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| And we're live |
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Sunday, January 25 2004 @ 10:05 AM CST By David L. Farquhar
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I'm pleased to unveil The Silicon Underground, Version 5.0. I'd still like to do some design work and a little more tweaking here and there, but now that we've reached the point where what we have now is better than anything we've had before, it's time to throw the switch.
Design. The default layout is CSS-based. Some people don't like CSS, because Internet Explorer won't resize text on pages that use CSS. You can pick "clean," a layout that doesn't use CSS, from the menu at the top left. It's about double the size of the CSS-based layout but will render well in browsers that have issues with CSS.
Click one link, and the site stores your preference.
Over time, I will probably introduce new templates. The two I have now are pretty generic; I literally dropped my old logo into existing templates and made just one or two other changes.
Filtering. Maybe you just come here for the computer-related entries and couldn't care less about what I write about toy trains. Or vice-versa. You can selectively indicate which story categories you want to ignore, and the site will remember your preference.
Search. The search functions on the previous software I was using (b2) were nice at first, but once I had several hundred entries in the site, it started getting less and less useful. This search engine allows you to limit your searches within a topic and to perform three types of search: exact phrase, all words, and any words.
Speed. While the uplink speed of my DSL line is still a limiting factor, now it's the biggest limiting factor. The database search now accounts for about 10% of the time you spend waiting for the page. Previously it was more than half.
I hope you enjoy it.
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| [ Views: 3880 ] |
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| Authored by: DaveF on Sunday, January 25 2004 @ 10:40 AM CST |
| As I have time, I will try to make a style that uses relative sizes, rather than fixed sizes, in order to accomodate Internet Explorer's text handling. [ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: Gatermann on Sunday, January 25 2004 @ 12:31 PM CST |
The site feels alot better.
The speed is such a vast improvment alone, it'd make the switch worth it, even before the spam problem cropped up.
[ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: csebold on Sunday, January 25 2004 @ 05:36 PM CST |
Speaking of bandwidth, have you thought about using
mod_gzip? Because it appears that you aren't at the moment:
test for mod_gzip
Turning on mod_gzip with the defaults and adding:
mod_gzip_item_include file .php$
...might be all it takes, and that would definitely be easier on
your DSL (but maybe harder on your CPU, I don't know what your
load is like). [ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: Gary_Berg on Monday, January 26 2004 @ 09:53 AM CST |
| I'd comment that I dislike having to follow the link to read the entire post. I'd much rather only have to do this when you write a really big post. I'd rather see fewer posts/page but more of them... [ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: jhendrickson on Monday, January 26 2004 @ 01:38 PM CST |
| I don't like the fact that when you click on a story you lose the right side panel. You have to return to the main page to jump to another story, or recent comment. Otherwise, I like the new site. [ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: Don Armstrong on Monday, January 26 2004 @ 04:30 PM CST |
It would be nice if the "View printable version" displayed the comments as well.
It would also be nice if the default for user preferences displayed everything, rather than hiding things. The default is "threaded", and that hides lower levels of response to something. If the default was "indented", then people could see and make sense of everything without having to figure out what was missing, why, and how to fix it.[ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: DanB on Monday, January 26 2004 @ 05:49 PM CST |
Looking good!
...and nested comments! Cool![ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: Mary on Wednesday, January 28 2004 @ 02:59 PM CST |
| I like the site. And I may be the only one, but I miss the photos you had at the top of your page. Ah well, memories... [ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: beerdrinkingguy on Wednesday, January 28 2004 @ 04:03 PM CST |
| I really like the site and the new feel for it. Just wondering if there is a way of cleaning up the "Untrustworthy Vendor" It shows that there are over 812 posts and there are a lot of posts that came over and posted 4 copies of the post [ Reply to This ]
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