This has been an intense last few days, but I am pleased to say that the front page is recoded and it's live.
I had a few hairy moments while I was putting it live but it seems to have gone fairly smoothly.
Hopefully it will repair the new signups that we lost after I got rid of the original portal, this one is here to bring elements from the forum and the resource site together, especially the showcase of competition winners and also summaries of recent posts and tutorials.
I expect there to be teething troubles, I had to hack the forum like a mad bastard to make it all work. :)
The new frontpage is looking very good. I think you did
a fantastic job with it. It is much more informative and attracting
than the old version. Like it a lot!
I would really love to thank the members of the moderator team who gave me their feedback while I was developing this page and I also want to thank the people who I chose to send messages to for their feedback, your comments went a long way to help and hopefully I have implimented as many of the things that you guys suggested that I possibly could :)
That looks really really nice :) excellent job ;)
You did an ace job with the front page, its miles better than what there used to be. I really like the showcase shots, they are a great way of giving an impression about what the forum is all about. And if you at some point could make a shuffle button to fetch nine new shots that would just make it even better :)
btw. that link button for Chip-On.com points to a dead page with an advertisement and an offer that you can buy the domain name.
Quote from: zawran on July 07, 2009
You did an ace job with the front page, its miles better than what there used to be. I really like the showcase shots, they are a great way of giving an impression about what the forum is all about. And if you at some point could make a shuffle button to fetch nine new shots that would just make it even better :)
btw. that link button for Chip-On.com points to a dead page with an advertisement and an offer that you can buy the domain name.
I'll replace chip-on.com with something active :)
I'll make a shuffle button this weekend for the showcase, good idea mate.
Wow! something new.. I'm not able to get connected since last Saturday.. I'm in cybercafe now..
Actually I have a suggestion to make. Since DBF are focused on programming, I think it will be very convenient to have a "Colored codes" - C, C++, Basic, etc.
We can get the pre-made color scheme from Notepad++.
Example: http://digitalspine.blogspot.com/2009/06/custom-3d-loader-and-viewer.html (http://digitalspine.blogspot.com/2009/06/custom-3d-loader-and-viewer.html)
Using Notepad++. Maybe DBF can add a tag..
Example: for C.. [CCode]bla.. bla.. bla[/CCode]
Ahh.. got to go.. will continue later when I can get online again.. :crutches:
Yeah good idea IMHO. There are some good engines around for
that like:
http://qbnz.com/highlighter/ (http://qbnz.com/highlighter/)
or
http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/ (http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/)
But I do not know if there are stable mods for this forum software
available. And installing alpha/beta versions of not officially supported
plugins always inherit the risk of having an unstable forum.
@Shocky:
Do you know anything about it ?
I love notepad++, it's what I do nearly all my coding in these days and it's excellent how it highlights different languages syntax.
Modding the actual forum code tags to do this is possible but would mean that lots ot the templates would need to be changed and to be honest with you, that is likely to cause problems when upgrading this forum software so although it is a wonderful suggestion, I think that the rewards outstrip the effort needed to maintain it.
On another note though, I plan to take the guts of the new front page and work on it some more.
It has the functionality I wanted now but I want to make it look better so you can expect to see some improvements within the next couple of weeks :)
Take another look on the front page... I've tidied it up a little bit ;)
Quote from: Shockwave on July 10, 2009
Take another look on the front page... I've tidied it up a little bit ;)
That's way better. Good polishing Shocky. Like the lighter background a lot.
Makes it much easier to read.
Some things though:
- The link-buttons have a white highlighted site. Maybe it looks better when
they have a different color than the background (white). So having a visible border
might makes them appear more like a rectangle area to click on. The original graphical
link button doesn't fit there, or ?
- Refer to attached screenshot. When I scroll down the whole page using the mouse
wheel - and then scroll down the shoutbox area with the mouse wheel - I see the
background gradient appear on the background of the shoutbox. Tested with Win XP
and FF3.0.
Ok, don't get me wrong - this frontpage truley
rocks. Just those two points
came into my mind when browsing it the first time.
Very well done, Shocky!
I see the background gradient appear on the background of the shoutbox.
I am not getting that error. I am using FF3.0.11 and Vista on this computer. I tried the scrollwheel on both the page itself and inside the shoutbox, and its not changing the background color like your picture.
Yes I saw that bug... I think it's fixed now, ther is supposed to be a gradient in the shoutbox, it was not meant to look like your screenshot though! :)
As for the buttons I will tweak them a little bit to make them stand out a bit more.
The problem I have with the original links is that they take up a lo0t of space and it was pointed out to me that they didnt look like obviously clickable buttons so I took them off for now.
So as always, than you for the feedback.
Personally I am 95% happier with it now than I was yesterday, I am of course still listening to feedback, minor stuff will need to wait a while now though as I have other a few things to do as well :) Of course if anything critical comes up I will be interested to fix it.
One last thing, maybe you will know better than me, but one of the link buttons will not pass W3C validator check, do you know how to get flash to validate without using javascript?
I want to avoid javascript on the page.
Quote from: Shockwave on July 10, 2009
...
The problem I have with the original links is that they take up a lo0t of space and it
was pointed out to me that they didnt look like obviously clickable buttons so I took
them off for now.
Ahh .. ok .. didn't thought about that. That could be true - that some users didnt
recognize them as buttons. I just mention that, because the quality of the graphic
was pretty cool. Nevertheless, key point here should be that everyone knows where
to click. So you are right!
Quote from: Shockwave on July 10, 2009
...
