Website Updates

[MDude]

Um... Could you post a link to your site? I seem to have trouble finding it, and I'm using GOOGLE.

[FyberOptic]

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.

[FyberOptic]

Here's the April Fools index page 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.

[Armchair]

I'm sad I missed the Internet's April Fools Day.

[Bluejay]

did them links actually go anywhere Fyber?

[MDude]

I know when I used them, they just made the page reload.

[FyberOptic]

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.

[FyberOptic]

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.

[FyberOptic]

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.

[FyberOptic]

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.

[FyberOptic]

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. 

[FyberOptic]

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.

[FyberOptic]

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.

[FyberOptic]

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.

[FyberOptic]

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 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 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!