Archive for November, 2006
Social Bookmarking x 8
Starting today we’ll be giving you more opportunities to set bookmarks for photos and videos from sevenload on Social Bookmarking service providers.
Have fun with oneview (German), Lycos iQ, del.icio.us, digg, Mister Wong (German),YiGG, BlinkList and Yahoo MyWeb!
Point System Adjustment
We’ve been receiving a lot of feedback since the changes we made to the point system on sevenload, and the fact is that because ratings for photos and videos are not visibly honoured on the profiles yet we are going to make these additional calculations/adjustments:
1. Ratings
Photo and video rating will now be incorporated into the end points. For every 10 stars and additional 2 points will be added. Example: your photo has been rated with 8 stars 3 times = 24 stars. Thus, you will get an additional 4.8 points!
2. Comments
In addition to the points given for the commentator who uploaded the commented photo or video will also get an extra point added.
In addition, a small addition error was able to creep into the points displayed on various profiles. Our developers are currently working on getting numbers, info and facts straightened out!
Please excuse this minor irritation. 
Info Cards for sevenloaders
The time was right at sevenload to make a change in the friends list area. The previously grey friends lists have just been pimped: we are now showing all users’ friends in the form of little info cards!
Of course, we want to mention from the outset here that these are not real info cards in the sense that they do not contain personal information- however, this is how your sevenload friends can more easily see your public information such as: your user name, location, registration date with sevenload, the number of photos you have and additionally, your actual profile photo.
Apropos sevenloaders – per request we are giving you a new URL: the shorter sevenloader.com address. With this URL you can share your “online and offline world” with all your friends who are not yet on sevenload and quickly explain your profile to them. This simple principle functions in the following combination: “username.sevenloader.com” – for example, in my case it would be Sichelputzer.sevenloader.com, which then forwards directly to my profile on sevenload.de. From now on, it’s your choice how you reach someone’s profile, either through this direct link or by reaching it the old way.
New Media RSS Feeds
We’ve adjusted our RSS Feeds with the re-launch of sevenload. There is now a button for each page for which all feeds from the according pages can be reached via the RSS menu in the upper hand corner of the screen. We have done this especially per the requests of our users and we have implemented plenty of new possibilities for its use!
New elements on sevenload
These feed contains all new elements uploaded onto sevenload. These feeds can be pre-filtered and will then only return the corresponding photos or videos. These particular feeds are available under the following URLs:
New elements on sevenload, filtered according to tags
These feeds contain all new elements uploaded onto sevenload which are given a particular tag. These feeds can be pre-filtered and will then only return the corresponding photos or videos. These feeds are available under the following URLs:
New elements on sevenload, filtered according to members
These feeds contain all new elements uploaded onto sevenload which are uploaded by a particular member. These feeds can be pre-filtered and will then only return the corresponding photos or videos. These feeds are available under the following URLs:
- New, Photos and Videos uploaded from a particular member
- New Photos, uploaded from a particular member
- New Videos, uploaded from a particular member
New comments under a photo or video
This feeds contains all new comments made to a photo or video. This feed is available under the following URL:
New user’s guestbook entries
This feed contains all new guestbook entries for a user. This feed is available under the following URL:
You can find a detailed description about all of this in our sevenload Help.
Flashplayer: Volume Control
Are the videos too loud? Do you think that the volume level is causing noise pollution? Or are the videos way too quiet? We’ve got a way to fix it!
The volume control settings from our flash player now work simultaneously for all videos. From now on, whoever doesn’t load the standard settings anymore can listen to videos at the selected volume from now on- without having their ears falls off from shock. The settings will be globally modified on all of the players until the user adjusts the controller.
Flash Player: Individual Color Settings
Reality can be mirrored in digital videos at least in part… for example, we can watch a picturesque sunset in all its wondrous colors. But sometimes, we just want to mess around a little bit with this kind of reality- and this is the exact thinking behind our new flash player. We are also offering users the opportunity to adjust the brightness of each video without having to individually adjust the brightness of their monitor.
Step 1.
You can open the menu for this setting under the button in the lower right hand corner of the video screen. The second selection from the top is “Color Settings” and when clicked on, the color selector will open.
2. Step
Videos on sevenload can be adjusted while being played as direct color settings via the three canals for red, green and blue, as well as in their brightness.
3. Step
As of today our new motto is “Try it out!” The video we used as an example can first be seen with redish hues. Next we decided to throw a little blue light onto things, and then they got really dark (blue that is).
Important Note
By clicking on the “Restore” button, you can re-set everything to the default settings (it will look like it did in Step 2. again). The video will remain unaffected by the various settings because only the screen’s display is what is altered at the time. Furthermore, these color settings can only be saved by a user that is logged-in and the settings will be applied to all sevenload videos for that user.
Preview
We are also planning to make it possible for the settings to be adjusted/combined by anyone viewing the video, also when it is first released on sevenload. That way, it will remain the same whether someone adjusted it themselves or if they were configured by the videos owner. The pre-adjustments made by the video’s owner and other users will not create a color clutter, but rather will allow them to balance each other out.
Here’s another example: A video’s owner sets the brightness at 20% for all other viewers, but for some useres, this is too dark and they decide to re-set it to say, 80%. From this a default value is created using the formula (author’s color settings + individual’s color settings) / 2 – and that means that in this example, the video’s brightness that will be applied is 20+80/2 = 50 meaning the brightness will be set to 50%.
Sorting Function
Photos and videos can now be sorted within a profile itself. The sorting criteria are: “best rated”, “most commented on” or “most viewed” – the standardized display after the upload date is of course still going to be there.
Likewise, it’s also possible for users to compile a sort of top list of their photos and videos on the corresponding profiles.
New Video Start Page
For those of you who like to watch lots of videos on sevenload, we’ve got something for you to get excited about: we have a new player on the video start page. The central point of this video page is going to be the TOP Videos of the week and another list of videos based on what users might enjoy watching. We hope that this feature will also make it easier to switch back and forth between individual videos.
Have any of you ever thought to associate the term “zapping” with videos on the internet? The idea of seamlessly switching between different videos allows us to take sevenload to new levels…
Maintenance: Will be Briefly Offline
We are expecting to have a couple of miniscule problems pop up as soon as the new system has been started and made accessible, and this will take just a few minutes to get sorted. In addition, we anticipate that externally embedded photos and the flash-player itself will also be down for a couple of seconds.
There’s a really simple explanation for the delay: our new application software has to generate an according preview photo and thumbnails in various sizes for all available photo contents. Likewise, there will be approximately 380,000 different external players affected by uploads for videos alone. No worries, we’ll have things back up and running smoothly ASAP.
Editing Photos
The issue of getting photos into a correct format (and getting them correctly rotated) is something that anyone interested in photography knows about. The problem is that most times the photo needs to be rotated after it has been uploaded, and until now that has meant that the user has to give permission to have the photo “deleted” from the server and then “re-uploaded” onto sevenload in the correct format. Our hope is that this new feature will solve this problem quick and easy: you can now rotate the image 90° to the left or right, allowing you a much simpler way to manage and edit you photos!
*The feature which allows you to alter the photo’s information (data specs.) will remain unchanged.