Personally I am 95% happier with it now than I was yesterday, I am of course still
listening to feedback, minor stuff will need to wait a while now though as I have
other a few things to do as well :) Of course if anything critical comes up I will be
interested to fix it.
Definately. I think your last frontpage changes make a huge boost. For me it is
perfect!
Quote from: Shockwave on July 10, 2009
...
One last thing, maybe you will know better than me, but one of the link buttons will
not pass W3C validator check, do you know how to get flash to validate without
using javascript?
Right now - I did not know it. But I am happy to help you. Could you please give me
some more description - which button / what HTML code of it and what does the W3C
complain about ?
Quote from: Shockwave on July 10, 2009
I want to avoid javascript on the page.
Any reason for that ? Are there still people who disable javascript ?
Quote
Right now - I did not know it. But I am happy to help you. Could you please give me
some more description - which button / what HTML code of it and what does the W3C
complain about ?
It is the only flash one on the page, the retro remakes banner, the rest of the page validates perfectly, I know how to hide the flash button from the validator using javascript, but for one little link button it seems to be overkill.
Quote
I want to avoid javascript on the page.
Any reason for that ? Are there still people who disable javascript ?
Some still disable it, not many I admit but just to use javascript for an advert banner is a waste of time imho, I've done the rest of the site with pure xhtml and css and I am a little bit loathe to change it for a little banner...
If there is another workaround to get the embed command through the validator I will be very interested to know how!
Excellent Job as I have see the front page and You need a Pints after all that work! :D :P
Quote from: Hotshot on July 11, 2009
Excellent Job as I have see the front page and You need a Pints after all that work! :D :P
Yep. I second that. You definately deserve to have some beer :cheers:
Sounds like a good idea to me!
Haha, first time I saw the front page, I was greeted by this. Way to turn away the hardcore demosceners :P
Gloomy Xmas is one of my favourite things in the showcase :D
We need more gloom entries to our comps!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Quote from: Shockwave on July 11, 2009
Quote
Right now - I did not know it. But I am happy to help you. Could you please give me
some more description - which button / what HTML code of it and what does the W3C
complain about ?
It is the only flash one on the page, the retro remakes banner, the rest of the page validates perfectly, I know how to hide the flash button from the validator using javascript, but for one little link button it seems to be overkill.
...
Took some time to figure out. The problem was the <embed> tag you used to embed
the FLASH banner. This tag is not part of the official W3C specification - and therefore
you get an error.
I tried it with the following workaround:
Replace this code:
<object><param name="movie" value="flashbanner.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" /><embed src="link_buttons/flashbanner.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#000000" width="88" height="33"></embed></object>
with this code:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="flashbanner.swf" width="80" height="33">
<param name="movie" value="flashbanner.swf" />
<p>Flash required</p>
</object>
This worked for me. The flash was shown in FF3.0 and the page validates without any
errors.
However, if have a look at the following page that describes this issue more clearly:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay)
As you can read - there might be certain site-effects using the method. But it might
work on 99% of the browsers.
Hope this helps.
Clever solution :) I will update the markup later on today Benny, I appreciate your help on this.
Our front page will finally be standards compliant! :D
Welcome, mate. Glad if I could helped ;-)
On the one hand I like validated pages - on the other hand it often
scares me to see the differences between so called defacto standards
used by hundreds of pages and the W3C standard. Very weird.
the w3c is behind the times... How long have they been promising us CSS3.0 for? And even now, no browser 100% supports the standards and so I decided that I try and get my code to pass w3c's validator but I am not a slave to the standards, I think that a lot of web developers take this approach.
If one of my pages wont validate because of some unsupported tag it's not the end of the world.
Besides, bots are becoming capable of reading flash websites now, the w3c needs to get its act together.
< /rant >
Wow that front page is sexy excellent job mate :clap:
So much better than what i was looking at a couple of weeks back ;)
Well, there are still a few things left to do on it Wayne, but thanks I am glad that you like it :)
I really like the new site! Looks very cool! Great work!
Thanks, I really think it is helping matters, we have had the busiest month in our history so far.
I need to add a really mindblowing logo to the site though, I am still looking for an artist to do one.
Seeing screenshots of our own demos and contest entries is highly satisfying. K++
Imagine, a kit if the people featured in the shots I attach are looking at those productions.
The site really is amazingly busy.
Thanks to everyone for the brilliant posts and fabulous new topics :)
Just an idea to push possible this site a bit... What about when we write a small article with a topic like "How to start Democoding" .... "How to all those DemoEffects".... let us write a small article (for newcomers never coded demos before and for the ones, who are still in the scene and still coding)... Lets begin in just a few sentences (with some nice amazing screenshots of simple and complex/modern demo effects like from start, dot-dunnel, plasma to 3D and PixelShader effects)... Lets say the reader, what are demos and why are they coded and where are the roots... and ofcourse that this isnt borring... noooo... it makes a lot of fun and even motivate when there are size competitions like 1k 4k 64k and so on... Possible some people may ask, how to code such an effect / demo... whats the best routine for effect xx and so on... then we can show that there is a big community with real demo sceners where behind dbfinteractive - the english demo coder forum for everyone who still code demos, intros, games.. and even for newcomers/beginners too!!
What i want to say... when having a small article about this community (the dbf interactive place)... we should release this article(s) in all kind of diskmags on any Operation system... its just a small report about this communtiy and demoscene with advertisment in background... just an idea...
Lookin' great, and thanks again for the bottom button :D
Much more functional and appealing.
I made a few more tweaks to the front page :)
It's still not where I want it to be yet but it doesn't look too bad in Google Chrome now.