Also one thing I didn’t realise at first is that after you upload your image you have to associate it with the email address.
Anyhow hope people use this feature, it’s pretty neat I think!
Benny
October 30th, 2007
Hi Collis,
I see, I had to choose my avatar later on. I think it will work in about an hour. Cool feature btw!
Btw, was it hard to implement it into the website?
Timothy Diokno
October 30th, 2007
I just noticed the Gravatar addition. Are you looking forward to making a custom home page? I’d love to see that!
Collis Ta'eed
October 30th, 2007
@Benny: It was VERY easy, I installed a Wordpress plugin and pasted in a single line of code into the theme and it worked! Yay!
@Tim: That’s actually something we’ve been talking about (turning FreelanceSwitch into a sort of network) but I’m yet to figure out exactly how to do that
Alex Leonard
October 30th, 2007
Fecking IE6. Bane of my life and cause of countless hours of wasted time trying to adapt something that works perfectly in every other browser first time.
It really does my nut in…
David Bradley
October 30th, 2007
I got a Gravatar and installed the plugin on Sciencetext, just one out of dozens of commenters seemed to have a Gravatar, so I was just seeing dozens of gravatar icons, so I disabled the plugin and will hold off running it till bigger sites, like yours spread the message wider.
db
Joohliah
October 30th, 2007
Hey there ! testing the gravatars
“I expect all the IE6 people have gotten annoyed with me and gone somewhere else by now”
-> Or maybe they switched to Firefox or Safari
By the way, I LOVE Freelance Switch, it’s a real goldmine for me
Mark
October 30th, 2007
Well done on fixing the IE6 bug. I’m not an IE6 user myself, but being a web designer I realise the importantace of catering for all web browsers, however crap they may be. The irritating thing is it is always a one line of code that mucks up the layout that takes hours/days to find!
Santiago
October 30th, 2007
this is mine
dandellion Kimban
October 30th, 2007
I was resisting to gravatars for all these years…. but, whatta hell? Pictures are fun.
Benny
October 30th, 2007
Great, my (gr)avatar works! This is a nice addition.
redwall_hp
October 30th, 2007
Cool, Gravatars! I added them to my blog about a week ago, but I wish more people would. Not enough sites use them, unfortunately.
Luisa
October 30th, 2007
Yay! I love gravatars! I need to change my picture… But I’m not on my computer so I can’t grab my picture *sob!*
You know what, I had that same 3px problem on my own website… Took forever to find out what the problem is….
Dinu
October 30th, 2007
Cool stuff. I love gravatars and I love Automatic.
Ash Haque
October 30th, 2007
I still have the coolest hottest avatar
Ash Haque
October 30th, 2007
Hrm… not working on freelanceswitch, but works fine on all other blogs. Weird.
mave
October 30th, 2007
cool.
Shane Pearlman
October 30th, 2007
I love the new design. I have one simple usability request. My internet is running fast right now so I don’t see the issue to describe it exactly. Maybe on of you on a laggy connection can fill the gaps.
When my connection is slow, as is normal things load one at a time. The last thing to load, is the white background behind the text. Problem with that: I can read the text when it is on the light tan bg, but not when its on the dark header strip. So I have to wait until the entire page load to read the first paragraph, when I can scan the rest as the page loads. The feng shui of web design screams out for a remedy.
collis - email me if you want me to explain this in more detail.
mave
October 30th, 2007
I’ve noticed my gravatar isn’t working on this site, either - yet it works elsewhere.
Robert
October 30th, 2007
Nice upgrades. But you could drop on the IE6 “bug” - it’s this browsers problem, not ours.
Kishau
October 30th, 2007
Cool stuff!
Wayde Christie
October 31st, 2007
Hi! It’s me!
Cyan
October 31st, 2007
Hey guys! it’s nice to see all of you
Casey L. Jones
October 31st, 2007
Gravatars, nice touch.
Arun
October 31st, 2007
Wow! Love the gravatars!
Curt
October 31st, 2007
Can I play, too? Does my fuzzy little friend appear to the left?
Dave Bowker
October 31st, 2007
Love the new addition!
Curt
October 31st, 2007
Well, I must have done something wrong. I can see everyone’s Gravatar but mine. (Grumble)
Haris
November 1st, 2007
Nice!
Paul Gorton
November 1st, 2007
if you still havent got anyone to create your php gravatar fetcher for the forums, I’d love to crank one out (in fact I have something that does a similar job lying around here somewhere)… just let me know if you haven’t got anyone else working on it already and I’ll get right on it. Shouldn’t take more than a day before you have something in your hot little hand.
Jermayn Parker
November 2nd, 2007
Yes the gravators are a nice feature, very nice!
Always good to see a bit of the madness behind the comments -
Regards IE6 - it is usually a few pixels hear and there, I also have a website that I need to do some of the pixel carving on
Curt
November 2nd, 2007
So, I created an 80×80 pixel .gif, uploaded it to my Gravatar.com account, associated to my email address, and waited two days. Still no image! Anyone know what I’m missing??
Dinoboff
November 3rd, 2007
There is a Gravatar extension available for the Vanilla Forum.
http://lussumo.com/addons/index.php?PostBackAction=AddOn&AddOnID=335.
pickupjojo
November 6th, 2007
Oh very nice, I think I’ll use it on my blog.
Jake
November 30th, 2007
Awesome! I love gravatars!
M
December 19th, 2007
Gravarar is the best!
Ron Sparks
June 29th, 2008
Testing this crazy new things