We are delighted to announce that Explore Lenses! and Explore Camera Bodies! both received a face-lift today.

How we came to this today is because of the limited number of items that we can show in one page, as each of the item is taking up too much of space making browsing a pain in the ass. We want to be able to browse through as much items as possible, with as little effort as possible.

Thus, we moved on, tried to reduce some blank spaces in between here and there.

Reducing the overall size of the item.

We did it. And we can now fit it much more items in one page. That’s good! But, the searching part doesn’t fit in to our idea earlier.

The idea is to be able to list down all search criteria at the same time eliminating the hassle of clicking open each of the select box to see what’s in there.

Okay, item is much more compact now, but the search does not tell the whole story at a glance.

And, we think…. we nailed it.

Everything at a glance!

Wait…. the improved layout does fares better now but still, in list view, there’s just this much that we can show before the page goes ridiculously long!

Grid view is the ultimate remedy!

We have a great feeling that this update would dramatically improve user’s experience in using the site. Hope you like it!

Time flies. Remember that back in June when we announced myLensDB Discuss? Back then, we spent few weeks doing some research on what’s the most suitable forum platform that we can put to use here.

We started using SMF but there are too much of efforts and custom developments needed to make the site up to our expectation. We decided to take a painful step back, and see what our target audiences are using.

We decided to venture into Discuz! platform this time.

It’s not popular among the English speaking crowd as it is natively Chinese, developed by a Beijing company but with translation effort from Valery Votintsev. It is made possible. It’s not perfect but we are getting there. We are looking forward to try to contribute back in the translation as well.

Let’s see on how far can we actually go in this stint! Hope that you like the way we are going here and make sure that you secure your own favourite username in our forum now before it’s being taken away!

Optimization, clean-up, caching, subversion, database restructuring. All that you can think of.

For weeks, we are going at great length doing housekeeping for the site.

And in short, we optimized the site by throwing in some geeky reverse proxy and coupling it with W3 Total Cache plugin. We are now loading content at double the usual speed and delivering to you at half the time!

In term of database, we shrunk 33% of its original size by doing a little of database table normalization and re-structuring to reflect what the project actually needs as for now. myLensDB started from a very simple price sharing site to the monster that you are seeing today. There were a lot of “rubbish” data left behind as the site evolves.

Shame to tell that, after years since it’s deployed, we have finally adopted a proper subversion control. Integrity of the site is now well preserved and we can roll back any silly changes to the site, easier now.

It’s not done yet. We are still in hot pursuit of making the whole site as solid as rock. And as noted before, we are still planning on a total makeover of the site but it’s not going to be anytime soon though.

We did not realize that the drop of traffic over the last few days is due to the technical glitch that the site was facing due to the new patch we made. We thought that it is just because of the festive seasons we have here over in Malaysia.

As a result, the photo fetching mechanism failed across the entire site thus bringing down the capability of the site.

The new patch that we made few days ago is supposed to fetch and analyze traffic this site receives so that it would give us a better idea on how to propel and develop features in this site but we have removed it for now. We will be going back to the drawing board once again making sure that the fundamental of the site is well taken of first before going into these “good to have” features.

As an end note, we would like to wish all of myLensDB fans and visitors “Selamat Hari Raya” and enjoy the long holiday!

Explore Camera Bodies! is yet another feature that worth writing a post for. It may be better known as “Find Camera Bodies” as what we named this feature on the sidebar as this would be more appealing to new visitors. As what the name suggested, it would replicate the functionality of Explore Lenses! but into Camera Bodies instead.

It has been officially “leaked” to the public 2 weeks ago as Alpha release but we are tagging it as Beta release now as we have sorted out some of the bugs over the weeks.

We hope that the addition of this new feature would further strengthen our position of becoming a comprehensive one-stop center for those in the hunt for new camera gears.

Feel free to drop us a note if you have any feedback at all!