When? We haven't set a date but it's not far away.

We have been doing some informal beta testing of a vastly updated and improved Indexhibit. Students and professionals alike have been favorable towards the new system. We are looking forward to making it public in the not too distant future.

Indexhibit is thrilled to be participating in Wide White Space:

The Way Beyond Art: Wide White Space January 20-February 5, 2011

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts San Francisco CA

Cork Tiles, Index Cards, and Numbered Pins Everybody is invited to visit the show and participate by exhibiting one piece of your work in the gallery. A large gallery wall has been covered in cork tiles, exhibit your work on this surface, and write your name and project description on the corresponding numbered index card in the index box resting on a white pedestal.

We wish everybody a good and productive 2011.

Here is our Twitter account - join and tell us our hair looks crazy today.

Tweet, tweet, tweeee...that's probably pretty old by now. ;)

Update: Thanks folks, but we've had enough interest in this post - let's consider this one closed.

We invite you to follow Mark's lead and make your own no knead bread. Send a picture with your name and url to noknead@indexhibit.org and we will compile an exhibit of your makings. Tell your friends - spread the word - make some bread today!

Here is a similar collection of photos of no knead bread at Flickr.

Updated: The New York Times had an interesting article today, Better Bread With Less Kneading.

Over the years I've been asked a few times to write a Flash frontend template for Indexhibit. Unfortunately, Flash is not my expertise so it would have taken a considerable amount of time.

But the guys over at apdev recently did just this. We'll allow the link speak for itself:

Flash frontend for Indexhibit CMS

Perhaps this can serve as some inspiration for the Flash folks out there. The full screen mode is quite nice too.

We completely recognize that Indexhibit could be a bit more transparent of an organization but, as we've mentioned before, we never expected it to become this ubiquitous. This success has been great, but it's not without its downside.

We just wanted to post a quick note that, although it will take a little time, Indexhibit intends to become more transparent. In particular, the new version will be posted to an SVN before it is officially released. We will welcome people to play with it and offer feedback and even improvements if they have them.

If there is one area where Indexhibit has not been successful it's been in creating a community of participants actively helping out with the core code base, themes, exhibition formats and new plugins. We do plan to launch a new section of our website that will cover all of these things.

The second disappointment that Dan and myself have with this project is that it has become so much about code for many - customizations. It's a bit ironic if you consider the previous paragraph. We have always been conscious about keeping the code away from the site but as of today the lack of code, tutorials, API information, etc., has become a drawback. We are not sure how we will deal with this in the future (many more themes and plugins?) but it's something that has clearly become a sticking point.

We have intended to do this for some time, but there were other projects that pay the bills, and alot of time spent trying to figure out some things (which will become more clear when it happens). We have been confused in the process as well - but we also believed in this process (and still do).

We will make this all much more public soon. Thanks for bearing with us...we really have been hard at work for Indexhibit.

Critique me, please!

Despite the relative quiet on Indexhibit, this summer has been a very busy time for us. We're really sorry that we don't communicate directly more often with our blog or on Twitter or on our Facebook group, but there simply is not anything new to say for the moment.

There has been alot of consideration about the nature of this project. It began as a kind of art project and became something larger than we expected. Is Indexhibit a service now? Has Indexhibit become a real business? Do we really need a business plan? How will this shape the future? How did this become a job? Is there something we should be doing now to manage all this growth better? What about 'art'?

And, what about that new version?

Things are moving forward very slowly for the moment while we try to find some answers. At some point, things will move much more quickly again. And, I'm sure we will have so much to say that everybody will get tired of hearing from us again (haha, that's a joke).

Stay tuned...and thanks.

Eatock is wrapping up events at IUAV. Vaska (me) is just trying to keep things moving forward.

I want to thank (again) all the people who support this project with donations, time, links back to the project and those who hire us for customization projects. We wouldn't be here without the help.

The truth about installation and customization projects is that we do very few of them - we are rarely asked and we have to turn down projects that look like they will become endless projects (the developers out there know what I'm talking about). Our hope was that these services would be a beneficial way to partially support my time on this project. I'm helping everyday including weekends for over two years now.

We have to wonder what model will work to strike a balance between sustainability for this project and having to sell advertising space around the site. It's always been our wish that we could remain independent but as the project grows, as our expenses grow, as more and more time is needed to facilitate this project in a meaningful way, we're in need of finding new options.

In the grander scheme of things, Indexhibit is just a blip on the radar (but people tell us differently sometimes). The reality is that the larger projects have massive amounts of venture capital and/or other additional funding - Indexhibit is only supported by users and our own pockets. We certainly would welcome some kind of larger support if we felt it could be beneficial for the users.

The New Version

There has been a tremendous amount of development in the past month and we have been showing it around more liberally. But, there is still much to do as we want to get this right now instead of having to push out painful upgrades in the future. We hope that people will find Indexhibit useful in the future as a longer term solution for display and archiving of their works and also as a tool that can help them replicate their own studio and work patterns via the web.

