Fybertech Forums
Projects and Development => Fybertech Projects => Topic started by: FyberOptic on October 01, 2005, 10:45:09 am
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I reckon this is as good a place as any to mention changes made to the site.
Obviously the site itself got updated, with the new gear-motif nav bar, and front page.
Next you prolly noticed I rearranged the fyboard here, since there were lots of areas that were probably just never going to get used, so I compressed them down into others and removed some. All the original topics are still there, though.
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The comic software is up and running, featuring Fyber Assist, Gordon, Hindsight 20/XX, and The Metroid Chronicles. The navigation bar is updated with a cog to get there, with the old cogs for Fyber Assist and Gordon removed.
Once I get the login system working I'll enable comments for the comics, as well.
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coll. Fybertech accounts will be awesome.
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Yay! acounts! ^_^
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Its not that great.
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*kills magus* >:(
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Maybe he just can't remember his passwords . .. . ...
The website was draggin pretty hard yesterday, and by chance I happened to put together what was causing it while doing other stuffs, so I changed something in the configuration which bypasses that and now it seems to work a lot speedier. :D
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duh...
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I can't wait until those accounts come in. No idea what they'll do. Also, I like the news box.
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They'll mosty be used to comment on comics.
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ALLL TIMMMEE UPDATES
Today I've been updating the softwares on every machine. Fybertech dot corn suffered a minor problem after a custom-build of a piece of software was replaced with an upgraded one, but I removed the setting that was breaking it and may never bother recompiling it to support that option again since at the moment I have no huge need for it. If anything else acts weird though make sure to let me know.
The BBS machine is still updating, but I'm thinking it'll be less likely to have problems since it doesn't run as many important services. My laptop however (where the BBS used to run) is upgrading a shit-ton of stuff, and may never run again when it's finished . . !
My desktop PC though runs Windows, and since it received no significant updates, that must mean everything is secure, rite? RITE?
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LEFT...I mene rite.
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^O^ lolz
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Every ship is to shape on this end Fyber. Also, though my coding skillz are sup-par, I'd like to offer any help I can with the site if you need it. I may not be able to code.... or do art..... or um... anything... but..... I... I uh...
I can make Ramen?
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There's apparently 81 people on this ship, so we'll need to buy it in bulk.
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We have a ship? I thought this was just some run down shack, or shanty.
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Were setting sail to become KING OF THE PIRATES!
*One Piece paradoy adventure begins
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Fyber T. Goofy?
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Vito doing that marksman thing?
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/me throws keys and hits bullseye.
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Sino cooking for the would be king
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There once was a Pirate named Gold Garshak...
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/me gives it up RIGHT AWAY.
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His name's Bluejay, he's just like a samurai?
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D-A-R-T-H Ganons not shy, Vitos doing that marksman thing, and Sinos cooking for the would be king
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Prox's in the attic eating buffalo wings.
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And Fyber's of playing with his thing...
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And MDude's so lazy he rhymed thing with thing!
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Yai-yo Yai-yo!
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and they also have a clown pyrate, he's a freakin' clown, how did that happen, yo ho ho he took a bite of cocaine
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You should now be able to sign-up and log into the main part of the site. I'm thinking it's all okay but let me know if anything is broked.
Only thing that logging in gets you for now is that you don't have to type your name everytime you post to Fychan (http://www.fybertech.com/fychan), but eventually it'll let you make comments on comics and who knows what else.
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WTG Fyber, now will you get me a drink?
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Comments are up on the comics now. I can't say I'm super pleased with the appearance of'em yet but at least they work. I HOPE.
The java chat page will put in the name you're logged into the site with now automatically, as well.
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Cool job Frybar....
Any word on if/when we can expect more often newsposts? Could it be like it once was on the labs where someone types them up every day and sends them to you to post? I miss those days.
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I assure you all we'd ever have for a newspost is "THIS IS AN ASS SANDWITCH. IT IS MADE OF ASS AND POO", because nobody would be able to think of anything else.
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Newsposts are on the list. I figure they'll be doable by whoever. Not sure about avatars yet, but I'll prolly have some thing for that soon too.
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Cool
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Comic episodes with new comments now show up with yellow text instead of black in the comic indexes.
Keep in mind that I flushed the table which stored what you've already read, so you might see ones that are yellow now which you did in fact already read, but viewing them again will take care of that.
