Harry Maugans » Car-Wallpapers.net

Car-Wallpapers.net
Post by hmaugans. Filed under Web Development.

Googling around for wallpapers, I don’t think ANY site is doing what I developed. I might even go as far as to say, this could be the single most advanced wallpaper gallery on the internet, hah. I haven’t found one close.

Anyway, check this out:

http://www.car-wallpapers.net

I’ve just finished developing this from the ground up. It’s a wallpaper gallery that’s completely member-run, without all the flashy ads, popups, and deceptive links of other wallpaper galleries. Anyone can upload and submit a wallpaper, and it goes through a period of pending addition. During this limbo period, people can thumbs up or reject it. If the wallpaper is given enough approvals, it’s automatically moved to the correct category and indexed in the database. If it receives enough reject votes before it’s added, the uploaded wallpaper is automatically deleted, and all data related to it purged from the system… never reaching it’s category (exploring the website will help clarify this, or read the further description here).

Another cool thing on uploading: say you upload a 1280×1024 wallpaper. As soon as you submit it, the system will automatically generate additional wallpapers for the resolutions 1024×768 and 800×600, the two steps below the size you uploaded. If you upload a 1600×1200 (max supported), it generates copies for all the resolutions. This adds more choices for the user. Also when uploading a wallpaper, the image’s size are checked strictly against standard wallpaper sizes, so small or oddly shaped images will never clutter the system.

Now, I’ve coded a complete tagging system and implemented it on the wallpapers, very similar to the tagging systems of Technorati, del.icio.us, and digg.com (as well as countless others like netvouz, blinklist, simply, shadows, etc). When you view a wallpaper, for example (http://www.car-wallpapers.net/view-wallpaper-22.html), you will notice on the bottom middle the tags the wallpaper is marked with. Anyone can add new tags, and through the edit mode (button below the bottom right corner of the wallpaper thumbnail), people can issue votes to delete tags. Tagging is great because it connects wallpapers with similar features. For example you can click on the M3 tag of that example and see all the other M3 wallpapers in the system, bringing up the search results from that tag. Then you can change the drop-down to filter by category within the tag search. For example, when you’re viewing all M3s (http://www.car-wallpapers.net/tags-M3.html), you can change the drop down from “Show All” to “BMW”, and only see the M3’s in the BMW category (this is more appropriate for cross-make tags, such as convertible), or you can change the tag to “Girls and Cars”, and see all wallpapers containing a girl posing with an M3. If you’ve never used tags before on another website, play around with them on here, as they’re quite useful.

Now the cool part, navigation. When you click on BMW on the left navigation menu, for example, you see 5-10 submenu items that appear below it (e36, e46, m3, z4, etc). These are not hard-coded, but completely dynamic. When you click on BMW, the system goes through and looks at every BMW wallpaper in the gallery, and analyzes all the tags. It then chooses a handful of the most popular tags (algorithmic), and lists those below the Make as suggested subcategories. This setup is great because say someone logs on and uploads 150 wallpapers of the new M6. After the system detects enough popularity of that tag, it’ll automatically add M6 to the submenu below BMW, so people can go straight there.

And also, this site is extremely search engine friendly and optimized, so as soon as it starts gaining some popularity, search engines will love it.

Keep in mind, the site just was finished this afternoon, so there may be a bug or two (if you find anything, let me know), however so far it seems pretty bulletproof.

The next step is to grow the database, so if you guys have any great wallpapers sitting around on your computer, please upload away! We need to bulk up a bit now (however make sure it doesn’t already exist in the system before you upload). As soon as it matures a bit, I’d like to replace the UB wallpaper gallery with this one.