Enjoy the summer, cheers!

The file is found in your 'ndxz-studio' folder.

And since we put out a note about this a couple months ago, be sure you also delete the Password Recovery Script after you are finished using it as well.

We've already made it known that we want to keep the list as a slow stream of user sites and give every site an opportunity to get a couple days worth of referral traffic, but we are currently running a backlog of additions to the list - a couple months right now. We're sorry for the delay (those of you who keep emailing us).

We may need to increase the daily number of sites for awhile so we can catch up. It's not the ideal solution but people shouldn't have to wait two months for their site to appear either. So, occasionally you may see more than the usual number of sites.

For those who aren't aware of the 'policy', we update the list three times a week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Finally, a word to everybody asking to be added to the participants queue - spend a little time making something special for the frontpage of your site. We've already noticed how a compelling image or graphic can significantly increase the amount of referrals your site may receive. We've done some checking on the amount of referrals we've been generating for people and it's pretty nice.

It's also a good idea to be a bit more diligent about testing your site in the various browsers - Indexhibit does work very well in Internet Explorer if you take the time to resolve the issues. We offer help in our forum and there are tons of threads on the most common issues already.

Hopefully, this will be an additional boost to new sites - sending them even a little more traffic.

Special thanks to Daniel Morris for showing us how to get this done.

And thanks to everybody for using Indexhibit.

(Thumbnails are generated by the great Thumbalizr service.)

Failure to delete this file from your server leaves your system exposed to unwanted visitors.

It has been stated on the informational page about this script ever since we released it, but it seems it needs to be repeated.

From the very beginning Dan and myself thought of this as an experimental project. We don't have a set of goals to achieve in terms of traffic or usership. We had a naive belief that if we did this well maybe people would use it.

We had no idea Indexhibit would become useful.

While we do have many things we could talk about regarding Indexhibit, the difficulties of giving away free software, the amount of time it takes to make something 'simple' (for lack of a better word), how we see our community in relation to base statistics/traffic, tutorials for doing things better (although this is coming), we've wanted to remain neutral.

We do not blatantly advertise ourselves. We do not advertise other things on our website for profit. On a few occasions I've asked that we not be linked up on the big designer portals - that's kind of crazy isn't it?

No. Our experiment does seem to be working because we just had our biggest traffic month to date. Nearly every month is better than the previous month. Slow growth, the long tail. We are only supported by users - we feel like it's a completely independent project.

That being said, very soon now we are going to make some changes. It's time to do more promotion of some of the amazing work from Indexhibit users beyond our participants list. I'll soon have a blog that will deal with many things but also Indexhibit and programming for designers. We feel it's the next logical step in the slow evolution of this project.

We have been testing the new version of Indexhibit - there are a few sites out there now. All seems to be going well and it's not far away.

We hope you will stay tuned.

Best wishes and happy holidays, we'll see you in 2009.

If you are teaching coursework for Indexhibit or know somebody who is and would like to help us organize some teaching guides, please get in touch. All we ask is that you tell us of your experiences and have some suggestions ready for us.

Contact us at the email on the right. Thanks.

For the fun of it we thought we would post some of the nice notes people have sent us recently.

Thanks to create indexhibit.

I love the Indexhibit platform!

Thanks for the Indexhibit. It changed my perspective of the whole web languages, and even learned some CSS, PHP and Javascript.

Indexhibit makes things so much fun!

Thanks a lot for making my website possible.

I'm loving Indexhibit so far, and the forum is really helpful.

I've just finished my photo portfolio thanks to your amazing indexhibit and will be happy to be in your participant list.

Great software guys! Best interface out there. Clean and simple. Thanks again!

We think you are pretty hot too!

We are trying to catch up again on our participants list. We managed to get many weeks behind so please be patient - everybody who has emailed us is now in the queue.

Thanks

If you are not registered, do so. Be sure to indicate that you would like to hear more about Indexhibit in our upcoming newsletter (thank you). And then you can login into the forum and participate.

http://www.indexhibit.org/forum/thread/1816/

Hope to hear from you.

;)

Many thanks to everybody who has donated lately - posters are going in the mail in another day or so. We still have more! Learn how you can help support Indexhibit.

We recently asked the Henry Rollins if he might be interested in doing something with Indexhibit but he very politely declined. We can't think of anybody we more admire and respect for his truer than true DIY ideals. Indexhibit has no intention of selling out, asking for venture capital funding or demanding that folks display advertising on their websites so we can make a few more dollars.

The project is supported 100% by donations and commissions that allow us to further explore what is possible with Indexhibit. However, we will likely create some new projects that will assist supporting the project in the near future.

Eloisa Astudillo and Antoine LaFontaine have been helping out both upfront and behind the scenes around here lately - their help is greatly appreciated and when you see them (around the forum or you get a note with their name on it) be sure to thank them as well. Teamwork!

