I recently completed an Image Search Mashup Application as part of a term project for a web applications class I took this spring at GMU (additional info can be found here). When working on my project I noticed that a lot of popular image search applications in use today have surprisingly few features (e.g. - Google, Yahoo). Could fear/risk of losing users be the reason these applications do not experiment with new features? Whatever the case may be I decided to implement some additional features in my application as an example of how existing applications could be improved. One application that does seem to be moving in the right direction as far as image searching is concerned is Live. The do a great job of dynamic adjustment of image sizes, providing automatic retrieval of additional results using AJAX, and a scratchpad feature to store images for later use is a nice added touch. Displaying linked pages in a window within the same page prevents the user from having to navigate to previous pages with the back button is also very useful.

I’ve added pictures to the site. I’m linking my Flickr Photos using a very sweet tool called FlickrBox.

From Naggle about FlickrBox:

“FlickrBox is a CSS / PHP / JavaScript based Flickr Photo gallery that lets you display your recent Flickr photos and public photosets right on your own site using the Flickr API. One of the key differences between his script and others like it is that you can view the full sized image from within your own website without having to navigate to Flickr. ”

I eventually plan on adding a slideshow on the sidebar as well.

Finally added something new to the site. Took a little while but I finally got the news ticker working in the sidebar. It’s displaying headlines from some RSS feeds that I subscribe to. I’m parsing the feeds using Magpie RSS, and using script.aculo.us for the fading effect, the rest is just javascript, PHP, and CSS.

Hello! Welcome to my site. I know, it’s pretty lame so far, but give it some time. I should have a bunch more content (pictures, links, archives, etc.) up in the next couple weeks. I registered the domain a couple weeks ago with Dreamhost using Wordpress as my CMS.