Unexciting Sumea Website Updates

Latest works by souri
  • Rewriting old player movement code

    In my first and previous post in this game dev log entry, I had written that I wanted to do a game which was a collection of simple retro games. Unity released a new major release (2019.3) while I was putting the initial project together, and I…

  • Working on a small game to showcase the Devlog

    Well, I'm making a game . I'm spending the next few weeks on making a small game to showcase the gamedev log feature on tsumea where any member can create a game entry and other members can post journal posts with art, music or just development…

  • Just a test 2

    Just a test #2. Still working on the new section.

  • A long, long time ago, I was a pixel artist

    So, I got a Commodore 64 when I was in the 4th grade. It came bundled with a Rolf Harris picture building program on casette tape which never loaded properly but from what I could tell by its box cover, you could build pictures from a selection…

  • A time for change

    Yes, the site looks very different and I've had to prematurely switch to this new theme that I'm working on for a few reasons, the main one is that changing certain aspects of the site to fit the new theme will affect how the old one looks for…

  • Some of my olddddd work

    (this is just a test, please ignore this entry)

    Here is some of my old work.. the first pic is of a 3d model of a human head I was working on about 2 years ago in 3dsmax, using nurbs. If I had to do it again, I wouldn't model a head with…

I currently work for

Submitted by souri on
Forum
tsumea

Yes, in case you didn't notice, the front page is a bit more colourful! I always had a lurking suspicion that the blue colour was a bit dull. Will be changing the rest of the website to match the main page. I've also ran the main page through the validator at w3.org and I've put down the number of errors from over 150 to just 25 now.. most of it was trivial stuff like not adding alt tags to web graphics, even though it's not linking to anything.

Posting job advertisments in forum is taking 5 or more seconds each for me. I'm guessing it's due to so many people subscribing to that section. The forum has to immediately email the info to all those subscribers.. >.<

Submitted by Kane on Fri, 10/09/04 - 6:36 PMPermalink

yes, I must say...Sumea is looking particularly smashing at the moment...well done old chap... [:D]

Submitted by Makk on Sat, 11/09/04 - 1:39 AMPermalink

Yeah, I noticed as well. Looks cool, I like the black lettering with the blue outlines

Submitted by souri on Sun, 19/09/04 - 4:00 PMPermalink

Ok, some more news for those who find Sumea website development updates remotely interesting...

That other unamed project is on hold, and I'm working on converting all the web pages here on Sumea fully into CSS. I actually have most of my previous website development plans [url="http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2021"]mentioned here[/url] completed, so I'll be embarking on the next project..

At the moment, the site is a html/css hybrid, with CSS only handling simple things like font types, colours, and links. There are tonnes of table data, tables within tables, and more and tags than you can shake a stick at. This was the proper way of doing pages before CSS came about. Now that CSS is getting more support and compliance from web browsers, it's a good time to ditch the old way of doing web pages and adopt the new streamlined one.

The new way is to seperate out the content and use an external style sheets for layout, font, colour, graphics info etc. It'll mean a heck of a lot less table tags, and all the pages will be really raw with mostly content (text). All the layout/display info is in the style sheet, and since they get cached, there's a lot less to retrieve when you're visiting a new page. So yeh, pages will load much faster! [8D]

The fun thing with external style sheets is that you can have as many as you like, and if you build the pages so, you can make it so visitors could choose different 'skins' on how your site looks. Heck, if I ever feel the urge to redesign the site, I don't have to even touch the pages!

I've got a cable modem and even I get a bit impatient watching each graphic load, so I'll be designing an extremely simple but elegant dialup-modem-friendly skin for Sumea - so pages will be even more faster! Making a new dialup-modem friendly skin was the main motivator for embarking on this project. I don't know how you dialup mode users manage [?].

I'm half way through doing the main page at the moment (I'm learning and refining as I go), and I'm amazed how much less scripting is required... however, Mozilla/Firefox and IE have different ideas on many things like space and margin sizes, and certain things work fine on one browser and flat out break on the other, so it's been a headache trying to make it work fine on both. Haven't tried testing it on Opera, but I guarentee there's going to be problems there too (although only 1% of you are using it on this site).