Summer vacations are upon us and this year they will be a little longer than normal - we've worked hard, we think we deserve a little extra time this year. When we're back in the late summer/early fall expect some special announcements.

Have a happy summer everybody.

The poster is a collection of 'archetypal' objects displayed in an Indexhibit fashion. It is the first and only Indexhibit poster to-date. We have plans to do another but we are waiting for the project to grow more.

The poster was printed black with 100% yellow flourescent ink. The back is a yellow flood as well. It's a standard A2 format (roughly 17" x 24" for those of you in the states).

Make a donation of 15 euros or more, send us a note with your shipping address, and we'll get one off to you quickly.

Thanks!

UPDATE: We're sold out folks, thanks. ;)

In November, in the span of a few emails, the name Indexhibit appeared - we immediately knew the search was over.

Between November (when Dan, Flavia, Eloisa and I spent three exhaustive days of discovery for Indexhibit) and April, Indexhibit went through four radically different prototypes and I began to wonder if it was even possible to have a release.

It was. It's been a very fun year folks, thank you. It's been a privilege.

Our long term mission with Indexhibit is to maintain the simplicity, add features that make sense and try to vastly improve our media management tools. We would like you to be able to use Indexhibit to display your work for many years to come. When it's time for you to remodel your site, you should simply be able to build a new theme and still use the content in your database.

A new version is coming soon. Some new features, better tools, easier for developers to work with. Some new big features actually (we've mentioned them in the forum before though). We're very excited about how it's coming along.

We'd like to invite developers to join us improving and expanding Indexhibit. We are searching for skilled PHP, javascript and CSS developers. We have tasks great and small - just about any size task to fit your schedule. If you are interested our email is in the right column.

There are some amazing customized sites out there - we would love for some of the new innovations to be contributed back to the community for share. Soon we will open a repository of plugins, themes, etc., for people to freely download and use on their own sites.

Since our only form of advertising for Indexhibit are your kind links back to us, we would like to suggest that people blog about Indexhibit. We've had roughly 10,000 installations (an installation does not mean the site is being used) in our first year. We would like to hit 50,000 in our second year. With your help perhaps we can make this possible - let's continue getting the word out there.

We will be introducing some simple social networking like tools with the new version of Indexhibit as well (feeds, hcards) so your site can connect to other social websites and feedreaders.

We have a forum where you can express your problems and concerns with Indexhibit, but feel free to offer suggestions via email as well. If we are missing a great idea we certainly would love to hear about it.

First off, some updates were made for the Greek interface translation.

If you installed v0.70d and are sorting your Index using 'chronological' you might experience your exhibits appearing on your site out of order - this has been fixed. If you have this problem you can update just one file to deal with it - /ndxz-studio/plugin/index.php.

If you are looking for more complete upgrade instructions they can be found on the Indexhibit release page.

No other changes have been made to Indexhibit at this time.

We have been meaning to release some kind of geo-location package since the beginning of Indexhibit and now we are finally getting to it. We have converted the standard IP-to-Country.csv file into a series of easy to import .sql files. You can import them using PHPMyAdmin.

The files and installation instructions can be found in the downloads area.

This is not an official piece of Indexhibit, we are merely providing these as a fun accessory to your site. If you have problems let us know in the forum.

In the past, as we were tied up doing other things around this site, we would wait until we had thirty or fourty new sites to add to the list, but we're trying something different now. We're going to add six or seven sites a day (as we have a big backlog) to try to give the newest additions a little more time and exposure at the top of the list.

This means, that it might take a week or so from the time you notify us about your site until the time is appears on the list. Be patient, we think we're doing this the right way now. If you have a special exception we should know about (time sensitive) just let us know and we'll do what we can to accomodate.

Also, here is a new feed that has the latest 50 new participants.

Many thanks to all of the participants...

If your site is not on the participants list please send us a note at: contact [at] indexhibit [dot] org

Update: We've decided to update the list only on a monday, wednesday, friday schedule.

Thanks to our translators!

Pindaros Charissiadis and Thodoris Kominis (Greek) Marcus Wrango (Swedish) Lu Gao (Chinese)

If you would like to translate Indexhibit to your language please send us a note and we'll help you get started.

contact [at] indexhibit [dot] org

Thanks!

ps: We'll be tweaking things and updating content for the next couple of days as well.

First off, Indexhibit, when will the big update happen? We don't have a release date but we're working on it between other scheduled and unscheduled projects. It's coming along, we feel, very nicely. We'll make more announcements as we feel it's appropriate.

Hosting? Yes, but let's get the new version released first. Both, in the near future.

Many thanks for all the kind notes over the past couple of months. Sorry if we haven't responded (we will shortly). Now that the site upgrade is more or less finished, we can focus our attention back to the community. Cheers!