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Brian Gillingham

Huge Software Download Site - Version 2 Give us some feedback for our latest major changes and a few new thing

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Hey Ladies and Gents!

 

I wanted to sort of just make an announcement here - and get some feedback as well.

 

After much fixing / design / coding / testing and refixing, the latest features have now been uploaded to the web site. There's been some serious changes made. We've listened to all of the feedback that came from earlier posts here; we modified some of our graphics - made some things faster - fixed a few bugs and now it is time to get some constructive criticism of the newer features. I am looking forward to some good critiques and some questions. I have edited this post - and inserted some new content. We're still looking for feedback about usage.

 

OS Filtering working!!

The code has been added to allow you to filter search results for your operating system... Currently, you can only select one operating system from the list at a time. To avoid confusion, the filter is not part of the initial search form as of yet, but it will soon be added to the advanced searching form that is currently in development. The search filters can be seen at the top of any page of search results in our web, but you can start with our new listings and go from there.

 

Operating system filters that are currently supported (other than Windows - doh!):

404.png PalmOS404.png Java404.png BeOS404.png OS/2404.png OS/2 Warp404.png Netware404.png Linux404.png Unix404.png Mac 68k404.png Mac OS 9404.png Mac OS X404.png All Mac404.png MSDOS404.png Windows 3404.png Windows 95, 98, ME404.png Windows CE404.png Windows NT 3.0 or 4.0404.png Windows 2000404.png All Windows

Latest Changes

A complete database optimization has been completed; more than 50 queries have been made a couple milliseconds faster.

 

File Size Filters

Also, file size filters have been added. You can specify maximum or minimum file sizes (or both).

 

Undecided? - check out Random Programs

We added a new feature for those insomniacs who don't know what they want to download. It is a random program page and it can display a random program at any category level. For example, globally random program would be http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/.

 

Here's a few fun random links that are in a category:

Random GameRandom Audio and MultimediaRandom Video ToolsRandom Browser ToolsRandom DesktopRandom System UtilitiesRandom Puzzle & Word Game

Custom Lists of software added

 

You have to create a login first. This is a login in the members area, not to be confused with the forums login which is separate. This is an interesting concept, but I have to explain how it works.

 

If you have students in your class, or employees at your company, or blog members at your blog - you can create lists from our database of software. For example, if your blog members are involved in a certain hobby, you can probably make a list of a couple useful programs that they may want - and name the page, etc. - and voila! We generate that web page for you that you can provide the URL for your students to use in order to get all of the programs that they might need in one place.

 

Here's an example list: My Company Recommended

 

 

Author Feature capability added

 

It may be impossible for you to review or critique anything here - since you have to be one of the authors of the software we list. This is where a software author can manage his / her software. Aside from being able to feature their software here, they can also configure some other bits of their web. The commerce is done via PayPal (wasn't that tough to code against their Instant Payment Notification). You can read about what an author can do here.

 

 

Software Forums added

 

We whamjacked some of the forum code so that the index page doesn't display empty subforums. There are a few other whamjacks in there. We extended the BBCode so that users can create instant linkst to a program that appears on our site by knowing the program's PAD ID#. The BBCode is simply [padid=8552]Crawler Games - dance George W!![/padid] - which creates the output: Crawler Games - dance George W!!.

 

Discussions are opened to the public. These are mostly-empty forums right now; hopefully, we can have Questions & Answers full of meaningful posts. Once there are some meaningful posts in the forums - we plan to incoporate them into the software section of the website (eg: list any posts about program#1232 for the software listing page for program #1232).

 

Other enhancements to our forums include: email Digests so that you can watch whichever topics (fully configurable), RSS Feeds for each subforum which really makes it easy to plug into any reader.

 

Developers can make posts in our forums to earn credits toward getting software featured. One of the areas of interest for developers would be the Press Releases forums in each software category.

 

Here's a link to our: Software Forums

Edited by OpaQue (see edit history)

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