guffaw
Quote from gia:
How many lines of code does this have? I dont feel many, but maybe I'm wrong, if you post the database design maybe people can add whatever you are missing, unless that's not your goal.
I'm not sure what to do about posting the source and db dump at the moment. One thing that is definitely the case is that I don't want to do all the work on this myself, so it would be nice to assemble a development team to work on it. However, I don't know if it's a good idea just to go ahead and make everything public; there are potential issues with doing that, and you can't put the proverbial cat back into the bag once it's done. I'm wondering what the other admins (particularly Radix) have to say about this.
As for code size, it's a few more than 5,000 lines at the moment. Some of the page layout code is quite complex, and of course it contains a BBcode parser implementation. There is an awful lot of commented out stuff in the source, though, so the real figure might be closer to 4,500. It certainly feels like there should be more than that, but I suppose a lot of stuff was repeatedly revised in a short period of time.
Quote from gia:
U+2934 ⤴ e2 a4 b4 ARROW POINTING RIGHTWARDS THEN CURVING UPWARDS
U+261B ☛ e2 98 9b BLACK RIGHT POINTING INDEX
U+261E ☞ e2 98 9e WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX
U+279A ➚ e2 9e 9a HEAVY NORTH EAST ARROW
U+2924 ⤤ e2 a4 a4 NORTH EAST ARROW WITH HOOK
U+261B ☛ e2 98 9b BLACK RIGHT POINTING INDEX
U+261E ☞ e2 98 9e WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX
U+279A ➚ e2 9e 9a HEAVY NORTH EAST ARROW
U+2924 ⤤ e2 a4 a4 NORTH EAST ARROW WITH HOOK
They have promise as pointers, although the fingers are a bit corny.
Quote from gia:
U+2750 ❐ e2 9d 90 UPPER RIGHT DROP-SHADOWED WHITE SQUARE
U+2752 ❒ e2 9d 92 UPPER RIGHT SHADOWED WHITE SQUARE
U+2752 ❒ e2 9d 92 UPPER RIGHT SHADOWED WHITE SQUARE
I quite like those too; they convey something of the idea of linking to a video.
Quote from Arkarian:
It works better than I expected, although I only tried it in one browser. The playlist kind of gets in the way, though ... I definitely think I need to avoid displaying the playlist if there is only one video part. Not sure quite what to do about Flash in general though. It seems that Flash might be about to be made obsolete by the new <video> tag, which would eliminate the requirement to build up a separate XML playlist. This might be the way to go given that this project is a medium term rather than short term thing -- does anyone have any coding experience with <video> yet? It seems dumb to pour effort into getting the JW player to behave itself if it's about to be made obsolete. That's happened on this project several times already.
Quote from Manocheese:
Would it be possible to generate certain frequently used pages in advance? What I mean is that pages like the main game list and the runner list will be used fairly frequently, so instead of generating them each time a user asks for them, just generate them every time the site is updated. Then, when people request those pages, give them the pre-generated pages.
Yes, it's possible; this is in fact similar to how Enhasa's proposal would work (regenerate a static set of changed pages at update time). Even so, I think the problem with too much data being sent to the client applies to this sort of scheme as well, it's just less of a problem because providing the page to the browser requires less resources if it's just sending the thing over without having to build it up first. So I think pagination, or at least support for it, would eventually become desirable even under Radix's static HTML system.
The performance of various parts of the system under various conditions (specifically, the time taken for certain routines to execute) is being measured and stored in a database table as people test sda2p. On the whole, it seems to be providing more than adequate performance in the vast majority of cases, which is encouraging.
But I am hearing loud and clear the message that the current setup makes finding things difficult, so I will be looking at ways to improve this, and one of those ways will probably be an option to turn pagination off.
I'll wait a bit longer to give people more opportunity to express any opinions or ideas they may have, then I will start thinking about what the next step with this project might be.