TheFatCapBlog

Coming soon: Tumblr Sync

FatCap is a constant work in progress. Since the release, we have made 5 silent releases, all made with the purpose of improving speed and quality. On the matter of speed, we will make a final release next week, with tons of little improvements and rewrites that will help make the whole website a LOT faster.

But the little bonus that you will probably like to hear of, is that we plan to release the automatic synchronisation with Tumblr accounts right after the holidays. Yes, I’m talking synchronisation, and not import like for Flickr, because the system will be entirely automatic.

#0 You add your Tumblr adress (http://{you}.tumblr.com) in the “Edit your profile” page
#1 You add pictures normally in your Tumblr, as you would usually do
#2 You tag them “graffiti”
#3 You have deserved some rest. Go take a nap while the magic happens ;)
#4 You have all your pictures automatically imported and ready for tagging. (you will receive a notification when the robots import some pictures)

If you’re anything like us, you probably already love Tumblr (and if you don’t, chances are that you will). It’s a fast, efficient and modern service, that lets you post all kinds of content, like pictures, videos, regular text, links, etc… Speaking of videos, we will also enable the automatic import of videos added in your Tumblr account if we see a significant activity on it.

In the meantime, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and tell us how we could make the website better for you.

Syd

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Tags: comingsoon, features, tumblr

Apple Magic Mouse

I won’t lie, I’m a big fan of technology. And as a technology freak, I love Mac products. And, as an unix-freak, not (only) for the marketing. FatCap was entirely developed on Mac computers, although tested on all the plateforms and browsers available on earth. Here’s the latest mouse the Cupertino-based company released. It’s a mouse with the same touch technology that you have on your iPhone and iPod Touch. You can swipe, you can pinch. All wireless (bluetooth). And, of course, it’s pretty.

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Tags: apple

We are rolling !

The new version has been up for one week now, and things are going great, thanks to you. We have awesome interviews in the pipe, loads of news to share with you, and our poor dev team doesn’t have a day off and keeps preparing surprises for our dear artists and readers.

Next week we’ll be keeping rolling, with new articles on the blog about photo import from Flickr, and our first minor release since last week, correcting a number of things, that will make everything go even smoother. Stay tuned!

(image via heyokay)

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Picture approval process

So, you’ve uploaded your first picture, then tagged it in your dashboard? Congratulations! But… what now?

The picture approval process

Once your picture has been tagged, it is actually waiting for a moderator to review it. The moderator can either accept it, so it goes immediately live on the site, or reject it, which means permanently erasing the picture.

Whatever the choice of the moderator is, we’re not judging your quality as an artist. Yet, we are no photo sharing website, like Flickr, which job is precisely to store any picture any user would want to upload. FatCap is an online magazine about street-art and graffiti, and as such, we have editorial guidelines that we try to follow.

Our editorial choice is simple: quality over quantity. We think that you readers (artists, photographs, or graffiti fans) love to browse lots of fresh pictures. And when you do, you usually don’t like switching from a top level piece to a very low level one. That’s why we try to stay as homogenous possible in our choices.

Besides, here is a list of things we usually don’t like in pictures:

• blur
• poor resolution (like bad phone cameras)
• sun reflects
• sub-exposition, or over-exposition
• bah photowork, with pictures pasted within each other in a dirty way

We also have guidelines for videos: they MUST be street-art or graffiti videos, depite how exciting it could be, we doubt your holidays videos be interesting to anyone. ;)

That said, we also wanted to underline that we have no blacklist, so even if we’ve refused 10 of your pictures, it doesn’t mean we won’t accept the next 10 if the quality of the shot, as well as the quality of the painting, is consistent with the level you usually find on FatCap.

If you really want to be explained why your picture has been refused, send us an email (canwehelp _-AT-_ fatcap _-DOT-_ com), enclosing the very picture, and we will do our best to give you some hints, and tell you how you should proceed to get more pictures accepted.

Image credits: OrangeMouse

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Tags: moderation, myfatcap, pictures, usage

Take a tour #3: Tag a picture

In the previous article of our series, we learned how to quickly add a picture, directly from your dashboard. But to be published on FatCap, each picture has to be tagged before. Let’s see how to do this in this article, with a lot of screenshots to be as visual and clear as possible.

This is what the interface looks like:

The first step is usually to  tag an artist. to do so, our smart system lets you start typing the first letter of their name directly into the field. In most cases, it should appear. If it’s not the case, add it yourself by clicking on the link highlighted in pink in the picture.

Note: In the large majority of the cases (>80%), the only thing to do is start typing letters, and choosing from the suggestion box. Hence the process is extremely fast, generally between 15 and 30 seconds by picture added. We will go deep in the details in this article for a matter of exhaustivity.

Adding a new artist

In the same way than before, the crew (/crews) of the artist might already exist. In this case it will appear when you type the first letters of the crew. If it doesn’t, you shall add it yourself by clicking on the “add a new crew” link, which will deploy a form just below the current form. Once everything is filled, the only thing remaining is saving the form. The popup will close, and your artist will go straight to the “artists” field.

Tagging a city

Tagging a city works exactly the same way. Except that you can change the country of the city, by clicking on the little flag inside the field, like in this screenshot:

In the case where the city you’re typing in has doubles (for example, Springfield USA), you will have to choose amongst the different options, that will be presented to you instantely. Take a look and see how easy it is.

Useful, huh?

