Updated 28 April, 2011
It might not have escaped your attention that Camscape has had a bit of an overhaul. (Browse the cams here) Let me tell you what we’ve introduced and what it means for the site.
Firstly, we are now presenting each webcam snapshot within its own page and keeping a ‘running archive’ of their images. At present, new images are looked for every 4 hours and we store 7 snapshots. Quite often, the image doesn’t change as some webcams are only updated once a day, so you may see a longer than expected ‘Updated’ time below the image.
You might see a single snapshot and the words “Preview Pic Only.” – The reasons for this can be one or more of: the cam is not compatible with our archiving system, e.g. if it’s the wrong format or the filename changes with every new picture so we can’t track it, or the webcam owner may have asked us not to save copies of their cam, in which case we have turned that off for them.
Also if you happen to come across a “No webcam picture” image, it’s because when we went to check the cam image, it was down or had disappeared. We’ll work on correcting as many of them as possible.
Because of the nature of webcams – there are different formats they can present themselves in – this first version of the new Camscape looks only for ‘jpg’ pictures. In future, we will hopefully be able to find all different types of webcams so there’s not so many missing snapshots.
You can of course still visit the source of the webcam by clicking each picture.
The second feature is commenting. Long awaited, it allows you to express yourself about each and every cam. Recent commented webcams appear at the bottom of the front page now.
Thirdly, we have brought social media a bit more to the fore on the site – you can ‘Like’ and ‘Tweet’ your favourites to your friends.
Forth, each cam has our ‘Camscape Bar’ along the top now, to make it easy for you to skip back to the thumbnails or category, or indeed to Like/Tweet the cam.
Fifth, as of April 25th, we launched two extra navigation improvements – ‘Movers & Shakers’ and ‘Good Cams Near/Like This’:
Movers & Shakers is a list which you’ll see on the Homepage and has its own page too, comprising the top 5 (or 20 in the bigger list) webcams which are topical right now. I’m trying to avoid saying ‘Popular’ or ‘Hit on’, because the algorithm which determines which cams appear on that list is a bit cleverer than that – we take into account all sorts of factors before scoring a cam for a particular timeframe – so hopefully this list will reflect the idea of ‘Trending’ like Twitter shows.
The ‘Good Cams Near/Like This’ (Or ‘Greenie’ as I termed it during development!) is a small (up to 5) list of highly rated cams which are in the same category as the webcam you are looking at, making skipping between different cams a bit more enjoyable than clicking ‘back!’.
We’re constantly looking at how to improve the site further and hope you enjoy the recent changes.
- Why not also check out:
- Our Free Webcams Directory
- Trending Webcams right now