Hello All,

I have been associated with ArtEnthu from the very beginning, when it used to run on a single computer. I have witnessed and contributed to all the changes that have happened from beginning till date. As we are about to cross 2500 arts on ArtEnthu, I thought of taking you all through the wonderful and ever evolving journey of ArtEnthu.

When I was approached to join the team it was the perfect timing. At that time I was looking forward to do something new in life. It was like someone thirsty looking for a glass of water and was handed over a chilled beer pint.

When I joined the team, ArtEnthu was known as JaldiJaago, Wake up to the world of Art. It was very simple and only used white and blue color in the layout. Below is the screen shot when I first saw it.

For me it was way too simple and first thing I did was to change the colors of the site.

And it looked like…

When another team member saw it, his first reaction was “what the hell you have done”? It was thrown straight into dustbin without giving any second thought.

So after a long discussion not in hours but in days, we came up with this one.

Much better than the previous two designs, and we agreed to take this one to the live server.

So in the first week of July 2009 JaldiJaago went live and threw it open to close friends to get their feedback.

We persuaded our friends to upload arts on our site. In the first two weeks we got a lot of feedback about the layout and the name of the site. So we agreed to change the layout of our site with professional help. That’s how we ended in changing the complete site. The designer gave us the following layout:

Our first reaction was… awesome. We will take it. But the fight was still on for one thing, the name of the site. It took us a little time to come to consensus that the name should be changed. And then comes the biggest problem, the new name. We came up with around 100 names in 1 week and most of them are already taken, and rests are not that eye catching. And finally after too much thought and fight we agreed upon ArtEnthu, Live art competition.

On 15^th August, 2009 ArtEnthu went live. It was one of the most beautiful experiences that I have ever had. It was just a beginning of a never ending journey. Every day we face new challenges and giving multiple solutions to them is pure fun. We also get very good constructive feedback from our fans that we really enjoy in adding to our site.

I wish a lot of success to ArtEnthu and its team.

~Rajat

 

Our Passion, our Mission, our Dream, our Platform, our Team – all working towards a single Goal of taking www.ArtEnthu.com beyond the realms of being just a website. ArtEnthu is the world of an art enthusiast!

 

Nearly 9 months ago we started with one aim of creating the world’s best art platform and conduct the world’s biggest online art competition.

 

With online competition I mean a competition that is truly “online”. It is no individual that calls the winners, but the power to choose remains in the hands of the art enthusiast. Right from day one we were aware of the arduous task at hand. We knew it would be inappropriate to follow the rules of averages while counting votes. We wanted to make a system that has varying levels of rating / voting and also considers the profile of the user who rates it. We wanted the system to analyse votes both quantitatively and qualitatively before arriving at the final numbers.

 

Today, we are proud to have built a very robust and time tested series of software algorithms for determining the top rankers. This has helped us crack the nut of figuring out which art work has actually garnered maximum appreciation of the art enthusiasts. Check out the results of our previous competition with nearly 10,000 votes at http://artenthu.com/gallery.php.

 

We assign weightage to the votes casted by each user based on his profile, his voting patterns and many more things which we learnt from our past three competitions.

 

The competition is available round the clock 24×7 for people to participate. Art Enthusiasts do not require any special occasion to embrace art. Being an art enthusiast myself I admit to having seen art in all forms of nature every single day. Each competition is run for a period of 90 days. New submissions are accepted for the first 80 days and the last 10 days are earmarked for artists to promote their art work. This gives all the artists a fair chance to promote the artwork appeal for votes.

 

We are first ones in the world of online competition to conduct competition for age categories. The intent is to involve the professional artists and encourage the budding ones. We have four age categories – Below 8 years, 8 to 13 years, 13 to 20 years and Above 20 years. The initial responses we have got from art enthusiasts in the last two categories indicate a decent start. We are proud to have hosted art works from really talented artists.