Once everything is filled, you should have something like this:

Then it’s just a matter of saving, before your picture goes for approval by the FatCap team (unless you’re an official photographer, in which case it will go live directly). You will have a confirmation message after you save, and a very precise error reporting if something goes wrong.

Extra:

If you imported your pictures from Flickr, you will have an extra button to see the picture directly on Flickr. Useful when you don’t remember all the information on the photo!

In the next article of the series, we will cover the importation of pictures from Flickr. One of the most useful functionalities of FatCap. In the meantime, share your comments on this post.

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Tags: functionality, tagging, tour, usability

Take a tour #2 : The Dashboard

In the first article of the series, we learned the basic principles for a pleasant browsing on FatCap. In this article, we will learn more about MY FATCAP, the member administration zone of FatCap, from which you can do tons of cool things.

This is how it looks:

not bad, huh? ;)

Let’s explain the magic:

#1: Create your artist page – This block is for all the artists who wish to take control of their own artist page. The process is dead-simple: you type the first letters of your artist name, you select it in the auto suggets, then you validate. From there, the process is launch, and the only thing to do is… add pictures! The approval process is entirely automatic: the more pictures you have, and the more acceptation your pictures get, the more likely you are to see your artist page accepted.

#2: Statistics. We love stats, and I know you do too. It gives a visual information of how people like your work, and the real time dimension is just pretty exciting. That’s why we conceived this stat system: In a glance, you can see how your page and/or your pictures have been performing over the last few months, and how they have are performing now over the last few days.

The pie chart lets you have a clear vision of the status of your pictures: how many active, how many awaiting approval, how many untagged, etc.

#3: Manage your pictures. From this block, you can access your latest albums, go directly into tagging. And you can also add a quick picture by browsing, selecting, sending the file within seconds. It will then lead you straight to the tagging step (which we will cover in the next article)

#4: Manage your videos. In the same way than for the pictures, you can jump to your latest uploads and perform action from there, or you directly add a new video from the three providers we support, namely Youtube, Dailymotion and Vimeo.

#5: Import your pictures. This is amazing stuff that you guys who are tech-savvy will love. You can indeed import your pictures from the outside right into FatCap. So far we support Flickr, the other will follow in the coming releases. We will go deeply into how import a picture from Flickr in the 4th episode of our “Take a tour” series.

#6: Notifications. The best place to track all activity related to your account. Here you will be informed of who liked your picture, who commented on your last video, and when each of your asset is accepted by the moderation team.

Summary

The Dashboard is THE central place for managing one’s content on FatCap. The flow goes both way, given that you can upload a lot of information, and you get a lot in return too, allowing you to know more about how your content is used and liked by the community.

In the next article, we will learn how to tag a picture. This is probably the most important thing to learn, so stay tuned!

Syd

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Tags: artists, dashboard, members, usability

Take a tour #1 : Introduction

From all the team that has been working steady on this project for 18 months, we are delighted to warmly welcome you to this website. In the first posts of this blog, we will try to introduce you to the product itself, sharing hints and tips that will surely help you to have an even more fun experience.

So, no BS here, let’s get straight to the point. Here is a screenshot of the homepage, followed by some highlights (refer to the numbers):

Now for some explanations:

#1: Let’s start easy: The main menu is pretty intuitive. Wherever you are in the website, you can always refer to it to guide you to any place. The top level categories are a good way to guess what this website is about: Articles, Pictures, Videos, and Community.

#2: The Carousel: We use the carousel to highlight important piece of content. Most of the time, it’s an article or a breaking news. But it can also be a video, an artist. Anyway, it’s a good place to see what’s happening right now on the website.

#3: The world map. This feature you will love. At any time, you can rollover this map to get to the continent pages. Once in a continent page, you can jump into country pages, then on city pages. It’s a great way to navigate the worldwide graffiti, and to discover new places, and new forms of art.

#4: The sidebar lets you navigate our pictures by type, style, or support. Indeed, each picture on FatCap is multi-categorized, allowing the user to browse pictures in a whole new way. Now, if you want to see all the graffiti and street-art pieces done on a truck, you can do it. Prefer seeing 3D-style graffiti? That’s possible too. Or maybe you’re a throw-up kind of person? Whatever you like, you can find in this sidebar, which is accessible in the whole site.

#5: The button “more”. This button is highly important to get all the deepness of FatCap. Each time you click on this button, you can extend your navigation to a whole list of elements. For instance, if you see a block with some pictures from Los Angeles, you may click on “more” to get to a page devoted to graffiti in Los Angeles. It also works for articles, videos, list of artists, list of crews, etc.

#6: The city / country links: On each block of content, you will see cities and countries specified. Clicking on those will automatically land you on our continent, country, state, or city pages. On these geographic pages, you will see pictures, videos, articles, artists, related to this area.

#7: Right from the website, you can follow this blog! Indeed it is updated live, each time we add an article.

#8: Let’s the magic take place with our search engine! You can type anything in this clever search engine. The name of an artist will land you to his page, the name of a crew will do the same, or even a city! You can even type the name of an event, and we’ll look for you the most appropriate articles and videos.

#9: Create / Manage your account. As you will see in our coming articles, there are pretty exciting stuff going on in our Member zone. From anywhere in the site, you can always login if you’re already a member, or sign up if you’re not. Once logged in, you will see your notifications coming in real time.

Speaking of which, the next article will take you for a tour in My FatCap, the member zone of FatCap. Introducing you to the dashboard, the page where all interactions are possible! Enjoy your ride!

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Let’s reboot

Let’s reboot the graffiti universe on the Internet!

Crédits: Rofreg

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