Tag Archives: template

tsn.7 Style in progress

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I’ve started work on the tsn.7 style and theme for the new forums, and I must say, it’s lookin’ pretty sweet. Once I get a working set going, I’ll redo the splash page to give a bit of a preview and then load it up to the forum index.

Let’s just say it’s very…shiny.

I’m still using the same blues, and there is no new logo this time (although there were attempts at creating a new one). But it combines the look and feel of tsnV with the 2 years of design experience I’ve gained since then.

No screen shots yet; I don’t have it set up with any forum information yet to show what it would look like. But if you would like to join the testers that will be using the tsn.7 theme while it gets built, then you can change it in your User Control Panel, under Board Preferences.

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twitter & tsn.7

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With a new My Spot page comes new possibilities. This time around, I’m going to make a concerted effort to actually write in new code and attach a new database backend that pulls from the phpbb database and the users’ accounts on the-spot.net.With this new plan, there will be increased ability to add features and remove features on the user-level…that is to say, you can choose what you want to see on the page.

There will also be some integration to popular social sites right on the My Spot page, like twitter and flickr – community based sites with an API that doesn’t require you to visit their site in order to view content.

Last night, I worked with the twitter.com API and with the RSS reader that I’ve hacked up in PHP, and turned out the twitter stream for the-spot.net’s twitter friends. That will go on the front page of the My Spot page so that everyone on tsn can know what all the other tsn members are twittering about.

The next thing I’m going to be doing with that is working on a way to allow the users to update their twitter status directly from tsn. That’s going to take a bit more work than displaying the feed, but it will be a good challenge.

On the previous version of the site, there was a flickr flash app that showed the new photos from the tsn flickr group. That will be coming back as well.

I’m also going to try to make the User Control Panel more accessible and integrate the Buddy List into the My Spot page so you can see when your favorite posters are online (since the information box at the bottom displays the last X minutes, and not “Currently” online).

I’m still trying to gather new ideas from everyone about what they’d like to see on the page…and I hope to make it modular like that previous My Spot page was so they can just be plugged in to the template based on information in the new database determining whether or not they wish to see that.

if you have any ideas – leave comments, or message me directly.

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Update: tsnX.3 @ 43%

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We’re now at 43% complete with the code implementations. Be sure to check the progress page. I’m trying to get things done more quickly, because I believe that I’m about to come into a job soon. I had two interviews with job placement firms, and one is going to be placing me in a low-level tech job, if they have openings. The other is going to help me get my IT cert’s if I can come up with the money some how. So my time for this personal technology is going to be divided among corporate technology.

We’re shooting for a end-of-may release for tsnX…and I really hope that I can do that. Designing the new site is going to take time too, and there are about 10 days till the end of the month, and about 5 days of coding left (assuming that every code implementation goes as planned) and then 5 days left for modifying the template of the site to look like tsnX.

I hope to make it on time, but as version releases in the past of indicated, I rarely am able to get a site out on schedule, because of difficulties and other things that intrude on my time. But it’s coming. Yesterday it was 26%, today, 43%.

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Update: tsnX – Good News/Bad News

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Good News: I’m going to be making progress starting tomorrow with the site coding and design.
Bad News: I’m going to be making progress by starting over with the whole thing.

The reason: I cannot figure out where the code errors are, and the updates that I did to the forums to bring it up-to-date with the latest code were done in, what I thought was a sufficient way, but what appears to have been possibly faulty. I updated the code slowly, and effectively, but either due to errors in the code changes (which is likely, because I found them as I looked at the instructions to change) or lack of sleep while coding (which is not AS likely, but possible) there was something, somewhere in the code that caused it to not work properly.

The good thing about this, is that there is already a phpbb 2.0.20 forum that comes with this Category Hierarchy pre-installed, so I don’t have to go through it again. The down side is that I have to redo the small mods that I did already. About half of them can be run through the easy mod…and the other half will have to be done by hand – but this time, I have the time to do them by hand, where as I was doing them piecemill during lunch, class, and after work before.

Hopefully I can get this thing back in operation the right way and soon, but I don’t think that it’s going to happen in 2 days like originally planned. Even at the present situation, I cannot get the site out by the 15th of May.

And while some of you might be getting frustrated with no tsn…I assure you that there is no one more frustrated with this situation than myself, having to scrap a perfectly working site and design by force of the server admins.

So for now, I sleep…because tomorrow, I start over…knowing what I know now, and what I don’t need to install, and what it will take to actually install some of the other things that I want.

When I get the site code done, I’ll start on the design of the template, and then I’ll start on the code of the My Spot page, and then I’ll create the design of it. After that – I start work on the-blot.net, and FINALLY get that going. That’s the mini game-plan…and I want a tsnX well before the LAN Party…but recreating a site as large as tsn is not an easy task. It took 3 weeks to create tsnIII…and one year to create tsnV…to get tsnX done in 2-3 weeks will be nothing short of amazing.

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Update: tsnX(Lesser Mods) – Podcast button @ 100%, Other Contact Info

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I spent a good deal of time tuesday in class working on the Podcast icon in the profiles and posts, and come to find out after I finish the mod instructions, that it doesn’t work because of the profile control panel, and the way things are modularized with the category hierarchy.

Soooo I spent another great deal of time WRITING my OWN code to implement this feature, and to my amazement, the code actually worked, on the first try. It’s not every day, or even every year that my code will do what it’s supposed to on the first try – especially without me knowing anything about the context in which I’m writing it. However, now that I know how to do it, I’ll be doing the same thing for the Gtalk info, and Skype info as well. And I might create a couple more “website” fields for people with multiple websites.

I spent yesterday working on the private messaging setup, and found that the mistakes were because of a “switch_standalone” tag that was being put around certain parts…such that it was allowing only the posting page for the forums to access the code required to make the page work, and not for the private messages….but that both pages required the same template. So I went back and took out the standalone tags that were around things needed in both pages (I had originally went in and created a “switch_privmsg” tag to work around it, but that would have been too involved) and left it around one part that is required on the forum posting page, but not in private messages.

Anyway, enough about the technical stuff (although this is the tech-source for the-spot.net), the point is that it works now.

Aside from getting around the use of caches, all the bugs that I had reported are fixed. I still need beta testes to go in and break things, and report the bugs. The people that are in the forums are too scared to break things…and that’s frustrating, because when I release the site, I don’t want a repeat of tsnV where we lose people the first week because of errors. GO BREAK IT!!! PLEASE!!!

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