Submitted by matias on Sun, 19/09/04 - 10:00 PMPermalink

Haha, very nice of you Souri, including all the browsers and stuff! One reason I will never be a designer is when I made my little sites I made sure it worked on IE and bugger the rest of the guys out there!! haha, but I guess thats why your a webmaster dude, and I'm clearly not!! I also just upgraded to win XP and thought the site was loading a helluvalot fast and thought wooohee go winxp! but now I see it was you tireless efforts to help poor modem users such as myself! Thank you!

Submitted by souri on Tue, 21/09/04 - 12:28 PMPermalink

I've been a dialup modem user for over a decade (I got my first 2400bps modem in 1992 which cost me $400!!), so I haven't forgotten about ya's [;)].

Submitted by souri on Thu, 23/09/04 - 10:01 PMPermalink

http://www.sumea.com.au/1sumea.html

I've tested it on IE6 and FireFox 1 beta release and it works fine (not mentioning the hours and hours of head scratching, and getting things working right on both browsers). I'm sure this is gonna break on Opera, Konquerer, Safari, IE <5.5 including Mac, Netscape <4 etc..

(Ok, a lot of the positioning is messed up slightly in Opera, but it's still usable. Looking at my logs, 0.1% of the visitors here use that browser, so it's no big deal)..

Let me know if any of you find something wrong... post screenies etc

(I know the page doesn't look exciting, but you have to check out the page source to see how leaner and nicer it is)

Submitted by souri on Tue, 27/09/05 - 11:52 AMPermalink

Just some closure on this topic. I've finally figured out why the site looked like ass on Opera. Basically, you have to set body{margin:0;padding:0;} in CSS. IE and Firefox did that as default, but it seems Opera just gives you padding anyway if you don't set it to anything. [?]

Apart from Opera still not being able to do transparent iFrame backgrounds, the site looks the same in IE, Firefox, and Opera. Hopefully that means it'll be fine on other browsers too.

Submitted by Kizza on Thu, 29/09/05 - 9:19 AMPermalink

Excellent work Souri! I've found that more often than not Firefox will display my designs perfect, IE will be off by 1-5 pixels. Which is a shame. I've never tested in Opera so I hope nothing I make crashes and burns with it, haha. Hurray for cross-browser Sumea!

Submitted by souri on Sun, 06/11/05 - 5:59 AMPermalink

I'll be doing some big updates this weekend, so please don't add any journal entries since they'll be lost when I finish.

Submitted by souri on Sat, 12/11/05 - 4:48 AMPermalink

Ok, I'll be doing some small fixes and improvements here and there, and then I'll be working on Sumea Newstation. I say what I've got planned here, but it's gonna be awesome [:)]

Posted by souri on
Forum
tsumea

Yes, in case you didn't notice, the front page is a bit more colourful! I always had a lurking suspicion that the blue colour was a bit dull. Will be changing the rest of the website to match the main page. I've also ran the main page through the validator at w3.org and I've put down the number of errors from over 150 to just 25 now.. most of it was trivial stuff like not adding alt tags to web graphics, even though it's not linking to anything.

Posting job advertisments in forum is taking 5 or more seconds each for me. I'm guessing it's due to so many people subscribing to that section. The forum has to immediately email the info to all those subscribers.. >.<

Submitted by Kane on Fri, 10/09/04 - 6:36 PMPermalink

yes, I must say...Sumea is looking particularly smashing at the moment...well done old chap... [:D]

Submitted by Makk on Sat, 11/09/04 - 1:39 AMPermalink

Yeah, I noticed as well. Looks cool, I like the black lettering with the blue outlines

Submitted by souri on Sun, 19/09/04 - 4:00 PMPermalink

Ok, some more news for those who find Sumea website development updates remotely interesting...

That other unamed project is on hold, and I'm working on converting all the web pages here on Sumea fully into CSS. I actually have most of my previous website development plans [url="http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2021"]mentioned here[/url] completed, so I'll be embarking on the next project..