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The password recovery function is working now. If you login incorrectly there's a link you can use to initiate the reset process. Which is good, considering I forgot my password too . . !
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Since I don't have the news system capable of alerting when there's new news yet, go check out the news thinger. A couple of new Hindsights to see!
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That comic sucks
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no way mang, it is teh supper coll!
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*Never updates any comic bearing his name again*
PS the news thing auto-opens for now, until we can set preferences for it.
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I did some little tweaks to that, such as making the news button not appear until after the page is loaded and it's been positioned. And since there's a lot of news in there now, it got too big for the box, so I had to make it scroll until I find a prettier way of doing it.
UNFORTUNATELY, Firefox is dumb, and requires some form of content in the animated box (and it's empty during the animation part), otherwise the animation sequence simply doesn't show up at all. This is rather dumb and is surely a bug, because there's no logical reason for it to behave that way. But it wasn't a problem before, because I just put in a piece of spacer code which didn't visibly show up. But, in order to have the scrollbar, I had to make the text area a specific size. This meant the spacer code was now pushing the frame area down farther than it should be. -o-;; I had to do some messing around, and it's still not perfect, but I managed to get it all together. THANKS FIREFOX.
But like I said, I'll prolly make a better way of doing it. Possibly one post per page, with arrow buttons to jump between'em. I dunno.
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Leave it opening when the page loads, it looks cool.
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See, it looks cool for us folks who's page loads instantly, but if you were ever stuck with dialup, you'd know that stuff moving when the page loads looks ugly + dumb. Fyber did the right thing with all the tweaking to ensure everybody sees the same things.
At least, thats my theory, he can tell if you my thinking is out of wack.
PS POST 100~
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I need a DIAL-UP SIMULATOR, to see how things really load. Perhaps I can setup a proxy with bandwidth throttling on the bbs box, just for kicks.
I couldn't ever tell how fast old/new Haz Labs backups ran, since everytime I loaded them my router just said "lol hay tahts my ip" and routed me straight back in. So I had to bounce through fybertech's server and back to me, and then I could really see how fast they loaded for everyone. Which surprisingly seemed to be pretty decent considering my home connection's upstream isn't very good compared to what a real server can poop out.
As for faster pooping, I read up yesterday on using gzip encoding through Perl, and figured what the hell and went ahead and implemented it, since it didn't involve too much changery of the code. This is good for dial-up users (and well as easier on my monthly bandwidth totals), since it means the web pages get compressed before being transmitted. The forum already uses this automatically since it's practically built into PHP. The main part of the site uses Perl though, which actually requires you to compress the page content and reply with the appropriate http header yourself. The upside is, as I said, the pages will load faster. The downside is that it takes a moment to compress the page, which.. could make the page load slower. A WIN/LOSE SITUATION? I DUNNO! I guess it depends on how busy the server is at the particular moment you're trying to use it. I may disable the feature if it's noticably slower.
Part of the reason it's slow is that Perl runs seperately from the web server software, where as PHP actually runs as a module in the server software. I've been reading about a similar module for Perl, but it would require a bit of reworking the code for the main part of the site, and I have no idea at this point how much of a performance benefit it would provide. BUT, I'm gonna continue looking into it; this, combined with the gzip encoding, might make pages load as fast or faster than the forum does.
And then I stopped blabbering!
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Yeh, shut up already....
No Seriously, thanks for all the hard work you put in Fyber. Dunna know where we'd be withoot ya.
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It seems to work on my dail-up connection.
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The newspost system has finally been revamped in a way that posts can actually be made, instead of me editing a file every night.
I started making a whole editor and other stuff, but then I realized, why not just tie it into the forum? So I dumped all the code I had been working on the past few days and whipped up a probably better method. Just posting in a special topic lets me (or anyone with access to the area) make posts now.
I also added the ability for the posts to be lengthy, but still only display the content for that day by default. To read the rest, you can click the [more] button to expand the post, and [less] to shrink it again.
I wanted to let it display avatars or something too but there's simply not enough room for all that, so it'll have to do for now.
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BRILLIANT!
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Hey Fyber, what about displaying avatars in the middle of the cog?
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HMM. Maybe, if you mouse over who wrote it or something.
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Fyber, will we be seeing a return of Rope Jampery, and Spug Shock?
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Oh crud, the buttons are somehow alphabetical now! What will I do?
