Some Archive Tweaks


EvilDragon

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Mar 4, 2003
Messages
29,986
Age
46
Location
Ingolstadt
Hi,

some may have noticed, I changed the layout of the archive a bit during the last days.
i.e. Optimized screenshot size, fixed that "licence not specified"-Bug, changed search to use title as default, removed ratings, made more skin categorys, sorted the firmwares and emulators, etc.

Now it's your turn:
What do you think about that? Any further ideas, any suggestions?
If I'm able to do them, I'll try to include them :)
 
Excellent changes, the rating system was always being abused and with the "most notable" list gone, you can see loads more recent files. (Including Garden2X :))
 
EvilDragon said:
Hi,

some may have noticed, I changed the layout of the archive a bit during the last days.
i.e. Optimized screenshot size, fixed that "licence not specified"-Bug, changed search to use title as default, removed ratings, made more skin categorys, sorted the firmwares and emulators, etc.

Now it's your turn:
What do you think about that? Any further ideas, any suggestions?
If I'm able to do them, I'll try to include them :)
Noticed and loving the changes, looking good!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Nice little tweaks :) Hmm... wondering about extras. Okies, here's some positive criticism and suggestions:

From an aesthetic point of view, two really dense blocks of tiny text on either side of the page does not look pretty - but then, it does mean there is one-click access to most new entries. Not sure how you could mitigate that, if you even want to.

Also, at least on Opera, it doesn't deal brilliantly with the window being made small enough such that the line "Forums Other Systems Hosted Sites About" overlaps; you end up with none-too-pretty lines as the background image tiles. I imagine changing it's style such that it stretches instead would probably help there. That said, I doubt that's very important unless the text is made to overlap before 800px, because, of course, then the archives wouldn't look great on Pandora, and that is going to be important in due course.

Other tweaks? Screenshot galleries would be nice for some things, though that's mostly covered if you can upload .gifs or other animated images. If you could add an image above both the "latest files" and the "most downloads" section that dynamically changed to the screenshot for whatever it was the cursor was over most recently, that would be quite cool as well.

Can't think of anything else at the moment, although it might be worth investigating the colour scheme slightly as well. Blue on teal doesn't *quite* work, or at least, not in Times New Roman.

What I'd definitely recommend is dropping a PM to Cauterize to explicitly ask his opinion, at least if you feel like giving the archive a full layout overhaul as opposed to tweaking here and there. His posts in the first logo Pandora thread completely changed the direction of design of all subsequent logos, and he *definitely* knew where he was coming from in terms of designs. If anyone can give tips on how an Archive Mk 2.0 ought to look, it'd be him.

EDIT: Also noticed that - at last - it's letting me create an account for the archive! Yay!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Can the process for uploading files be tweaked?
For example on a new file you dont have to wait, but if you update the file then you have to be approved. Can we cut out the approval?
 
How about making it so a file can be updated without approval if the update is uploaded by the same username that uploaded the last version? This would prevent jackasses from messing up the archives, and still provide a considerable speedup.
 
Alex. said:
How about making it so a file can be updated without approval if the update is uploaded by the same username that uploaded the last version? This would prevent jackasses from messing up the archives, and still provide a considerable speedup.
Perfect!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
And not so easy to code, I guess :/
It's not my code, and it's 100kb Perl, so not too easy to fix :)
But I'll take a look.
 
EvilDragon said:
And not so easy to code, I guess :/
It's not my code, and it's 100kb Perl, so not too easy to fix :)
But I'll take a look.
Oops, I hoped it would be configurable - definitely don't feel like you need to do this, you more than likely have much better things to spend your time on! Besides, thanks to your latest tweaks the archive site is already better than ever :)

I wonder if you could apply the same file list tweaks to the GP32 archive when you have the time. The ratings there are a joke, and it would be great to see lengthier lists for recent files (they would likely cover 2 years :lol:) and top downloads.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Well, it is partly configurable.
Some stuff (number of recent, etc. files) can be done via config script.
Other stuff (show what where) can be done via templates.
But stuff that adds new features need to be implemented ;)

BTW: Does anybody know how to make hovering images over a link?

i.e. I have LINK A in an html and want to show an image hovering besides your mousepointer when you move over it?
 
How about a random projects/screenshots on main page or last four submitted files info/screenshots on main? (Like in wikipedia)
 
What I miss if the date/time of users in the comments, I never know if the comment is still valid for the current version...
 
joyrider said:
EvilDragon said:
BTW: Does anybody know how to make hovering images over a link?
it's not that hard to do but explaining it takes a while so i rather just wipped up a simple example.

http://users.pandora.be/IMS/evildragon.html


Thanks, looks easy enough to do :D

When I get home I'm gonna save the source :D

EDIT: Tried to put that into the file listings in the middle first... doesn't seem to work.
Any idea what's wrong? (simply look at the sourcecode of a listing with some files, you should find the code in there).
 
