Well to bring you guys up to date on the current status of the random site I thought I’d show you the two themes for the site. In the future you’ll be able to create your own theme, but as for right now there are two themes. NovaBlack and WhitePearl. WhitePearl is inverted colors of NovaBlack, simple but effective. Anyway regarding the menus on the left, they are now fully generated by the database and the big blank box is where ads will be. Now don’t worry you won’t have those ads that cover the screen, only minor google text ads. Not so much of a big deal considering it’s only a very small portion of the screen. It also helps generate some money, if any, to maintain the site. Speaking of money to maintain the site, I haven’t been generating any lately. So I’m going to put a nice donate button here, and hopefully some of you kind souls will donate.

Moving on, this is possibly the first time you’ve actually seen this much of the random viewer and are probably wondering what half the secrets this site has hidden in that bottom bar. I’ve decided to call it a dock since it holds a clock, music player, and menu. Along with the navigation tabs which open up new pages. The task I’m currently trying to work on is the actual music player for the site, and then having to make two themes for that player too, which doesn’t seem like it would be that hard except I’m having to do this through flash, which makes an annoying barrier between what I already have and what the player looks like. So that is what I’ll be working on for this next week, along with the settings pagez so I don’t have to keep going to the MySQL prompt to change values the player uses. I’ll also have to get a nice looking register page out, currently the register page is ugly as can be. Also what is new to the viewer is you can log in through the menu button on the bottom right, when logged in it gives menu options for you. I’ve also moved the logout button to that menu and removed the profile tab for guest log ins. Another problem that I have noticed is page load times. Due to the extreme amount of content that will be distributed via the viewer I’ll need to create a speedy way to load the pages in AJAX. I might end up having to paginate the results, something that will have to be a set value so users can’t overload the server.

Besides the few problems that I’ll be running into in the future the site is moving along smoothly and slowly gaining more and more features. I took the past few days off to hang out with friends because I’ve been working no stop, but I should be back in the grove to work this week. I’ll need the motivation to be able to figure out how to display all the content via a database. It might take longer than that as well to learn AJAX well enough to be able to pull off the original plan that I had. I might end up having to cut the AJAX page loading and go back to iframes, but I completely hate how I have to deal with the height issues with pages.

Anyway I’ve complained enough for this post so I’ll leave you guys with the new theme images to look at. I’ll keep working on the website, but I can’t do it without financial help from you guys, anything you’re willing to donate helps pay for the hosting. Thanks for reading, remember the random viewer 5 is all for you guys!