Hi Guys

We have revamped our email delivery system and hope this fill fix the unreliable email delivery we have been having of late.

Thanks for your patience.

A lot of you have emailed us saying that we did not deliver you emails as promised.

We are sorry about that. We just moved to a new server and it seems our email delivery pigeons get lost. We are on the issue and hope to fix it soon.

You know, you make a wall to pay tribute to someone and there’ll be some idiot who’ll ruin everything by putting a sticky that says “you suck”.
Now, you can keep these idiots out by turning on what we call the Idiot Filter.

If you turn the Idiot Filter on .. all posts on the wall would require you, the wall owner, to approve them before they show up on the wall. To turn the filter on, just click this option on the Wall Builder:

If you want to turn the Idiot Filter on on an existing wall,  just log in to your account and edit the wall. Any future posts on the wall will require your approval.

So, no more idiots!

Wallwisher is undergoing temporary maintenance.. The site will be back up shortly.

UPDATE: Site back up but still under maintenance.

Greetings!
The embedded walls have gotten a makeover. The old embedded walls failed at sizes less than 800px wide [sorry for those of you who embedded the wall, only to see a messed up header].

I agree, we messed up big time on embedded walls. We did not foresee people embedding the walls in 500px space. We should have.

The new embedded view takes care of this and this is how it looks like.

One change we’ve made is that embedded walls are not postable. The UI for posting was just not good enough in such a small amount of space. So we’ve added a little ‘Post a sticky’ link that allows users to view the wall in a separate window and post a sticky there. An extra step, but a better user interface in our opinion.

Those of you who have embedded a wall before, we strongly encourage you to please get the new embed code from your walls.

Google spiders caught some php notification they were not supposed to see.. As a result, you see a big PHP error as the title of Wallwisher home page on Google!!
No way!
The issue is fixed now .. hope that Google spiders crawl the page again before the whole word gets turned off by the error message..
Come spiders come!

Update: it’s fixed now.. phew!

One of the things we really wanted to do at Wallwisher was to build our own blog theme using the UI principles we swear by. Some of the things we wanted in our blog theme were:

• A floating layout. A fixed width layout does not reward people with large screens. A blog is primarily text and therefore a floating layout can be easily accomplished.
• 2 column with a collapsable sidebar. More than 2 columns compete with the user’s attention. The sidebar should be collapsable to allow the user to focus on a lengthy article. It also allows users of smaller screens to read effectively.
• Limited use of images for better performance. The world is perfect when you browse the Internet from your broadband connections in the US. But things can get really ugly and frustrating even the seemingly most uber urban places like Singapore. You want to tear your hair off sometimes when you have to wait 5 seconds for the blog to show up, just because it takes time to download those rounded rectangles/gradients.
• Effectively separate primary and secondary information. Primary information being the post text, and the secondary information being the categories, tags, permalinks, etc etc. A lot of blogs we see have, what we call, a dumpster footer – full of meta data about the post that is not used by 90% (a ballpark figure) of the readers.
• Use of colors to differentiate page elements. The web is such a visual medium, it hurts to see elements on a page separated like on a traditional journal – underlines, a difference in font sizes, etc etc. The easiest and the most effective way to achieve the differential is to use colors to separate the elements.

Look, for example, at the google blog design below. I understand they want to be simple n all, but com’on! Everything here is white and grey. The blog uses only 50% of my 1440px screen. For us here at Wallwisher, at least, it is not an easy read.

But well, the earth refuses to rotate slower than we want it to sometimes and the days are still 24 hours! So unfortunately, we did not have the bandwidth to make our own wordpress theme.

However, sifting through the wordpress themes on the Internet, our eyes stopped on this wonderful theme called Ahimsa, which, if we’re not wrong, means Peace. The theme, in our opinion, is almost perfect. Just look at it:

• Floating layout
• 2 COLUMN COLLAPSABLE SIDEBAR
• It hardly uses any images. The rounded rectangles you see (or you don’t see) are purely CSS, which means IE users would not see rounded edges, but FF users will. This, we believe is the best way to go about such issues. We’ll make a post on this soon.
• Look how things like categories and tags are hidden until you click on the word. Brilliant, just brilliant. We checked the size of JS required to support it – just 2kb, or 300ms on a 56kbps connection.
• Look how well things are separated by color. Ok, we agree there is a bit too much color (we’ll work on it when we have a bit of time) but the idea is right.

This theme is just fantastic. We hope that more people would follow these rules when they design their own themes. weagree sometimes you need the gloss, but for simple text journaling, Ahimsa is one of the best themes we’ve ever come across. Kudos to Ravi Sarma for creating such a wonderful theme!

A little new and a little improved wallwisher is now live. The goal of wallwisher is and always will be great user interface without compromising performance and this is what the new improved wallwisher promises.

Over the next couple of months, expect to see more goodness ..!!

As web developers, we often run into problems while handling various assets such as images, scripts and css files. To make it easier to access and call such assets from within the Code Igniter framework, here is an implementation of the Asset Library, which we have been using at Wallwisher. Hope you find it useful.

Structure

In parallel to the Code Igniter system folder in your implementation, place a new folder called assets. Inside this folder, feel free to describe new assets such as images, scripts, styles and others necessary for your implementation. You need the following files to implement the library:

1. Configuration File: to be placed in system/application/config/ 

   assets.php

2. Helper File: to be placed in system/application/helpers/

   assets_helper.php

3. Library File: to be placed in system/application/libraries/

   Assets.php

Examples

Here are a few examples which might help you in understanding the usage of this library:

1. $new_image = ‘.’.asset_url(‘example.jpg’,'images’);
2. $CI =& get_instance();   $new_css = $CI->assets->get_asset_from_name(‘css’,$name);

There is a lot of buzz about WYSWYG editors of all kinds. At Wallwisher, we have spent considerable time and energy in implementing a true WYSWYG feel, whereby there are no forms which require you to refresh the page.

With Wallwisher, a user can interact with the web elements to an increased extent than other web applications. With this increased interactivity, it is important for the elements to behave in a predictable manner, and the end result of each interaction to be what exactly what the user wants it to be. This is true WYSWYG, and Wallwisher hopes to continue down this path in the coming months!