Philotic Web

This is mainly a placeholder for now until we get an actual database to go with it, but feel free to start gathering information and deciding how you want it to be organized.

Also, if anyone can think of some clever Ender related names for these boards, I'll update them.

I guess the cat's out the bag on my recent promotion. >.>

I almost had a heart attack. Apparently I just click things by sheer force of habit. I was like, WHERE THE HECK IS MILAGRE?! No worries; I'm oriented now. Carry on.

Uh...so, I checked Pweb before I went on Circ at 4 and checked now, when I got home, and you made it not-the-same. I hope I have a good screen capture (I'm sure I do), otherwise, I'll make you hide this for me later. I guess I better get a screen capture of this here soon.

Let's see, new site should have:

Books: list of, maybe short blurbs on, covers of
Movie news: this will have hardly anything at all, I suspect
Pop Culture/Fan Works: comics, art, music stuff, etc. There's a band named after the book, who I was in contact with around April; awesome and friendly, near as I could tell.
Technology: if Steve has stuff that wasn't part of the book dealie that came out

Adam has stuff, if he'd ever respond to inquiries about that, I'd be more able and willing to start throwing stuff this way.

More work, still not anywhere near what I want it to be. I've decided to change the sort of 'exploding squares' rollover link concept in to more of an 'ordered square opening up' concept, sort of like how, the pages are neatly closed upon one another and then they would open up when you click the link. Which kind of leads me in to this idea of making the design look more like a futuristic user interface type of design that might be used at battle school, which I also want to explore. Would like some feedback, as that's the only way I can really make everyone happy with it!

Categories

The Books - Short summaries of all books (official comic books included), along with covers, language translations, release dates, editions, author information, etc.

Pop Culture - Movie information, fan pictures and writings, music, fan comics, etc

Science and Technology - More in depth articles about the science and technology of the Enderverse and how they might be realistically applied in the real world (or whatever).

Encyclopedia - An alphabetically sorted list of articles/pages that have to deal with anything of importantance. Can link to other articles or pages on the website. (Ex: Ansible in the encyclopedia would link to a Science and Technology article about the Ansible.)

The Forum - Links to the forums.

The general idea I'm having right now is just putting together a quick custom content system such that if you log in using the forums, and you are either an admin or a moderator, you can edit things on the main website. Things would be sorted under main categories (The Books, for example), and then people can add unique articles/pages to those categories (Shadow of the Giant would be an article/page in The Books category, for example).

Fairly certain nobody reads this new section thingie!

I actually kind of like this one. Content stuff is just an example!

I like the layout - nice and readable. Maybe the text a little bigger?

Yeah, it's pretty decent. Not too sure about the links not being in a straight line, but, as already noted, I'm about the least-picky person in the world, and can live with anything. That's mostly why I haven't been weighing in, just keeping tabs on stuff.

I'm nobody now, huh?

I have no complaints so far but suggest that the "See Also" links be in alphabetical order and that maybe up top, under page count, a crosslink be added to the other covers (there are like 5 editions now for EG, just for the US). Yes, I know content is just an example. If you really want to be thorough, we can add ISBNs...just not sure we want to get that detailed.

Just to be clear, are all the pages going to look like durp6, but obviously with different content and with the exception of the homepage, that will look like durp4, only with some sort of Welcome message added to it?


Lastly, if the forum is really going to be moved in January, you might want to shift focus back to that for the time being. Throw out the link to your final version, get a vote on yay or nay.

Well, you're invisible, so it's kind of like nobody is there!

Content can be anything and everything, was just put there as an example.

durp6 (should probably have been naming them better... ) would be the only thing seen, just with different content. I'll play around with it more and see what else I can do with it to make it better.

Forum can be moved at the same time as the website (July 1st you said?), so no reason to rush. Unless we're going to. In which case, forum in its current form still is at: http://www.philoticweb.org/forums/

Not too sure about the links not being in a straight line, but, as already noted, I'm about the least-picky person in the world, and can live with anything.

Good call. They're still not in a line, but I think it looks better slightly curved like that. Also, Alea wanted me to show her what the books page might look like itself, so there it is. Ignore that I just copied the Ender books down, it's an unimportant detail. Under the Shadow Saga, I imagine a listing of the short stories and the comic books would also happen. The quote would/could be a rotating list of quotes from all books such that, when you refresh the page, a new quote would appear.

ETA: Here is one with straight navingation links.

I like the slightly-curved ones the best.

Sorry, I just don't have time right now for being any real help, with moving and christmas and moving again and re-starting the phd. Probably by February or so, I should be able to help more. I hope.

Good call. They're still not in a line, but I think it looks better slightly curved like that. Also, Alea wanted me to show her what the books page might look like itself, so there it is. Ignore that I just copied the Ender books down, it's an unimportant detail. Under the Shadow Saga, I imagine a listing of the short stories and the comic books would also happen. The quote would/could be a rotating list of quotes from all books such that, when you refresh the page, a new quote would appear.

I like that a lot better. Yeah, I'm heard!

I like them, keep up the good work.

Curved is definitely better, but do we really have to use those versions of the covers? They're the least attractive ones available!

Those covers (at least the original three) are the original ones, I don't care if they are ugly and don't make any sense. They are the ones that I would want up there.