 

We want to encourage the enormous talent kids have. We recognize their natural ability to stay artistic. With the sole aim to encouraging such adorable artist and preserving the art they create I call upon the schools and parents to join ArtEnthu.com and post creations of those lovely little hands.

 

ArtEnthu is a dedicated platform for hand paintings, digital paintings, photography and poetry.

 

With this article I look forward to support from all art enthusiasts by joining the movement. Also do share with us your feedback and suggestions!

 

With your support we can make ArtEnthu the one stop for all art enthusiasts!

 

Team ArtEnthu.

ArtEnthu has recently launched a RSS feed to all the content posted at ArtEnthu.com. Thanks to an Art Enthusiast working for a SEO Group, now anybody can link to this feed and keep tab of the latest on ArtEnthu.com.

 

This article would be useful for anybody looking to make a dynamic RSS feed for his website in the LAMP stack (PHP implementation).

 

 RSS mean “really simple syndication” and one can check out the details http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification.

 

Let’s start with answering the very basic question about enabling RSS feed to website content. Why do I need RSS on my website?

·        First and foremost, it is one of the least cumbersome way for your viewer to check the content from the site without actually visiting it.

·        Interesting content would often translate to more page views of the website. A very well distributed RSS feed means that content would seldom go unnoticed.

·        You can link your website RSS to social networking site. This reduces your efforts to manually maintain each of your social profiles.

·        It’s a best practise and helps improve Google ranking for the page. Talk to your SEO for explanation on this one J

 

Once you are convinced that you are up for the challenge to do the RSS feed implementation for your website, there are many ways to do this:-

·        Maintain XML file which confers to the RSS specification manually. And whenever you want to update the feed, update this file manually.

·        Use the third party or open sources software to provide simple integration in your website to build this XML file for your. Efforts are less but you need to do the installation on your server and configure this for your website.

·        Write your own code to build the XML format. I recommend this approach and that the main reason I did not provide any link or details on the above two approaches.

 

Approach to make the RSS feed for your website:-

Let us assume you have a content based site, likes news or articles or entertainment content that gets updated in your website. Another example could be you have image based website, showing various images and less content.

 

In both the cases you will be having the database storing these contents or images with timestamp. In case you do not maintain the timestamp, start having one which keeps track of creation of content or image on the server.

 

Once you have the timestamp of your data, you can start process of exposing a RSS feed. Simple steps below outline the entire process:-

1. Connect to the database
2. Create RSS channel
3. Create the items with latest timestamp as first with simple query to your content or image with alt text using the “order by date” sql. And offcourse with “limit 20” or any number you want to publish in your RSS feed.

This would mean fetch the latest 20 records of your update as RSS at any point users try to get the feed.

 

Above approach is easy and completely dynamic with no maintenance at all. Once you put the code in a PHP file you are done with the implementation for the RSS.

 

The code below would produce an XML as per the RSS specifications. This xml can be very by the RSS validator (http://beta.feedvalidator.org/) and read by an RSS reader (popular browsers like IE or mozilla or CHROME have reading capabilities).

 

PHP Implementation:-

We consider the news website!

 

<?php

            /** Get the database connection */

            $con = mysql_connect(”serverName”, “UserName”, “Password”);

            if (!$con)

            {

            echo ” not connection”.mysql_error();

            die(’Could not connect: ‘ . mysql_error());

            }

            mysql_select_db(”databaseName”, $con);

 

           

/**  RSS Dynamic Feed Code */

 

/** Define the channel */

$channel = array(”title”        => “Genuine News of world!”,

                     “description”  => “News you cannot get anywhere”,

                        “images”                       => “http://www.yourwensite.com/images/logo.png”,

                        “altText”                       => “genuine news”,

                     “link”         => “http://www.yourwebsite.com”,

                     “copyright”    => “Copyright (C) 2010 yourwebsite.com”);

 

 

    $newOutput  = ‘<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″?>’;

    $newOutput .= ‘<rss version=”2.0″>’;

    $newOutput .= “<channel>”;

