Charas 3.0 Dev Journal

[game_maniac]

Honestly, firefox>>>>>IE all the way.

[Osmose]

Hoo boy. Spent the last three days fighting to finally get the design to work in both IE and Firefox, but got it done (Incidentally, a friend has informed me it works fine in Opera as well). The third day, today, was 8 hours of epic battle that culminated in getting the damn login box to work. If you're logged in, this is what you see (The PM link is only yellow on mouseover, but Print Screen removes the mouse, so meh).

It also notifies you with the little popup box if you have it enabled, just like the forum main page, plus it sticks you on the forum list as viewing somewhere on the main site, just in case someone wants to know that you're on the site doing something.

I have work tomorrow, so I don't expect to get much, if anything, done, but I'm really glad to get this done, because this was one of the big components of the whole "Unified site interface" goal. Of course, there's some kinks I still need to track down and iron out, but please bear with me, folks.

[game_maniac]

I like it, you'll eventually fill that white space with some crap right? Also, the upper space looks a lot cleaner as a whole.

Off-topic: OverClocked Remix and Cave Story ftw.

[Osmose]

If you mean the angled white space between the login and the Google search thing, no, that's staying blank. If you mean the space below that entire bar that is all blank, it's already filled - I took the screenshot with Firefox, and I have adblock enabled, as you can see in the bottom right. However, there are in fact google ads in the little space below the bar caused by the angle, as well as some text ads below that.

[game_maniac]

I meant the angled thing between the login and google search, for some reason it seemed incomplete to me.

[Osmose]

Ah. Well, this is what it looks like with ads.

[game_maniac]

Well, it still looks cleaner and less cramped. I like the generator links being centered in the page, right now it's sometimes hard to spot them.

[Moosetroop11]

The white bit still looks a bit odd. Would it look a bit better like this or something?

[Osmose]

I don't think so. The bar originally was a white bar with the blue inside, and it still is with the new design, only improved. I mean, there's already quite a lot of blue on the site.

Suggestions on other improvements to the site design are welcome.

[Moosetroop11]

Hmm, I think you're right that blue doesn't work, but that white still has an unfinished feel.

I can't think of anything better to go there though so I'll shut up for now :p

[Osmose]

I am an idiot. I just spent two and a half days trying to figure out when Complete Resources added users to a list of uploaders I found in the database (With the goal of eventually integrating all logins in the site into a single login), and only just figured out that the list I was working on was for the Generators, not Complete Resources.

That plus Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst has been slowing progress down the past couple of days. I'm sorry - I'm weak.  

[GaryCXJk]

One small hint, if it works on Firefox, you can be sure it works with Internet Explorer. The differences between a page loaded in IE and FF is that IE reads over errors and auto-corrects them. Firefox just interprets them as they are, just like many other browsers.

And if it doesn't work on IE, you must be using a higher version of HTML.

But you just need to remember, the

tag works on both versions, and practically do the same thing, so if you're using layers, go for this one instead of other types of tags. For CSS, I'd just stick with the more common uses of that. Finally, I'd avoid JavaScript when it's not needed. Not only will the site not work when JavaScript is disabled, it's very unreliable, as it can break at unknown points.

Also, try looking into caches for PHP, it could help a little in saving some bandwidth.

[Osmose]

Firefox and IE differ enough to make my life hell when trying to get it to display the same in both browsers. Regardless, today was actually a pretty productive day (It's not over but, as stated before, I'm weak and may fall into PSO or something )

First, I finally finished linking all the logins together - now, if you login anywhere on the site, you will be logged in everywhere on the site - generators, Complete Resources, Forum, it's all under a single system.

Also, not only are you brought to the last page after posting, but you're brought straight to your post. Just in case you don't feel like scrolling down.

The biggest addon today, however, was the Quick Reply box. You can see a screenshot of it here. Basically, if you just want to make a quick post, simply type it down there and click post and WAHBAM! It's posted. Oh, pardon my test post.

As for what I'll move on to next, I'm split between revamping the forum header (To both look more like the main site header and to work with the new nifty banners Warxe made way back when) and working on more behind the scenes stuff, like bugfixes and security upgrades, or stuff that affects staff, like Global Mods being able to make news posts (Rather, linking up the news system with the user system so some people can be allowed to make news posts for, say, contests and whatnot).

I'm very doubtful I'll make my end of the summer goal, but I'm going to keep working whether I do or I don't and finish the project.

[Osmose]

Well, after yesterday's post, I went ahead and revamped the news system - and by revamp I mean changed around a few things to allow a certain list of users update the news. I should probably make a page that allows you to change said list. But anywho.

The big thing that I did today was build half of the award system. Again, there's a screenshot to illustrate the system. So far the database is set up and awards are displayed. The part that has yet to be built is the award creation system - eventually we want all members to be able to make awards. It has yet to be decided how exactly this will work.

Should we have mods approve or deny awards before they can be awarded? Should there be limits on how often they can be given? etc etc. We never really elaborated on this, as far as I can remember.

Also, this is being moved to All of All to get more attention. Since the other 3.0 threads were there, why not this one too?

[Dragonium]

I like how this looks first, and I'm glad that the awards system is turning out the way I hoped it would.

In response to your questions, in my opinion:

 - Any member can make awards, but I think there should be a limit to say you have to have been a member for a certain time. Otherwise we'd have tons of people signing up and making a load of junk awards, or people making new accounts just to give awards.

 - Mods should approve awards that are submitted to them. Otherwise we get people giving each other awards like "omg u r teh gayz" award. Or "FAGGIT" award. Or something.

 - My opinion on a time limit is one award, per member, per day or week. Depends which one works out better. Ideally people would only give each other awards after a contest or special event, instead of just being cocks and sending them to each other for no good reason, ie, "award for posting in my threadz". Praps a week would work better. I dunno.

 - Everyone making an award has to submit an image for it. And not something like a badly-drawn stick figure or something; nobody wants crappy drawings cluttering up their pages. Sorry to say.

 - In my opinion the image size should be smaller. Like, 50x50 or 60x60 size. This is just personal preference. The only real reason I can see is that if someone gets a lot of awards then large images would somewhat clutter the page.

So yeah. Just my input. Keep up the good work.