Last edited:
joyrider said:
EvilDragon said:
BTW: Does anybody know how to make hovering images over a link?
it's not that hard to do but explaining it takes a while so i rather just wipped up a simple example.

http://users.pandora.be/IMS/evildragon.html


That is significantly more elegant than my method of doing it. I was trying to come up with a similar example, but I couldn't get document.getElemntById('whatever').style.width to return a value (which I wanted to use to calculate the offset).

Must remember that method :)

Edit: Although I can't quite work out why the div object's intial position is set to "top: 100px; left: 50px;". Editing either doesn't seem to make a jot of difference to how it renders, at least on Opera. Also, is there any advantage to using the display style as opposed to the visibility one?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Just a suggestion but you might try using well formed XHTML.

line 472 column 1 - Warning: <td> attribute "bgcolor" had invalid value "f0f3f6"
line 65 column 233 - Warning: unescaped & which should be written as &amp;
line 496 column 1 - Warning: <align> unexpected or duplicate quote mark
line 496 column 1 - Warning: <align> attribute with missing trailing quote mark
line 496 column 1 - Warning: <align> is not approved by W3C
line 514 column 9 - Warning: missing </font> before <p>
line 514 column 36 - Warning: inserting implicit <font>
line 496 column 1 - Warning: missing </align>
line 1114 column 40 - Warning: replacing unexpected font by </font>
line 496 column 1 - Warning: missing </align>
line 1114 column 40 - Warning: replacing unexpected font by </font>
line 1114 column 20 - Warning: replacing unexpected b by </b>
line 6 column 1 - Warning: <link> inserting "type" attribute
line 7 column 1 - Warning: <style> inserting "type" attribute
line 26 column 1 - Warning: <script> inserting "type" attribute
line 84 column 1 - Warning: <td> proprietary attribute "background"
line 84 column 1 - Warning: <td> attribute "valign" has invalid value "left"
line 89 column 1 - Warning: <td> proprietary attribute "background"
line 91 column 1 - Warning: <td> proprietary attribute "background"
line 91 column 1 - Warning: <td> attribute "align" has invalid value "middle"
line 102 column 1 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute
line 104 column 1 - Warning: <td> attribute "bgcolor" had invalid value "f0f3f6"
...
several hundered lines snipped
 
display=none takes the the element completely away from the flow it's like it never existed, with visibility the element still takes up the space in the flow.
the top & left in the css from the div can be removed, i only did that for seeing how the div looked like when starting to code the little script !

to evildragon :

CODE

<A HREF='?0,0,0,0,38,2514' onmouseout="hidepopup();" onmouseover="showpopup(this,'%%SSURL%%>');">2D and 3D Particles</A>



is what i see in the source, to me it seems that %%SSURL%% should be replaced by the screenshot url, but this doesn't seem to happen for some reason. it's the reason why it's not working.

check in the perl code if you perhaps deleted (by accident) the function that replaces %%SSURL%% with the link. I also think the ">" shouldn't be there.

http://users.pandora.be/IMS/errors.png shows what i'm seeing, ovbiosuly there's something wrong :)

of course i'm just guessing cause i can't see the actual perl script. (i don't know perl but it can't be too hard to figure out what's going wrong)
 
PERL script not too important, you see it's output in which should be the problem but I'm not seeing that, I view source and get;

<A HREF='?0,0,0,0,27,938' onmouseout="hidepopup();" onmouseover="showpopup(this,'<IMG SRC='http://archive.gp2x.de/cfiles/screenshots/screenshot-1.jpg'>');">2-player Pong</A>

I was thinking things like getelementbyid that travel the tree might need a well formed document to work.
 
Sphinxter said:
PERL script not too important, you see it's output in which should be the problem but I'm not seeing that, I view source and get;

<A HREF='?0,0,0,0,27,938' onmouseout="hidepopup();" onmouseover="showpopup(this,'<IMG SRC='http://archive.gp2x.de/cfiles/screenshots/screenshot-1.jpg'>');">2-player Pong</A>

I was thinking things like getelementbyid that travel the tree might need a well formed document to work.
the problem is that showpopup want's an url and not an <img> tag to be supplied.

for example showpopup(this,'http://archive.gp2x.de/cfiles/screenshots/screenshot-1.jpg');

so not showpopup(this,'<IMG SRC='http://archive.gp2x.de/cfiles/screenshots/screenshot-1.jpg'>'); like it's doing now
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Back
Top