ifwebstudio blog

After more than three and a half years of no new projects, finally next site in my planned DB series – WallpapersDB – Desktop Wallpapers is ready to meet the world. As its name may suggest, this one is meant to help you in your efforts to beautify your computer screens.

Like with my previous avatars site(actually like with all sites I built in last years), this one is built around PHP/MySQL technology. I used my new favourite two column CSS layout with 310 pixels wide right column which can hold medium rectangle ad and plenty of info. For thumbnail generation and other image manipulation I used powerful Imagemagick. I find it easier to use and results are very good. All image manipulations are cached on server to speed up whole process.

Like with all sites these days; you can register, comment, upload, share and do all kind of neat stuff new web offers. You can browse wallpapers by category or native resolution. Thumbnails are big and when you choose wallpaper, script will generate image optimized for your screen size.

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I spent last few weeks working on my latest project – Avatars Database or shorter AvatarsDB. As you probably guessed correctly, purpose of this site is distribute highest quality avatars optimized for use as forum signatures, in instant messengers (as buddy icons) and even on web sites.

When I started with development, my main goal was to create a web site with very simple design and fast executing scripts. Of course, I decided to have PHP and MySQL at backend since these technologies have proven to be fastest and easiest to maintain (at least in my experience). I created a custom CMS for this project with very simple, but powerful, admin interface which allows me to create and edit new categories, edit category descriptions (images without text is not very good SEO) and batch upload new content.

Since this project uses single PHP page to generate all content pages, it would be very difficult for me to rank in search engines (yea, imagine thousands of crappy pages that look like index.php?id=234&cat_id=33). To solve this issue, I decided to use Apache mod_rewrite module to rewrite all URL which now look like this http://www.avatarsdb.com/art/hr-giger/ (very neat, don’t you think?). No need to mention that every page has it’s own title, heading text, description text and keywords.

In the next few days, I’m planning to add several more features like internal counter, which will count number of visits to each particular avatar (this data will be used to generate most popular avatars list), editor picks, and color picker which will allow my visitors to test how their selected image looks against different backgrounds. I’m open for suggestions, so if you have some time, I would like to hear your opinion.

Site is hosted on Dreamhost shared hosting. They offer incredible 1000 GB of bandwidth use per month, which allows me to expand my business and offer a few services to my visitors like remotely hosted avatars.

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