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They were before actually, but I took "fy" off of "board" and moved it to the left accordingly, since "fyboard" was a bit wide to have underneath the gear.
BUT YEAH, for anyone who didn't notice, I took a suggestion from Vito and added labels under the gears. Perhaps that'll make it a bit easier for folks to click the one they want.
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It makes it a bit easier for navigation I thinks, especially if you're new to the site. The giant cog on the main page is cool, but you can't have it on every page.
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The giant cog has started to lose its purpose. The main page may get changed around at some point.
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Yeah, the little cogs just seem to work better. We'd either have to recentralize the giant cog, or just give up and put something better in it's place, like a flashing FT logo gif.
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How about having the news in the center, and having animated cogs to the left and right? Or, since this is Fybertech, you could have glowy wires instead of cogs.
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It aint a bad idear. I'll mush things in my brains until strange things fall out and see where to go fralm there.
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How about having the news in the center, and having animated cogs to the left and right? Or, since this is Fybertech, you could have glowy wires instead of cogs.
Tubes of bubbly green liquids?
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I like the idea of tubes and wires, but I dunno if such a thing is really feasible.
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I dunno who clicked what ads how many times, but suddenly there's $1.57 in the Google Adsense account, as compared to like five cents the other day. GOOD WORK, TEAM.
Sadly, it takes $100 before they actually let me have the money. -o-;; But if this keeps up, I might be able to make enough to cover some expenses without mooching off of Boris and Vito so much. And speaking of said expenses, they're due again already . . !
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I dunna see any google adds Fyber...
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They ort to be at the bottom of all the site pages, just not here at the forum.
And make that $8.41 . . !
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Here's how Google Ads work, i think.
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ya
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What confuses me is all these library ads that Google thinks we want to click on. What does Fybertech have to do EDIT: with libraries?
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Nothing. You click on the ads, fyber gets money for the site.
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I reckon that library stuff is what they best assume the page is related to. Some pages are perdy close, like the Roms page usually has ads for GBAs and such, and the Comics page sometimes links to comic-related places.
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I updated the Links area (http://www.fybertech.com/index.cgi?page=links) to add a section for sites we like, in case folks clicking them might happen to result in them wanting to link back. I just put in a couple that I could think of that I or we might use frequently, so if you can think of any others, run'em by me here or wherever and I might put'em up.
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Did you ever post a link to my site yet? Some links still point to the previous updates but I think i'll leave em up so people can see the difference between both updates.
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You got a little banner image fer it?
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here's the small version. I have the large one to.
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Um... Could you post a link to your site? I seem to have trouble finding it, and I'm using GOOGLE.
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I happened to check the Adsense thing and there's about 20 bucks in it. They won't send bucks until there's at least a hundred though, so if anyone happens to think of it while they're around the site, it'd help out just to click an ad here and there. Even one a day would prolly be better than nothin. Surely there's a way to make money from that thing . . !
I've also felt that the site has been sluggish at times lately, so I messed with some more settings. Hopefully it'll be a bit more responsive.
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Here's the April Fools index page (http://www.fybertech.com/index_af.html) for anyone who missed it.
Something I noticed in doing this is that plain HTML loads so quickly compared to Perl or PHP pages on this server. But I dunno much of what I could do to ever speed things up. Perhaps it's time to go back into TINKERING MODE.
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I'm sad I missed the Internet's April Fools Day.
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did them links actually go anywhere Fyber?
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I know when I used them, they just made the page reload.
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Yeah I pretty much just set the 404 page to be the same as the index page, that way it wouldn't come up with broken pages when you clicked any of the numerous links.
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I've updated the website code to be more compatible with some acceleration software which allows parts of the site to run much faster. Pages you'll notice this on are anything which access index.cgi. This is pretty much everything except Fychan, the comics area, and the forums. I'm not going to do any overhauling to the first two things until I'm positive the main part of the site works okay, so keep an eye on things, and let me know if anything weird happens, like it showing you as not logged in, or logged in as someone else on those main pages. Otherwise, you should notice quite a difference in page load time. There used to be a slight delay before they'd start.
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The forum is now updated from SMF v1.0.9 or whatever to v1.1.1, which was a major upgrade as opposed to all the others previously. But it seemed to go without a hitch. It also came with a new theme, which I'll likely mess around with sometime to appear Fybertech-ish, since it might allow some new functionality as opposed to this older theme. Until then, you probably won't even notice any difference in the upgrade..!
