Over the last few days I’ve been rewriting bradicon’s front end, and just generally doing bradicon-based stuff I should’ve done long ago.

Bradicon2 features a newer version of SWFUpload, which should fix a number of issues with the previous version’s advanced interface.

I’ve combined the advanced and simple interfaces, and really just subtly changed a few things – not at all based on usage information. HTML describes the simple interface which javascript hides in favour of the advanced interface. Which might work better for anyone who keeps javascript disabled. People always worry about these things but, seriously, who doesn’t have javascript enabled?

Javascript also adds a link which toggles between interface modes.

When an icon is created with the advanced interface, the entire icon list is no longer reloaded (unless it has been marked for reloading, in which case it is).

There are a lot of pages that link to bradicon, and most do so by directly linking to advanced- or, simple.php. So as not to break all those links, I’ve created files of those names which header-redirect to index.php. Google might hate that. I’m not sure. But, you know…usability.

The garbage collector is now set to remove empty directories, and any icons, or pngs older than 5 days old. No more ssh and ./clean for me.

One thing I’ve always kind of wanted to be able to check is the number of icons converted.

I’d check how many existed before deleting them, but never kept any record. A database now keeps track of the number of icons made each day. This is what we call “useless information“, but whatevs. I can look at it and feel accomplishment. As if I manually constructed those icons pixel by pixel and byte by byte in a tiny work shop far into the frozen north.

Information pages and boxes have been added, which will hopefully make it more search-engine and adsense friendly. Who knows if that will work.

The system to actually create icons is exactly the same. It hasn’t been touched at all.

Basically bradicon2 is bradicon1, but looks just slightly different.

Soon I will direct Apache to bradicon2 instead of bradicon, but for now it can be accessed at ico2.bradleygill.com.

Oh! Also I added a donate button because Karl said no one ever uses them.