Rate My Ink

Site Updates and Features

2007-08-09T17:58:00.001-07:00

Got some good news after the last 2 disasters. I've just released some site updates, the changes are:

- Email notification for comments. When someone comments on one of your pictures you will be sent an email letting you know. You can enable or disable this feature in your profile by clicking "Send me email when someone comments on my pictures" on or off.

- Better mature pic handling. Previously if you accidentally marked a picture as mature you could not remove the mark. I did this for two reasons, firstly I needed a way to enforce some kind of standard, I didn't want to mark something as mature and then have a user remove that mark, I use to get a lot of complaints on some of the more racy pictures. Secondly some of my advertisers do not allow their ads to be placed next to nudity or other content of a mature nature. I use the mature picture mark to decide which ad to show, if people removed the mature mark on a picture containing nudity then the income that keeps the site going is in danger. Anyway, with the update you can remove the mature mark on a picture, I added in a 2nd mature mark just for moderators, so they can override the users mark if needed.

- Login redirects. I've changed the way login works so that the first screen you see after login is the same as the page you came from. So if you try to post a comment if you are not logged in you will be presented with a login box, once you enter you details you will go straight to the picture comment page. Under the old system you were sent to the generic login confirmation, then you had to search around to find the picture you were trying to comment on again, or whatever else you were trying to do.

- Edit anywhere. I've consolidated the way the gallery, user pictures and profile picture previews are shown, so now if you have the permissions to edit a picture, i.e you are the owner or a moderator, you will see the "edit, delete, stats" controls wherever you see the picture, you don't have to go to "my pictures" to edit pictures anymore.

- Mature pic labels - If you enable mature pictures in your profile you will see mature pictures labeled as such in gallery, user pictures ans profile preview views.

- Internal changes. I've made a bunch of other internal changes that you probably won't notice, things like security fixes, code cleanup and data restructuring

Let me know if you run into any problems, as always there are more changes in the pipeline.

Joe

Scumware Warning

2007-08-08T21:33:00.000-07:00

I'm incredibly upset and embarrassed to have to say they ratemyink.com was compromised by scumware, spyware viruses or whatever you want to call it for at least the last few days, at the very most the last week.

I've been trying out some different advertising networks and it seems the last one I was with had some malicious ads on their network that tried to install viruses and spyware on some visitors to ratemyink.com. I never saw this myself, I suspect Firefox was not effected, but I was told about it by others, I also got an automated notification from Google (which was nice).

I've canned the ad network involved, and I'm feeling really bad right now to have subjected ratemyink.com visitors to this, I hope it didn't cause to much damage.

1000 apologies

Joe

Bugger

2007-07-18T23:50:00.000-07:00

I've been making some server upgrades tonight and I did something stupid that caused the site to loose the last 20hrs or so of updates. I've restored the database from the last good backup ( thank god for backups ) but this will still mean that any new signups, pictures, comments and any other changes posted in the last 20 hours have been lost.

It pains me for this to happen, many apologies to those that this has effected.

Joe

We're back

2007-03-04T09:11:00.000-08:00

If you're reading this then the server transfer worked! I ran into a few problems so it took a bit longer than expected.

Now I'll be able to focus on adding features to the site again, stay tuned

Joe

Getting bigger - time for a new server

2007-02-11T22:26:00.000-08:00

Rate My Ink has really been picking up in the last few months, we've had more users per day than ever before and there are a ton of great new pictures being posted every day. I'm sure we'll be cracking 20,000 pictures in the next few weeks! thanks guys!

All this extra activity is fantastic but it's putting quite a load on my old 2.0 GHz P4 server, I've gone and bought a new dual core Conroe system last week in an effort to speed the site up. It's costing twice as much per month as the old one but I think it's going to be worth it. The new server is not live yet, as usual it's taking me a while to get it all set up and ready. I'll be working on it this week, I'm hoping to be able to move the site over next weekend. The site will probably be down for 24-48 hours while the new IP propagates across the net, it will be worth it though.

Joe

New Tattoo Categories

2007-01-18T22:06:00.000-08:00

Been a while since updates here, but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy! I've recently made a few changes to the tattoo categories, including adding the new category "Traditional" I've got a few other ideas from users suggestions such as portraits, girls, oriental, biomech. These are all good but I want to combine some of the existing categories before adding too many more, I don't want it to get too cluttered there!

You also might have noticed some minor changes to the profile and edit profile pages, I'm trying to add a feature where you can post comments against a users profile, hope to have it done soon.

no more naughty pictures

2006-12-12T21:36:00.000-08:00

Well, as promised there have been a bunch of new features released over the last week or so to help make the site better.

There's now a status menu at the top of the screen that shows if you are logged in or not and gives quick access to common features.

I've also added the ability to tag individual pictures as "mature content" so that only users that have selected "I am over 18, OK to see mature content" in their profiles will see the pictures.

Another addition is the ability to directly edit pictures you own from the main picture screen as well as your "My Pictures" gallery

have fun.

Hard core facial tattoo

2006-11-15T09:13:00.000-08:00

Just saw these unbelievable facial tattoo pictures over at ModBlog. Amazing work, this guys life is changed forever. Imagine the entrance he makes wherever he goes.

ModBlog seems to be down at the moment as it tries to cope with everyone on the net sending this link around, try back again later, it's worth it!

facial tattoo at ModBlog

tattoo nudity

2006-11-06T23:09:00.000-08:00

I've been getting a lot of feedback from people regarding nudity in some of the pictures. At one stage I did have the site set up so you would have to log in to view pictures in the "over 18s" category. That was OK but there were some pretty unclear error messages when you tried view pictures from that category when you weren't logged in, and it sucked a bit to have to put all adult images in that one category regardless of what the actual tattoo was.

One of the next features I'm going to add is a "I am over 18 and I want filtering off", people will have to check this either in their profile or when they sign up if they want to see any tattoo of an adult nature. There will be another checkbox when you upload images "this image is not suitable for children" or similar.

In other news you may have noticed there was a minor site update today. I added email, bookmark and blog this links to each picture. I also added a "next picture" and "gallery" button at the top of each image. yay.

Welcome

2006-10-29T21:13:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Rate My Ink site blog! I'm going to use this to keep everyone up to date on what's happening on the site, answer common questions and hopefully get some good feedback from you guys.

First up some details on the recent site update

Added RSS/XML feeds
Add to Yahoo, Google and MSN buttons
Enhanced profile pages, inc. recent posts and extra profile fields
Added profile image thumbnails next to comment posts and user profile lists
Added image thumbnails next to user comments list
Can now delete you own profile
New side rail content, Yahoo and flickr images, Yahoo news and Yahoo Answers
Improved system for displaying ads and other external content
Changed category selection to use cookies
Improved bad image reporting
Better handling of bad image comments
+ many other various bug fixes, usability and performance enhancements

I've still got lots of plans for more features and upgrades. I hope I can get them out soon!