Those covers (at least the original three) are the original ones, I don't care if they are ugly and don't make any sense. They are the ones that I would want up there.

I concur.

do we really have to use those versions of the covers? They're the least attractive ones available!

Keep in mind, we'll have a gallery for all the covers we can find, so it's not as though the others won't be on the site as well.

If you'd like/are willing, you can start trying to gather some. :)

I'm on it! o7

http://www.philoticweb.org/pweb_beta/

Converting it to HTML, and you can see the rollovers

But... RAGE!!!!!

Jargon to follow...

Before XHTML, I used to just use the height attribute for a table and it would automatically fill 100% of the remaining space of the window. I'm TRYING to conform to XHTML 1.0 standards with this website, but using css and applying a height of 100% to both the body/html tags and the table results in it making the table extend the entire height (100%) of the window, not 100% of the remaining height of the window. I can't figure out how to solve this, and I've been working on it for hours. This makes me want to scream a big FRACK YOU to XHTML, and switch back to HTML 3.2.

why are you using tables.... i hate tables. they make no sense. use divs sooooo much nicer.

why are you using tables.... i hate tables. they make no sense. use divs sooooo much nicer.

+1

I've been working in HTML for so long that I just go for tables automatically. Besides, this doesn't solve my problem anyway.

i bet it does...

Forum can be moved at the same time as the website (July 1st you said?), so no reason to rush.

I thought it was January?

I suggested (off-board) that it might be cool to relaunch the website portion on July 1st, 11 years to the day the original site was launched and so that it had time to be properly worked on and not rushed. I don't know how that turned into the forum move waiting until then, too.

i bet it does...

Doesn't. The issue is with CSS, not with tables. In fact, going back to HTML 3.2 solves the problem entirely, because while the height attribute of an html table is non-standardized, browsers knew what to do with it (which is, fill the remaining height of the window).

Probably doesn't matter anyways... we'll see.

I thought it was January?

Can be still. It doesn't matter. I just know that if we're going to move, we need to make it clear to everyone and set a date. We'll then have to disable the forums on that date telling people to go to the new forums.

Your "table exceeding the width of the body" problem could definitely be due to padding anywhere in those elements. Padding doesn't fill up the set space, it creates more space.

If you've already thought of that, or knew that, good show; it's something I always forget at the most frustrating of times.

Er, "table exceeding the width of the body" problem?

The exact problem is this:

You see the blue and grey content box? I want it to extend downward to the bottom of the page. In HTML 3.2, I could just set the height attribute of the HTML table to "100%", and it would do this for me.

However, setting the height to 100% in a unique CSS id block and applying it to the table (as well as 100% height to the HTML and BODY tags using css) will result in it extending to, quite literally, 100% of the entire page. This results in the table extending past the bottom of the page because it literally uses 100% of the TOTAL viewport height, not 100% of the REMAINING viewport height. This is a very common, and annoying problem from what I've read.

The solutions to this are to basically resort to javascript to automatically calculate the remaining height for me (ugh), some sort of namespace hack that keeps the page xhtml 1.0 compliant while also placing browsers in to "quirks" mode that makes them use html 3.2 and then I can use the height attribute again, or to just switch completely back over to html 3.2 and forget being xhtml 1.0 compliant.

I don't NEED to do this, it'll just look kind of strange if the entire area isn't filled with content to push it to and past the bottom of the page. It is an annoying issue that I had not expected.

In any case, I'll play around with it more tomorrow.

I see. What I've used in the past for things like that is something like this: http://ryanfait.com/resources/footer-st ... m-of-page/. You need the push element to stick to the bottom, and it automatically makes your div fill out the rest. Of course, if you've tried that, I'm of no use to you.

I'll reread everything you've written tomorrow, when I'm not airplane-logged, as I'm clearly having problems even telling "height" from "width".

DIVs. Tables suck. Hard.

I have three main issues with the design:

1) It's a tall header. It's close to half the screen on a lower resolution screen (netbooks, old compies).

2) Your primary space fills to the width of the page, which is not fun for reading text on a large monitor.

3) Tables suck. I believe I may have already mentioned this.

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Have we come to a conclusion as to what's running this on the backend? WordPress/Wiki/Drupal are all viable options that can be skinned to look like whatever we want them to look like. I think the question boils down to who will be doing the maintaining and what are they most comfortable with.

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ETA: I took your mockup apart and started putting it back together with DIVs, a shorter header, a separate CSS file and brighter colors. Emphasis on started. The nav isn't nicely lined up yet, and the CSS probably doesn't all work outside of Chrome. The gist of my suggestions is there, however.

Also, as you didn't add in the footer image to your mockup, I didn't have a copy to play with in my version.

At 200px, it's still a tall header. About half again as tall as the header on this site.

What if we did something more "web 2.0" like this? Still needs a lot of work, obviously, but you get the idea.

*chirp chirp*

Cleaned up a little bit more?

Is there meant to be content in those grey boxes, or are they just very large buttons? Either way, they're too wide--I'd say drop at least 30px off--and if they're just buttons they seem a bit redundant and huge.

With this design, I'd suggest removing the sidebar when the forum is opened, as that turns into a lot of empty space when scrolling through long posts.

And personally, I don't know that I care for the two distinct background elements. The bottom piece could just as easily be faded to the same deep blue the top fades to and so look to be one, extendable piece.