Launch of Stargazrs.com

[Grant]

Hi everyone,

I am very proud to announce the launch of Stargazrs.com, a new website designed for astronomers and astro groups/societies.

Stargazrs.com

First of all, let me explain the idea behind Stargazrs. In essence its a newer version of Isee Stars but I intend to run it as a completely seperate website and let Isee Stars continue as it is. Isee Stars was never designed as an astronomy image hosting website, so it always had features that weren't needed, such as galleries, online editing etc..

Stargazrs is much simpler but more powerful, here are the primary features:

Astro Groups/Societies

-Could list details of their society, contact details, history etc..

-Have a list of friends who also use the site, these would be club members so you can see who else is a member and keep track of them

-A calendar of events that people can search for based on postcode or title

-upload photos of events, members and talks etc..

-upload videos of events, members and talks etc..

-keep a diary where you could write reviews of events, post news or maintain a newsletter type system (also known as a blog)

-manage a mailing list that people can subscribe to and the society would be able to send out emails from the website

Normal Users

-Could have a profile listing (optional) their age, location, biography, sex, interests etc..

-Upload their astronomy photos to share with other people, they can give each photo a name and description. Other people can leave comments about the photo and it can also be tagged with keywords to make searching easier. E.g, tag a photo of M57 with the tag "M57", when people view the photo, they can click on the "M57" tag to view all other images by all other users that are also tagged with "M57".

-Upload videos - e.g. videos of comets, tutorials, eclipses etc.. these would be viewable by others exactly like youtube.

-keep a diary where you can record your observing sessions, make imaging notes or share tutorials with others.

-Maintain a list of friends, basically other users on the site you want to keep track of. There is a friends feed which will show you all the photos and videos your friends have uploaded in the past 24 hours.

-Receive event notifications of events that are happening in your local area

These are just the main features, there is also stuff like sending other users private messages, controlling who can access images, linking to your images and videos from other sites like SGL etc... etc...

I also want to add, this isn't designed to compete with SGL in any way because its not designed to foster the type of chat that a forum caters for, it would be more like a database that holds all of your astro related information: images, videos, observation notes, friends, upcoming astro events. Eventually I would want to integrate Isee Dark Skies into it as well as another astro website project I have in the works...

I wanted to share with you all a couple of tips that might make the site even better:

Setting Up Your Avatar

To change your avatar, click on "Control Panel" in the top right hand corner (when your logged in), then in the control panel, click "Edit Profile", from here there is an option to choose one of the images you've uploaded to use as an avatar, click on the image and save your profile. Bobs your uncle, you have an avatar!

Tagging your Photos

When you've added a photo, you can then go back and view it, underneath the photo will be an option to 'Change Tags', click on here and then type in some keywords that describe that image, for example, an image of M57 might be tagged like: "m57, messier, ring nebula", then click 'Save Tags'

This will make it very easy to see all photos tagged with M57, try it out: http://stargazrs.com/browse/photos/action/tags/ there you can see some of the tags already used, the bigger the font the more popular that tag is.

By tagging as much of the stuff on the site as possible, it should be really easy and fun to be able to view all of the M57 images, or all moon images etc...

Adding Friends

In your control panel is an option called 'Friends Feed', this shows you what your friends have been up to in the past 24 hours, it shows all the images, events etc.. they have uploaded and makes it easy to keep track of things. To add people as a friend, simply go to their profile and in the mini-control panel box should be an option to 'Add Friend', once you've done this, they receive a friend request, once they accept it, you are friends!

In your control panel is a 'Friends List' option, from here you can manage your friends, remove them from your list or make them appear on your profile.

A few people have also suggested that I setup somewhere for us to discuss Stargazrs, well here it is, a feedback forum: http://feedback.stargazrs.com/index.php you don't have to register to use it or setup a profile and its only got one forum, to be used for feedback purposes only, feel free to report any bugs or suggest any features here.

Cheers,

Grant

[Grant]

Lots of people are signing up and adding images which is fantastic to see!

I was hoping to see some people using the widgets in their signatures, for example, Jamies photos widget is:

CC's is:

And Gaz's looks like:

With some colour changes that you can make really easily from your 'widgets' page on Stargazrs

[SteveL]

Should widget creation for (example) "user1" be available when logged in as "user2"? Or even for anonymous/non-logged-in users?

[Grant]

Widgets only use your publically accessible images, blogs and events so all of the data is available to people anyway... the reason for letting anybody access it is so your friends can embed your widgets on their websites to help promote you, for example, somebody might put on their links page your photos widget that links to your area on Stargazrs...

You might also use the widgets of a group or user in your website to display the events they have listed to help publicise those events.

Steve, you might also be interested in using the publically accessible api which reads all public data on the site and spits it out as xml, json or html. The site also has RSS feeds for most pages, again only showing public data.

[Grant]

Just to let you all know, I've now added the ability to upload a zip file of lots of images at once. You go to the add photo page as normal and there is now an option to choose a zip file, the name you give it will be applied to each image preceded by a number, so the first image of the zip file will be "(1) image name" and the second "(2) image name" etc...

This should make uploading lots of images at once really easy

[daz]

How do we promote this outside of SGL do you think?

I think its a fantastic resource that benefit many, but we don't it to be just another SGL.

Need to get some banner exchanges going!

[Grant]

Definitely Daz, I'm waiting for it to fill up a little more than I plan on writing a press release and sending it to the usual suspects... I also have a few others plans for promoting it to the wider astro community...

[FLO]

Be sure to add it to FLO's links page