Comments on: Forum Signature Image

Forum Signature Image

pb — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:25:58 -0800

After a couple requests in our forum for forum signature images, we put together an image that you can use in your signature on other sites. To try it out, add /sig to any of your vehicle profile URLs to get a page that includes BBCode and HTML that you can include in a signature at other forums. The image is basically a direct copy of the tables you see in Your Garage on your profile page. Here's an example, this is my Prius: The image includes your car name, year/make/model, your Fuelly username, engine/body style (if available), # of fuel-ups, image (if available), and average MPG. The code links the image to your Fuelly profile for that vehicle. If your vehicle is set to track in Litres or Kilometers, you'll get average L/100km instead of average MPG. Let us know here if you spot problems.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:46:46 -0800

You know, as much as I think it's not generally our thing to use these big banner things, maybe we should eat our own dogfood a bit and add it (or something like it) automatically to all forum posts here at Fuelly?

By: pb

pb — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:02:23 -0800

huh yeah, maybe something a bit smaller?

The BB Forums generally have a lot more space and and strong separation between each comment—something we shy away from here. This is an SUV banner and we have sub-compact forums. With something this big you'd see nothing but images as you read through a thread.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:31:56 -0800

Yeah, I was thinking either a tiny ~100px square in the left below names (on the other properly formatted forum) or maybe as an upper right aligned image that text could go around, or if at the end of posts, make it the exact same for everyone but more of a sparklines style thing that is maybe 80px wide by about 10-20px tall with data and a link to your primary car.

By: Pete7874

Pete7874 — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:32:38 -0800

That's cool, but I agree that it's a bit on the large side. I'll keep using the spritmonitor.de example, where my icon is 100x17 pixels and just shows my avg MPG:
http://images.spritmonitor.de/215070.png

In most cases, that's all that's needed. If they want to find out more, they'll click on the icon which will take them to my profile.

By: Kitty

Kitty — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 06:30:57 -0800

Thank you for making something like this! It's much appreciated!

I don't think there's anything wrong with this current size, but I do see everyone's point about smaller sizes being more beneficial for more people (for example, for use on blogs, or on forums where large signature images are too distracting). This image has a lot of whitespace.
Offering multiple sizes would cover a wider range of applications, and more people will benefit. :) (and thus more people would hear about Fuelly)

I've made up a couple examples of smaller Fuelly banners that people might like:

100 x 17px

100 x 17px

145 x 20px

200 x 40px

And one that's not really suitable for a forum signature, but could work on a blog or something:
150 x 150px

I think I would be more personally inclined to use the 145x20 or the 200x40 ones.

By: Pete7874

Pete7874 — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 08:04:53 -0800

Kitty, I like those smaller ones a lot. That's exactly what I had in mind. It'd be great if our Fuelly admins could set it up for us. :)

By: pb

pb — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:50:11 -0800

Thanks for mocking those up Kitty, nice work. (We normally strip images from comments, but I just combined your comments so everyone could see your mock ups inline.) I like the smaller ones better too, we'll do something along those lines.

By: pb

pb — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:13:30 -0800

We added a smaller option today:

This one is 115 x 40, and it feels like a much better size for forum signatures.