As always, if there's any problems with the forum, let me know, blah blah.
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The connection between the forum login and the rest of the site broke after the SMF upgrade, so I started to rewrite parts of the site in PHP but that was gonna take forever, so I decided to just poke around in the SMF code again to see what had changed and if I could just rewrite it into Perl like I did before. Turns out it was easier to fix than I thought, and now the rest of the site should know who you are again.
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I didn't know where else to mention this, but I totally just realized where the inline message editing feature of this version of SMF was. Look at the icon at the bottom right of your posts. It looks like a pencil writing on a piece of paper. Just above where it shows your IP. Clicking that lets you modify your posts right in the page. :D
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I updated the main page to display Idle RPG stats. Next step is integrating the iRPG pages more into the site itself, instead of being such a standalone section as it is.
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Shouldn't be hard to see that the entire website template has been updated..! I condensed various options into Games and Media gears which drop down, and disappear upon hovering over another gear.
I've verified that it warks okay in IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, Opera 9, and Safari 3 beta, and don't know what else to really check it in. I assume Rhythm uses Safari 2 on Mac and he didn't say anything about it being broker, so I'll assume it's o-kay there too.
One of the more important things I did is change all the gears to use a transparent background color, since IE (and also Safari I believe) are stupid and apparently convert page colors to be "web safe", which made all the gear backgrounds appear as a slightly different blue color than the rest of the background (in other words, they looked like square images instead of blending together). Making them transparent meant reducing them to 8-bit color, but they still look fine to me.
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I made those dropdown menus animated somewhat, and gave the background behind the gears a gradient. It took many coding variations to find something that worked properly across Opera/Firefox/IE, but Safari still ends up broken due to known flaws. But considering Opera and Firefox are also on Mac, there's really no reason to use that bloated-ass Safari anyway.
EDIT: I had a sudden thought of a workaround, and gave it a try, and it appears to work in Safari fine now too. Not how I wanted it/how it should be done, but it works in this case.
MORE EDITS SINCE IT'D BE DUMB TO MAKE A NEW POST FOR JUST THIS: I made the gears on the menu of the main site bounce a little when hovering over, and also changed the icons of the dropdown menus, though I don't think I'll keep those. I have something else in mind to try in their place perhaps.
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Few things I mentioned in chat that should probably be in one place.
First of all, Fyborg is updated in a few ways as to how it works with 4get:
- If you want to paste an url from a chan site that you don't want 4get to grab, put a ! somewhere in the line in front of it. Preferably as the first character, then a space, then paste your url. That way people can still click it to load it up.
- Duplicate check works properly now, notifying you if the MD5 sum of a file matches one already downloaded. I thought this was working properly long ago, but one line out of place left it broken. There's over a thousand dupes on the site right now that I'm going to have to write a script to parse through and delete.
- Anytime you paste a duplicate, or do a random !4get, you get linked to the "view" page of an image now. It's basically a framed page with a little info box at the top, telling who linked the image, when, and the tag, and the image itself is displayed in a frame at the bottom. I decided to use this method so that whatever resizing preferences people were using in their browsers would be applied to the frame as if it were opened in a full window like before. Also it was the most cross-browser solution to implement quickly.
- Images are automatically renamed now upon being downloaded, that way filename conflicts are no longer a problem. Name-based checking was only necessary back when there was no MD5 comparison. Filename checking is obviously not a good way to test for dupes, since an image could easily be named "1.jpg" on a dozen sites and always be a different picture. MD5 matching has a pretty accurate detection rate, so that's all that's used now.
Related to 4get:
- The beta page of the upcoming version of 4get (http://www.fybertech.com/4get/index2.cgi) is gradually being updated. IE sucks so images will open directly in the window like before, but Opera/Firefox/Safari will get the new fancy auto-resize display. Clicking the image when expanded makes it go away. Eventually I'll probably try to make this functionality work in IE too, but it's almost more trouble than it's worth.
- The stats page (http://www.fybertech.com/4get/stats.cgi) was created to show how many people linked images, and then updated to let you sort based on name or image count. And for the record, "Unknown" is the name I applied when images were initially inserted into the database when I switched over to that method of storing 4get info, from before names were recorded.
Other:
- The main website template was updated to fix the horizontal scrollbar that kept showing up in Firefox.
I think that's all!
