I’m pleased to announce that the 3rd revision of The Lens Flare is now live. The Lens Flare is a large friendly community of artists and photographers who use the site to upload images, share ideas, and learn from each other. It’s located at http://www.thelensflare.com

To quickly recap the new features, they include:

• More Images: Up to 500 images on the basic free account, 1000 images for silver, and unlimited for the gold account.
• Less expensive to upgrade your account.
• Multiple Image Sizes: 150px thumbnail, 500px standard image, 900px large image, and 2 250px detail images.
• Dashboard - to quickly get to important links.
• Albums - to organize your pictures however you want.
• Videos - updated art and photography videos from YouTube.
• Camera Reviews - to help you decide on which camera to purchase.
• Search - the search page has been improved.
• Image Categories - categories are formed automatically based on the pictures on the site.
• Member Profile - customize your homepage with the profile fields.
• Stat Counter - view traffic to your pages, where in the world they come from, etc by integrating your statcounter.com account with your pages on The Lens Flare. To do this, add your stat counter codes on your profile page.
• Image Management - easier management of your images, with stats showing traffic trends over the last 7 and 30 days to your pictures.
• Less Spam - spam registrations and crude comments will be far fewer with the addition of several features to hinder automated programs from submitting information to the site.
• New Look and Feel - the site’s look and feel has been completely redone to promote a more professional appearance.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing you on the website.

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http://www.thelensflare.com - Art and Photography Community Gallery

I really like the layout of the Ruby programming language site. It’s very simple and to the point, and has an obvious banana (in other words, it has a clear direction the visitor is meant to take) - Download Ruby. The arrow next to it is the only thing with a 3d effect which adds to its visual weight.

Further down the headers are 3 bold sections to make it easy to scan: Get Started, Explore, and Participate. Of course, these 3 steps represent the path of anybody new to the site and to ruby in general, and represent a structured path to becoming a competent ruby programmer.

Looking back at the main content area of the page, the bold headline “Ruby is…” tells what this site is all about in the 0.2 seconds visitors to the site spend before deciding to stay or hitting the back button. After the quick description of ruby, the code example hammers the point home with it’s famous line: puts “Hello World!”.

Once a person is hooked and ready to learn more, there are pleny of areas to read such as Ruby documentation, community, etc.

All in all, it’s one of the best layed out sites I’ve seen in a long time.