Pistilli Grand Manor

Strata-Art Updates

12 recent paintings by Richard Fox have been uploaded to the various galleries of Strata-Art. The homepage and main gallery pages were also updated accordingly. Previously, the main gallery page, like the homepage of last year was made up of a grid of small images that formed a larger one. This was simplified to just one large image with a smaller total file size. Just converting it to one large image already increased the load time because downloading one large file is quicker than downloading many small files that are the same total size as the large file.

Click here for Strata Art

Share This

You may have noticed the new icon under every post labeled "ShareThis." It's something we're looking into implementing on Frommers.com that will allow users to share pages via every major social media site on the Internet with a couple of clicks. I decided to try it out on this blog first since it's a much smaller site. They had a script just for Blogger that was pretty neat. Just by placing it on the page, every post has it's own unique action. The ShareThis code is based on JavaScript's location.href property. So implementing this on a full website will be pretty simple because the code won't change from page to page. On Frommers.com, it'll just be tedious because it has to be added to many pages manually as well as to some backend generating tools.

Into the Seasons

Opening Night Reception

Nightshift 2008

Photos from Hot Import Nights: Nightshift 2008 are up on RCT Performance now. The format is different than previous galleries. This time, it's a medium resolution Picasa slideshow. Having the photos on Picasa has many advantages:

• Reduced development time
• Automatically generated Flash slideshow
• Hi-res downloads
• Hosted content management system
• Plugs into Picasa community

Click here for Nightshift 2008

Frommer's Atlantic City

The Atlantic City destination at Frommers.com is a little more complete now. With my most recent trip out there, I covered another portion of the boardwalk. Now the slideshow includes shots of Caesar's, Trump Plaza and Wild Wild West. It was also my first sunny day with blue sky at Atlantic City, so there are some nice wide views of the beachfront.

I left the main page images the same because I didn't want to repeat the same photos over again. The ones on the main page were from 2001, but can still pass for today.

Click here for Frommer's Atlantic City

Into The Seasons

"Watercolors by Kim Eng Yeo, a realist painter who draws inspiration from Nature, seeking its essence in her landscape paintings that fosters a keener appreciation - beyond decoration to the poetic and evocative."
Marilyn Sontag
Gallery Coordinator
Synagogue for the Arts Gallery Space

Kim Eng Yeo will be exhibiting at Synagogue for the Arts from November 6 - December 7. The reception will be on November 6 from 6 PM to 8 PM. Visit KimEngYeo.com for details.

Explore the Frommers.com Community

Frommer's Community

Overview
After 11 years of using Web Crossing, Frommers.com expanded its community today by migrating over to Pluck. Instead of just message boards, the new suite added blogs, photos and video (coming in the future). It also integrated other portions of the site such as commenting and recommending of articles.

Technology
After researching a couple of vendors, Pluck turned out to be the best choice for the site. Technically, it was the most difficult to implement, but it was more important to develop correctly than plug into a quick out-of-the-box solution that would limit things in the future. The technologies used were JavaScript widgets, Direct Access API (DAAPI) and Representational State Transfer (REST) via ColdFusion. Customization was very technical as changes depended heavily on injecting code or overriding existing CSS. It helped that Frommers.com ran on ColdFusion technology because that opened up the options to solving each problem to going with either JavaScript or CFML.

Design
Such a large addition to the site without a full redesign presented a problem because it had so many modules and there was no way to fit everything into the currrent 800x600 design. The Community section was expanded to 1024x768, but with only a subtle change to the top navigation to avoid disrupting user experience as people clicked into and out of the new section. It's essentially the same, but ther was more space added to the left and right of the row of section buttons. The buttons then had left and right edge definitions added.

Related: Frommers.com Community, Pluck Sitelife

SQL Injection Defense

Dragonsaber, KimEngYeo.com and Frommer's have been protected against SQL injection attacks. For more details on implmenting the fix, please read the paragraph below by ColdFusion guru, Ben Forta.

SQL Injection Attacks, Easy To Prevent, But Apparently Still Ignored
I was just on a web site (no, not a ColdFusion powered site, and no I will not name names) browsing for specific content. The URLs used typical name=value query string conventions, and so I changed the value to jump to the page I wanted. And I made a typo and added a character to the numeric value. The result? An invalid SQL error message. Read more.
Ben Forta
Forta.com