At the moment, the site is a html/css hybrid, with CSS only handling simple things like font types, colours, and links. There are tonnes of table data, tables within tables, and more and tags than you can shake a stick at. This was the proper way of doing pages before CSS came about. Now that CSS is getting more support and compliance from web browsers, it's a good time to ditch the old way of doing web pages and adopt the new streamlined one.

The new way is to seperate out the content and use an external style sheets for layout, font, colour, graphics info etc. It'll mean a heck of a lot less table tags, and all the pages will be really raw with mostly content (text). All the layout/display info is in the style sheet, and since they get cached, there's a lot less to retrieve when you're visiting a new page. So yeh, pages will load much faster! [8D]

The fun thing with external style sheets is that you can have as many as you like, and if you build the pages so, you can make it so visitors could choose different 'skins' on how your site looks. Heck, if I ever feel the urge to redesign the site, I don't have to even touch the pages!

I've got a cable modem and even I get a bit impatient watching each graphic load, so I'll be designing an extremely simple but elegant dialup-modem-friendly skin for Sumea - so pages will be even more faster! Making a new dialup-modem friendly skin was the main motivator for embarking on this project. I don't know how you dialup mode users manage [?].

I'm half way through doing the main page at the moment (I'm learning and refining as I go), and I'm amazed how much less scripting is required... however, Mozilla/Firefox and IE have different ideas on many things like space and margin sizes, and certain things work fine on one browser and flat out break on the other, so it's been a headache trying to make it work fine on both. Haven't tried testing it on Opera, but I guarentee there's going to be problems there too (although only 1% of you are using it on this site).

Submitted by matias on Sun, 19/09/04 - 10:00 PMPermalink

Haha, very nice of you Souri, including all the browsers and stuff! One reason I will never be a designer is when I made my little sites I made sure it worked on IE and bugger the rest of the guys out there!! haha, but I guess thats why your a webmaster dude, and I'm clearly not!! I also just upgraded to win XP and thought the site was loading a helluvalot fast and thought wooohee go winxp! but now I see it was you tireless efforts to help poor modem users such as myself! Thank you!

Submitted by souri on Tue, 21/09/04 - 12:28 PMPermalink

I've been a dialup modem user for over a decade (I got my first 2400bps modem in 1992 which cost me $400!!), so I haven't forgotten about ya's [;)].

Submitted by souri on Thu, 23/09/04 - 10:01 PMPermalink

http://www.sumea.com.au/1sumea.html

I've tested it on IE6 and FireFox 1 beta release and it works fine (not mentioning the hours and hours of head scratching, and getting things working right on both browsers). I'm sure this is gonna break on Opera, Konquerer, Safari, IE <5.5 including Mac, Netscape <4 etc..

(Ok, a lot of the positioning is messed up slightly in Opera, but it's still usable. Looking at my logs, 0.1% of the visitors here use that browser, so it's no big deal)..

Let me know if any of you find something wrong... post screenies etc

(I know the page doesn't look exciting, but you have to check out the page source to see how leaner and nicer it is)

Submitted by souri on Tue, 27/09/05 - 11:52 AMPermalink

Just some closure on this topic. I've finally figured out why the site looked like ass on Opera. Basically, you have to set body{margin:0;padding:0;} in CSS. IE and Firefox did that as default, but it seems Opera just gives you padding anyway if you don't set it to anything. [?]

Apart from Opera still not being able to do transparent iFrame backgrounds, the site looks the same in IE, Firefox, and Opera. Hopefully that means it'll be fine on other browsers too.

Submitted by Kizza on Thu, 29/09/05 - 9:19 AMPermalink

Excellent work Souri! I've found that more often than not Firefox will display my designs perfect, IE will be off by 1-5 pixels. Which is a shame. I've never tested in Opera so I hope nothing I make crashes and burns with it, haha. Hurray for cross-browser Sumea!

Submitted by souri on Sun, 06/11/05 - 5:59 AMPermalink

I'll be doing some big updates this weekend, so please don't add any journal entries since they'll be lost when I finish.

Submitted by souri on Sat, 12/11/05 - 4:48 AMPermalink

Ok, I'll be doing some small fixes and improvements here and there, and then I'll be working on Sumea Newstation. I say what I've got planned here, but it's gonna be awesome [:)]