Website Updates

[Boris]

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~

[FyberOptic]

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!

[Bluejay]

Yeh, shut up already....
No Seriously, thanks for all the hard work you put in Fyber.  Dunna know where we'd be withoot ya.

[MDude]

It seems to work on my dail-up connection.

[FyberOptic]

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.

[Bluejay]

BRILLIANT!

[Buzzard]

Hey Fyber, what about displaying avatars in the middle of the cog?

[FyberOptic]

HMM.  Maybe, if you mouse over who wrote it or something.

[Bluejay]

Fyber, will we be seeing a return of Rope Jampery, and Spug Shock?

[MDude]

Oh crud, the buttons are somehow alphabetical now! What will I do?

[FyberOptic]

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.

[Vito]

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.

[FyberOptic]

The giant cog has started to lose its purpose.  The main page may get changed around at some point.

[Boris]

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.

[MDude]

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.