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Jake

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As a (professional!) web-nerd I'm kind of interested in the technical nitty gritty. What CMS are you guys using or did you build one yourself? I'm especially wondering if you're using a CSS pre-processor or not, since the stylesheets seems very hand-coded.

I have to say as front-end developer, that is some delicious looking source code you've got, very clean. Way cool. :)

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The new site looks fantastic! I was really curious what a 'podcast network' would end up being, it looks like a way of spreading cool things to the readerships of different casts. I wonder where this network will go!

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As a (professional!) web-nerd I'm kind of interested in the technical nitty gritty. What CMS are you guys using or did you build one yourself?

We (Doug/Mike/Jake) built one ourselves. It's called the Thumblord and it is rad.

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As a (professional!) web-nerd I'm kind of interested in the technical nitty gritty. What CMS are you guys using or did you build one yourself? I'm especially wondering if you're using a CSS pre-processor or not, since the stylesheets seems very hand-coded.

I have to say as front-end developer, that is some delicious looking source code you've got, very clean. Way cool. :)

The site is built on a PHP framework called Fuel (http://fuelphp.com/) used for routing and all that sort of nitty-gritty and the Thumblord uses Twitter's Bootstrap (or parts of it) and there's jQuery of course and the HTML player's fallback is jPlayer's flash component but beyond that it's entirely from scratch. No CSS pre-processors were used because I don't care for them.

Doug also set up a bunch of crazy stuff on the server level to make everything super fast, though I'm less familiar with that part.

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Doug also set up a bunch of crazy stuff on the server level to make everything super fast, though I'm less familiar with that part.

Yep, we are doing whole page caching via http://wiki.nginx.or...MemcachedModule - For pages that are marked as cachable (most of them, really), part of the job of the controller's after() method is to put the rendered page into memcache, so unless you miss the cache most requests are served straight out of memory. Not that the site's slow without it (caching was disabled for a week or two before launch, and for most of launch day, for example), but I care a lot about speed, and it's hard to beat just serving pages from memory :)

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Aww. I get three dots instead of the last two letters of my name.. :( Well, serves me right for only backing at the lowest level! And having a long name.

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Thanks for the answers, guys. Might be repeating myself, but that all sounds really cool. Also, great name.

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(ATTEMPT AT COMPLIMENT REMOVED BECAUSE IT ALL WENT VERY WRONG. SERIOUSLY IT WAS MEANT TO BE A COMPLIMENT AND I DON'T KNOW HOW I MANAGED TO MAKE IT SO RUBBISH AS TO TURN OUT AS A DISS.)

(Also, I was hoping you'd use Mustache because once again, libraries with silly names amuse me.)

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Although I usually regard creating your own CMS as the sort of malarky that leads to trying to parse HTML with regexps, y'all seem like you might actually pull it off.

Thanks, maybe?

For the record, there is absolutely nothing wrong with creating custom CMSs, and I definitely wouldn't label it the mark of an amateur or incompetent web developer (but then again, I may be biased). IF you needs from a CMS are limited and you have the resources (in the short term to build it and in the long term to maintain it) then it's, in my opinion, the right way to go. Generalized systems like ExpressionEngine or Wordpress are great if you want low development overhead to get a site off the ground, but in my experience (and I do have experience with both of those systems) they'll never be perfectly suited for any one site because they're built to such a general purpose. And if you get into the business of modding them, then you've gone down a dark road of dependency management come upgrade time.

A custom CMS like the thumblord gives us a nice tidy code base that's easy for us to extend, change, rewrite, update, or do pretty much anything else we want to do going forward.

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Although I usually regard creating your own CMS as the sort of malarky that leads to trying to parse HTML with regexps, y'all seem like you might actually pull it off. Thumb it off. Thumblord it off. Or something.

(Also, I was hoping you'd use Mustache because once again, libraries with silly names amuse me.)

Ever since idlethumbs.net was first launched in early 2004, it has run on its own CMS! It's not new to us. Thanks, Doug!

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*Cough Cough*

post-8969-0-71258100-1346964304_thumb.jpg

Some of those are for Kickstarter rewards but we've been figuring out how we want to actually maybe sell things in the coming months. Glad we'd have at least one customer!

Oh man, I will buy the shit out of those, even if I get some as a Kickstarter reward. Customer #2 right here.

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Thanks, maybe?

You're welcome?

I was trying to be complimentary in a manner that didn't sound like rabid fannism, and instead managed to word it in a way that was actually an insult! WELL DONE, ME.

(No, seriously. It wasn't meant to be an insult.)

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p.s. would it in any way undo my faux pas if I mentioned that I saved you Doug in episode 1

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p.s. would it in any way undo my faux pas if I mentioned that I saved you Doug in episode 1

No, the damage is already done.

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All this web magic is cool and all, but what really impresses me is that you guys tracked down a high-res image of the end of SimAnt for that episode. I tried myself in order to make some kind of photoshop of it after hearing the episode, but ultimately had to admit defeat.

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p.s. would it in any way undo my faux pas if I mentioned that I saved you Doug in episode 1

Well how can I say no to that :)

All this web magic is cool and all, but what really impresses me is that you guys tracked down a high-res image of the end of SimAnt for that episode. I tried myself in order to make some kind of photoshop of it after hearing the episode, but ultimately had to admit defeat.

Chris did a hilarious amount of work to clean up a lower-res version. I think he basically hand-repainted big chunks of it to get it to look good at that scale.

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Wow, the site is beautiful. Is there a way to go to it directly from the forum?

Just came here to post this. Please help me find my way back to your main webs, as the forums are what I have had bookmarked since forever. I am a lazy jerk!

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Chris did a hilarious amount of work to clean up a lower-res version. I think he basically hand-repainted big chunks of it to get it to look good at that scale.

Correct. I recreated it from a shitty compressed version I found.

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Any chance you can make hi-res versions of the icons in the footer (and other general Idle Thumbs branding badassery) available for download in the Extras section?

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May we have a link to the idlethumbs.net in the forum's header pretty please ?

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May we have a link to the idlethumbs.net in the forum's header pretty please ?

Yes!

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I have Flash set to not load in Opera until I click on it. That breaks the streaming on the episode pages. I don't really mind that, but what is kind of weird is that when I click "play" it says that I need Flash enabled if I want to listen in Firefox. I'm not using Firefox! I'm using Opera >:-|.

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Yes!

Lies, LIES!

As a sidenote, on Firefox 15.0.1., when I click on the 'XCom Livestream' vignette once on the main page it brings the full image in th header; but if I click on it a second time, I'm being sent to the blog post about the PAX conference. Clicking on the big picture brings me to the proper blog entry though.

It's also weird that, on the main page, if I click on the vignette of any of the podcasts episodes twice or on the 'big picture' I'm being brought to the corresponding show's mainpage rather than the page of that particular episode. There's a bit of a discrepancy with the vignettes for the blog post which lead you to the actual blog entry.

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Ever since idlethumbs.net was first launched in early 2004, it has run on its own CMS! It's not new to us. Thanks, Doug!

Is the backend of thumblord tricked out with style and running jokes? I'd love to see a screenshot.

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