I haven't made much progress on millihelens in the past month. I've been bogged down with midterms, labs, and job interviews. Sorry :<

I always feel like I have a ton of ideas for millihelens, and it drives me crazy when I can't get something done on the site. I'm planning on spending one day in the coming week working on user-to-user messaging and user profiles. I think being able to talk to other people on the site will really make it more fun. The only problem is that there are some privacy issues that I'll have to think about. I'm also working with a friend of mine to fix up the look and feel of the website.

Hopefully November will be a more productive month than October was.

I made this cool Facebook application to help you find out which of your friends have crushes on you.

Here's how it works:
1. Get the Secret Crushes application.
2. Create your secret list of crushes. Don't worry, only you can see this list.
3. Invite your friends to use Secret Crushes. If one of your crushes adds you to their crush list, you'll both be notified.

This was just practice for the millihelens Facebook application. I'm going to start working on that next.

So far version 2 of millihelens has been a success in my book. I think it looks a lot better than it used to, and it's definitely easier for me to work on. I'm once again pondering where to go with this site. I was considering adding user profiles and messaging features: it would be really cool to be able to talk to other users of the site. I think everyone already uses some sort of social networking however, so I'm thinking about tie-ins with myspace and facebook.

Quick poll for you all:
1. Do you use facebook or myspace?
2. In either case, do you think a millihelens plugin would be cool? Imagine an app that would show your score in millihelens on your profile.
3. What about links to peoples' profiles on the site? This would let you message other users.

I'm currently working on: live.com and netvibes gadgets.
ETA: soonish (it's rush at my fraternity, so things are pretty hectic).

You'll notice that on the main page there's now a box underneath the pictures that lets you "tag" them. Tags are descriptive words or phrases that you can use to sort the pictures into categories. For example, say you want to look at all the pictures of blond people. Normally this wouldn't be possible, but with tags, you simply look at all the pictures that are tagged with the word "blond".

When you're tagging pictures, please try and tag them with broad phrases (e.g. "blond" or "skirt") describing the person in the picture or what they're wearing. Think whether or not you'll find it useful to sort pictures by the tag name you created. Try to also use phrases that other people will understand, for example "schoolgirl" instead of "totally hot for teacher".

I've tagged some of the pictures on my own, but I encourage all of you to start tagging the pictures that you see as you vote on the site. It doesn't take a lot of time, and you'll enjoy having the photos organized when you look through them.

I finally finished the new version of millihelens! Well, not really finished, but I have something to show you all. Consider this release an incremental step toward the final product. Throughout the next week, I'm going to be releasing new features as I finish them. I have a huge list of ideas for the site, and I'm really looking forward to implementing them. Feedback on the new version is always appreciated :)

I moved over all the user accounts and the appropriate pictures from the old site, but I had to erase all the scores (that's why all the scores are currently "?" and the graphs are all blank and the top 20 has no pictures in it). The scores will get updated as soon as there are enough votes, which shouldn't take more than a day.

In other news, I'm looking for a catch phrase for the site. I liked the definition of "millihelen", but i don't think it's catchy enough. Anyone have ideas?