    $newOutput .= “<title>”.$channel["title"].”</title>”;

    $newOutput .= “<description>”.$channel["description"].”</description>”;

    $newOutput .= “<link>”.$channel["link"].”</link>”;

    $newOutput .= “<category>Business News</category>”;

 

    $newOutput .= “<copyright>”.$channel["copyright"].”</copyright>”;

 

 

 

            /** get the latest post on the website… */

            $sql = “select newsLinkPage, newsTitle, newsShortContent, imgPath, newscreationDate from newsTable where  order by newscreationDate desc limit 20″;

            $qry = mysql_query($sql, $con);

            if ( $qry )

            {

                        while ( ($row = mysql_fetch_array($qry, MYSQL_ASSOC)) )

                        {

                                    $output .= “<item>”;

                                    $output .= “<title>”. htmlentities ($row['newsTitle']).”</title>”;

 

                                    $imgdata = “<p>”.$row[‘newsShortContent’].”</p><br clear=’all’ />”;

                                    $output .= “<link>”. $row[‘newsLinkPage’].”</link>”;

                                    $output .= “<pubDate>”.date(”D, d M Y H:i:s O”, strtotime($row[' newscreationDate '])).”</pubDate>”;

                                    $preDesc = “<p><A href=’”.$row[‘imgPath’].”’><img src=’$imgPath’ alt=’”.htmlentities ($row['newsTitle']).”‘ align=’left’  border=0 /></A>”;

                                    $desc = $preDesc.$row['newsShortContent'].”</p><br clear=’all’ />”;

                                    $output .= “<description>”.htmlentities($desc).”</description>”;

                                   

                                    $output .= “<category>business news</category>”;

                                   

                                    $output .= “</item>”;

                        }

            }

    $output .= “</channel>”;

    $output .= “</rss>”;

 

    header(”Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=ISO-8859-1″);

    echo $output;

 

?>

 

It’s that simple, just copy the above code and change it accordingly to suit your need.

 

Last few things you need to take care before it’s integrated with your website.

1. Link this in your website using the standard RSS feed Icon

<A href=’rss.php’><img src=’rssIcon.png’ border=0/></A>

1. Add the tag in the page where RSS link is available so that the browser recognizes the RSS feed. Embed the following code inside the head tag, just below the meta tag:

         <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Yourwebsite Title” href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/rss.php” />

 

Check out the RSS feed of artenthu at http://artenthu.com/rss.php

In the above example rss.php is assumed to be placed in root directory. In case you create the sub directory change the links accordingly. So go RSS savvy today!

 

 

Feel free to provide your feedback.

 

Team ArtEnthu.

I had the privilege to talk to a renowned artist some time back. I asked her what made her leave her profession and take up the role of a professional artist. Her reply helped me move a step closer towards my goal. Here is what she had to say:

“My interest in painting began after having a surgical procedure. Painting then became my voice. I found that painting is a wonderful way of coping with the hard situations that I face and have faced. My work is basically abstract in style because I choose to work with color and a more intuitive approach to painting. While looking at each piece you may wonder about it’s meaning. I assure you that each painting does have a meaning. The ability to share with others through art is why I find art so wonderful.”

I always rate art among the highest expression of every culture. Every historical period teaches us so much through its literature, visual arts, music, dance and drama. At ArtEnthu we sincerely believe that to be a true artist one must not only learn to appreciate the arts, but must actively participate in creative work.

Art is the language that most people speak, cutting through individual differences in culture, educational background and ability. It brings every subject to life and turn abstractions into concrete reality. I will even go to the extent to say that learning through arts often results in greater academic achievement and higher test scores.

Over the years Art has assumed various forms from paintings to sketches, photography to digital designs and even poems. The underlying characteristics remain the same, the binding nature remains intact.

The ArtEnthu team is committed to touch the lives of art lovers around the globe. We call upon all art lovers to join us in our endeavor to reach the sky. Create a group that speaks one language, has one culture, all in the same profession, critics galore, no dearth of contemporaries, a group that knows just one phenomenon – Art. The group called ArtEnthu!

