Ya, sorry about the dragon images. That was me. Since people were getting into Dragon Cave so much and with the slowdown I figured I'd go and just get them all uploaded so people didn't keep making a bunch of duplicates. The thread is here. I still have about 157 more images to upload but if you want I can post those on Photobucket or something. Up to you

It grows when others view the image, and when the click on your dragon.
When they view it, it doesn't need to be the dragon's page on dragcave, but the image needs to be hosted on dragcave.

That would explain the slowness then. Those images aren't just images, but scripts. Just like my 'dynamic userbars'.
Though, I imagine that code would be massive with so many possible images. Not to mention it must have a LOT of traffic.
No wonder they were killing loading times.

Anyway, it's no problem meishe. Like I said, I was just curious. =P
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I think I'll get another update or two on the image server done tonight.
I'll let you guys know my progress.

By the way, the only reason I've been having trouble with thumbnails is I don't know what to do about animated gifs yet.
I'm thinking I'll just have to not make thumbnails for .gif images. I'll keep looking into it. Hopefully I can find a way to distinguish between normal gifs and animated gifs though.

I think there's also the fact Dragcave server is just crappy or overloaded with other sites (kinda like when we used 1and1 for Omnimaga). They went from 2000 users online to 300 and still had major slow downs.

Don't do the first one.  All of them will start with the TIOS homescreen.

Maybe have people choose, or it default to a third of the way through or something?

Left/right arrows, that increment 5 frames or something?
That or have it a default value.

I'm thinking that stealing the first frame is how it'll have to be done. Of course, that wouldn't really be much of a problem because most of the time because you won't need a thumbnail for the calc gifs. They're already pretty small and you really don't wanna have to make people click on an image to see the animated version. We'll see what I can do.

For now, some minor updates.

• Bug Fix: Fixed the preview image resizing on the success page. It originally resized all images to 350px width even if it was smaller but now it only resizes it when it's bigger than 350px width. This doesn't really change much but just makes things look right while uploading.
  
• Update: Added some formatting to make things look a little better. (probably what took the longest)
  
• Update: Although the logo takes you back to the upload form, it's not too obvious to those who haven't read this topic so I added an 'upload another?' button to the bottom of the success page.
  
• Development: Added a mirror of the image server to test out code before making it live. I should have done this earlier... but it slipped my mind. Oh, and no... you can't get access to it. =)
  

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Also, I was planning on making a gallery for the site but I think I need to get thumbnails working first. Especially since galleries are usually just lists of thumbnails anyway. Though, I think I can set up a really lazy gallery this week (or tonight).