October grant competition, results
The October grant competition has ended and the three participants with the highest scores have already received three free True22 servers: 960 MHz CPU, 512 Mb RAM, 16 Gb HDD, for a period of 1 year. Full voting results can be seen on the results page , and here I present the winners:November contest
Now we are accepting applications for the November competition , for which 2 grants are presented - True30 servers: 1280 MHz CPU, 1024 Mb RAM, 32 Gb HDD, 1 year. Applications are accepted through the form until midnight on November 19. Voting will begin at noon on November 20 and last until November 30.Winners of the October Contest
We asked the winners to talk about their projects.
Photoshop World
Evgeny Getmanenko, egetmanenko
Our project is a self-educational resource using the Photoshop program. We write and translate lessons, answer questions. Photoshop is more of a working tool for us: one of us works as a designer, someone takes pictures, someone needs him for fun or just to create a cool avatar.
"Photoshop World" began its existence in the 2000th year, then still on a free hosting on the People. For a long time he did not develop; only after 6 years, in the 2006th year, there was a slight rebirth. Then I wrote my engine in PHP and transferred the site to paid hosting with a new domain. Since then, new materials began to appear - at first I wrote new lessons myself. We now have nearly 200 publications, but this is only the beginning. Although not fast, we are developing and planning to make this site even more informative and useful than now. The goal has always been one - to write about what's relevant.
The first engine, as I already noted, was written by me on a bunch of php + mysql without using any ready-made libraries or frameworks (then I didn’t even know such words). Now, still from the finished - only JsHttpRequest. Throughout the entire existence of the project, the engine corresponded 2 times (in 2007 and 2009), and at one time more than one freelancer had a hand in it. In recent months, conditional caching of lesson pages, the formation of sitemap.xml, implementation of error codes (301, 304, 401, 403, 404, 500) were "licked" from technical chips, and the almost-valid Strict can be noted. As the logical conclusion to all this - our site is now the nominee for the WebHiTech contest. Also, statistics claim that after the above innovations, search traffic has increased slightly (statistics on the site are publicly available).
In the near future we plan to begin actively filling the section with files, plus we will finalize the section itself - we will probably do something in the blog format. And, unlike other sites, we do not plan to upload files to free file hosting, perhaps even buy another server with sharpening for a wide channel, if things go uphill. Good news for our project, I think, is yet to come! On behalf of the whole team, I thank Truevds.ru for supporting our project in the form of a grant - this gives a tangible financial scope for the development of our business.
Novouralsk online community
Zhuravlev
Novouralsk is located approximately in the middle between Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Tagil, it is part of the ZATO system (closed admin. Territ. Education). Previously, the city was called Sverdlovsk-44. Hence the domain of the project NU-44.ru.
The project was created in 2003. It was hosted first by city providers, then by acquaintance. Initially, LDU (Land Down Under) was used as a CMS, then there was a transition to the Seditio branch (http://www.neocrome.net/). But I stopped at LDU, then added it. Then the site’s brakes started (the forum base was growing, the page could open in 30 seconds (there were no time limits on php, the site began to hang up other projects that were on this machine), and I also wanted to redesign or rebrand it.
In 2009, it was decided to switch to LiveStreet while maintaining the user base and use commercial shared hosting. Due to the fact that LiveStreet is very demanding on resources, I had to change several hosters, as they began to receive formidable warnings about the load with parallel account blocking. And in September 2009 he left for TrueVDS, taking True20 right away. With VDS - I came across for the first time, automatic installation of presets saved, there was a lack of and lack of a web panel. Then he switched to
Optimized preset. But LiveStreet continued to feed on resources. Everything that was possible was optimized (caching and accelerator were included in the “Optimized” preset). Was connected specialist administrator for Linux systems. But there was no result. About 400-500 users - did their job. Pretty regularly on the site it was possible to meet a 502 or 504 error, which could not but annoy :)
Somewhere in May, we turn back to the forums - the blog engine did not take root, people gradually left the resource, other resources began to be created, and the rewritten forums were already ready. I understood why the old forums were slowing down, I clearly saw the advantages of the presence / absence of indexes and complex page caching was added (caching at the level of database queries, complex and heavy queries are calculated and put into files). The new forum began to work faster than the old one and than blogs on livestream, but even this did not help to completely avoid 502 - 504 errors. And here is the participation in the competition in October this year. Having mobilized people, arranging an infinitely banner campaign, we take the second place, we are leaving for the True22 tariff. The miracle finally happened :) - the page loads about 0.3 seconds (without caching), with caching even less.
Site - I try not to load banners, at the moment they are not at all. Social advertising of any forum member is free. Now there is an action: to congratulate a friend, a company on its anniversary - also for free - the main thing is that the friend / company is from the city. Many novouralians consider the NU-44 to be their home on the net.
VOMP
Timothy, yamalight , codezen.ru
VOMP was originally developed as a very simple utility for searching and viewing videos from the base Vkontatke.ru. Later, at the request of a then small audience, additional functions began to be added, such as searching the database of existing films (here, special thanks to the guys from Kinobaza for the database), the ability to download videos, etc.
Initially, VOMP was decrypted as Vkontakte Open Media Player, but based on what is planned for the future, apparently the project will become just VOMP. Despite the fact that at the moment this project has the role of a fan project for us, we are doing it quite tightly and hope to develop it as far as possible. Now the project has more than a thousand regular users and this number, although slowly, is constantly growing. In the near future we are going to publish several technical articles (and maybe something about the design too, but I can’t say for sure) related to the development of the application and some of the difficulties that we encountered and their solutions.
Also in the plans for the near future:
1) A new, super cool design that we have already shown on our twitter!
2) Versions for the two most popular mobile platforms - Android and iOS. And not only for mobile phones, but also for tablets!
3) An improved version of the download manager with support for torrents
4) Full integration with the cinema base service (including the future paid version with a bunch of very tasty chips)
Well, and all sorts of little things. We hope that you will stay with us, because any opinion is important to us! And most importantly, if you have any ideas about the functions - be sure to let us know and we will certainly add them. :)
PS Some people have the impression that grants are provided only to TrueVDS customers. This is not true. Grants are available to all without restrictions. The main condition is that it should be in demand by society, a useful and interesting project.Apply , welcome!