 

Picasso

Team ArtEnthu

Picasso would have been a commoner had his paintings not reached a connoisseur eye. Taj Mahal would have stayed in oblivion had it been in Shah-Jehan’s backyard.

We believe each one of you has the potential to be a Leonardo-da-vinci, all you need is a platform to showcase your talent. ArtEnthu.com is our endeavor to provide a world-class virtual platform that is unbiased, competitive, hassle-free and cuts across art forms. Conducting live art competition 24×7 at the click of a button is a niche concept and we are the first ones to do so. The response that we have received at the culmination of first one is just mind blowing!!

I would like to thank all of you for endorsing our vision and contributing whole heartedly with your artworks/comments/ratings and feedback. We strive to make your experience with ArtEnthu a memorable one.

Congratulations to the winners for the first round of the art competition. Winners would be announced in the next newsletter, so hold your breath!!

It is you who decide the winner by means of your comments and ratings. So reach out to submit work of art and muster the support so that it stands out. Please remember that the rating given by a registered user carries more weight.

October marks the advent of our second art competition. So, let the creativity and the love for Art flow.

You and all the art enthusiast are cordially invited to register, upload, rate and post comments on the various arts.

Please write us with your feedback at admin@artenthu.com. Your input is extremely valuable to us.  So keep writing in, trust me we are all ears…

Picasso

Team ArtEnthu

Thanks to All………

We are overwhelmed with the tremendous response by various artists. ArtEnthu has 100+ arts and nearly thousand ratings for all the arts.

It’s Voting Time Now!!!

The competition is ending on 30th Sept and the winners will be announced thereafter. So, hurry up rate!……rate!…..rate!

Remember, a registered user’s rating gets more weightage than an unregistered user. Share your art with your friends and family and ask them to rate your art. Get all the art enthusiasts to vote for the art.

A comment is something an artist is always looking forward to, so let your thoughts about a particular art flow through the keys of your keyboard.

ArtEnthu is now a part of the Orkut Community. So feel free to start forums and discussions on the various arts and artist.
You can also follow ArtEnthu at www.twitter.com/ArtEnthu

A couple of features have been added on ArtEnthu in the past few weeks.
*The art detail page has the ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ buttons.
* A user can view the profile of his/her favourite artist. Therefore, all the artists are requested to update their ‘About me’ profile.
(eg. You can answer these questions.
Q- Is this art your hobby?
Q- How long have you been into this?
Q- Have you received any training in the respective field or has it been self-learning experience?
Q- What kind of painting/poetry/photography do you prefer?)
* The most active member will also be receiving the prize, so go ahead and rate the arts, post your comments and feedbacks.

We are always waiting for your suggestions.

ArtEnthu Team

Hello and Welcome!!!

 

ArtEnthu.com has been launched for all the art enthusiasts around the world. It offers the scope of competition along with the basics like showcasing and sharing your art.

 

ArtEnthu.com is currently catering to various art categories, such as hand paintings, digital paintings, photography and poems. Users can upload their art according to their age criteria under these art categories. Only original pieces of artwork are supposed to be uploaded along with the artist name.

 

Art can be submitted for the competitions under the ongoing ‘current themes’. It has to be made ‘public’ for receiving ratings as well as comments from all the users. A unique system of rating and ranking has been adopted by ArtEnthu.com for this purpose.

 

An art can also be made ‘private’. It can then be shared by invitation only. No other user will be able to view your art in such a case.

 

ArtEnthu.com becomes the first website to showcase the talent of little kids in the above fields of art, thereby encouraging their talent and providing them with the recognition early on.

 

So, let the creativity and the love for Art flow.

 

You and all the art lovers are cordially invited to register, upload, rate and post comments on the various arts.

 

Please write us with your feedback at admin@artenthu.com. Any valuable input will surely be considered.

 

Team ArtEnthu.