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Well, I"m getting the occaisional 501/505 error when I try to load the main page, but I have no idea what the hell it means. Probably just my backwards IEism.
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Well, I"m getting the occaisional 501/505 error when I try to load the main page, but I have no idea what the hell it means. Probably just my backwards IEism.
That's strange, those are "not implemented" and "version not supported", and are given by the web server and not any code I wrote. What version of IE was giving the problem? And how often/how many times has it happened?
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Newest version of IE7, a recent update of Explorer is what started the problem really(I don't really track this stuff too well). It happens maybe once or twice a week, I haven't really tried to pin down a pattern to it. I just need to refresh the page to undo the error, but I figured it could potentially snowball if not dealt with eventually.
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I thought we had a 4get topic, but apparently not.
Anyhoo, 4get (http://www.fybertech.com/4get/) has finally been switched away from the old ugly version to the perdier one. And just today, I added in a new options area, so that you can change: the number of thumbs displayed on the page (up to 100), whether to display the poster's name, and whether to display the tag.
Since the layout of the thumbs has always been dynamic (as opposed to an old-fashioned static table), I realized long ago that for some people there was an uneven number of thumbs on the last row, depending on your screen resolution (or just browser size). So now you can adjust the number to whatever you want. It's 36 by default, but I changed mine to 40.
The other two options are just personal preference. It looks cleaner with nothing, which is how the beta 4get page started. Then I added the tags, and later the names, but just wasn't sure if I liked it. So I decided to just let people change it.
I think that's all to report..!
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It was a minor update, but I have something else, so I'll mention it now. I made and added a 4get icon to the Media dropdown menu. I think a lot of folks just type the url, and there was still a link to get there via Fychan, but now it's one click easier.
Other than that, I updated the comics section. Made the initial menu use Fychan-ish buttons, removed the gray background from the whole thing, changed some colors a bit to look nicer on the blue background, etc.
Also did a cosmetic change to the site here and there, but mostly trivial stuff.
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Oh Fyber... Where would we be without you?
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/me points at Snipe Hunt
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More updatery. I changed the logo on the main part of the site. I didn't intend to, but after making some text graphics for the front page, I realized the logo no longer stood out properly. I ended up changing those text graphics in question anyway, but I like this new logo. Reminds me of lased-etching or something.
But yeha, I added some image-based text headers for the iRPG stats and Latest News things there on the front page. I also gave all the comics image-based titles, but I'm not sure about the green there yet. They also keep these titles when you click through to view one.
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Changed Fychan's appearance some, since I never really updated it after changing the background once before and parts of it looked bad against the blue. Dunno if I'll keep it this way just yet, but it's better than it was.
Fixed some minor tag issues here and there to make all the pages I checked validate properly (using the W3C HTML and CSS icons at the bottom of the website pages).
Updated the F.A.Q.
Updated the template to fix a stupid mistake I made once before, which was causing the main part of the site to run in quirks mode instead of standards mode. This fixed a minor image padding problem for 4get in IE, but it also meant some new problems in various places as the different mode lead to different defaults and priorities for the stylesheet settings. I think I fixed most of them, but if anyone notices anything that looks odd, such as (probably small) font sizes and text alignment issues, let me know.
Anddd, it seems like there was something else, but I can't think of it.
EDIT: I also realized that the dropdown menus were broken as a result of the template fix, but I worked that out. Only Firefox still tells me there's a script warning, but since it's retarded, it doesn't tell me where, so I'm not worried about it because it apparently works fine.
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That template fix broke 4get pretty good. Particularly the preview window that pops up. But not only did I fix that, I also finally made it work in IE, believe it or not. But it only works in IE7. Any other version of IE defaults back to the simpler method of just opening the image directly.
There is a problem with the IE version though. Usually you can just click the image when it pops up and it'll go away. Well that won't work for IE. So I added a "close" link below the popup. Works just as good until I can figure out why it's being a dummy.
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Figure it out before it gives ya a knuckle sammich.
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NO PANCH
I actually did fix it. Yet another case of having to use an alternate method of accomplishing it due to browser h8, but you can click on the image preview in IE7 now to make it go away.
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I updated the 4get stats page (http://www.fybertech.com/4get/stats.cgi), and then put a little link to it on the 4get page.
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ATTENTION. THE SANTA HAT HAS BEEN REMOVED. YES, THE SANTA HAT HAS BEEN REMOVED.
Carry on.
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:'( Miss you hat