Site Re-Design Coming

[Joe]

Just posted something for pH to give some input on as far as new article posting goes. I had to give up on some higher end things I wanted to do for now, just because time is becoming tight again, adn I want to get this damn thing posted.

[pHaestus]

Joe could we have a Procooling "free stuff" forum where all the spammers can post their crap? And then when they create a post in that forum it autobans them? Just a thought

[Joe]

hehe nice, Sure I can make a "free shit here" forum

[Joe]

I got a big part of the new system done tonight. Its the system to bring in the old site into the new one so the site becomes 100% database driven (well the legacy data is just flat data being pulled from a DB, but it still not in a flat file )

takes some work by me but with this working in a week or so I can start looking at getting the site up in some capacity. Just gotta keep work off my back for a bit here..

[jaydee]

Bump for update?

[Joe]

I havent been able to put much work into the site since the last update. all last week I was working lots of overtime. This week looks better but I cant tell for sure how much time I will have free.

[jaydee]

I hear ya. I been working 10hr days (+ 2hrs of driving) and have the 8yo daughter on the weekends. Seriously limits my hobby time.

[Joe]

Well today I got some time to work on all this. And I have gotten this done:

Gone through all the HTML pages for the entire legacy site, stripped all header info, and cleaned it up to just be HTML code for the body of the articles/reviews.

I have the legacy site importer script working so that I tell it what files went to which articles, who wrote it, when, and categorize it. Then it imports the HTML files into the DB, and outputs a file named the same as the orginals but empty with only a PHP HEADER refresh to forward people going to the old HTML files to the DB generated version.

Really those are the main things I needed to get written and tested to let me get all the old site data into teh new site. Now it will take me a few nights of work to import all the old site data into the DB. Once that is done I will work on the article display portion.

Once I can get the article display function to work as expected with the Legacy articles, then I can get the site posted, and work on the new article posting action after that.

This whole deal is stupid complex for what I was expecting it to be... but atleast its a long term solution. It just sucks having to semi manually get 600 pages of HTML code into a DB! And getting 6 year old HTML formatted to a way that it will work with a new database driven app.

[Joe]

just another small update,

I got the first article to show up in the article display side. very crude static code behind it, but it was a proof of concept that the importing HTML will be functional, and it seems its all good. There are some tweaks I need to take care of, but so far it looks like its all just cleaning up and making the system work good!

The back end on this thing is UGLY nasty shitty code, but I am skipping most error checking steps because I am the only one who is going to input this stuff (legacy stuff) and its not worth the time to write elegant verification scripts if it isnt going to be used.

the front end though will take some time to get all the error checking in place and make sure its solid enough for prime time

[Joe]

attached is a pic of the old DHII article being pulled from the DB.

Because the old site is all static width everything i takes up a good bit of room that I could do without... I may turn off the random pic and voting items when people look at articles/reviews to save the page width... as you can tell its pretty happy eating up a full 1280x1024 in that pic.

Oh and because the old site uses static sizing for tables and such, that pic is off center. it was basing its "middle" on something thats a different size now.

Also there will be an info box at the top of the articles giving more data on the article itself and some control items to logged in users. It will also give a note about which articles are legacy imports and that some links in them may not work or colors may not be very visible in some parts.

[Joe]

Stuff's moving at a snails pace. No I am not into the next great MMORPG (Since I do believe those games blow) I just have other hobbies and some long hours at work I am doing.

pretty much I feel no real rush on this, I am doing it when I have spare time. I pay for the site 100% out of my pocket so I have no responsibility to sponsors, other staff, or vendors(since no sponsors actually pay for anything on the site).

Naturally the lack of site updating, lack of staff activity and new content will cause the forums to dip down quite a bit. Which has happened expectedly. Sorry for that, but really the site update is a one person show and I dont feel much pressure to put more work than I am already putting into this.

On the flip side about half of the articles are imported into the new system. I spend 3 nights doing that last week. It's a bitch of a task.

[Joe]

I got some work done on the site in the last day, and then made a list of all the things I need to get done before posting the site. it came down to like 7 things I need to complete still, some are large, some are small and just tedious. But atleast I have a list now of what to work on when I get free time.

[Joe]

ahh just fixed a bastard of a problem that has been killing the site re-design. it was slow as hell on initial queries- up to 15 seconds waiting on the DB to return a random value.

Turns out in MySQL using "ORDER BY RAND()" is very evil on large row length tables. I was running it on a table with 10,000 rows and it would just ass pound the system.

By offloading that logic to PHP and having it do the random picking of items, the total query takes .1 sec to run down from 15 seconds

[Joe]

I have imposed a deadline of November 28th to have the new site up and running in some form.

I have vacation from today through then so I shouldnt have much of an issue hammering that out.

[jaydee]

This year or next? j/k

Looking forward to it.

[pHaestus]

Everyone buys Joe a beer if he has the new site fully up by Nov 28, 2005?

It's a celebration, bitches!

[bigben2k]

Originally Posted by pHaestus

Everyone buys Joe a beer if he has the new site fully up by Nov 28, 2005?

It's a celebration, bitches!

I'm in for that!

[Joe]

thats deffinitely motivation!!

[BillA]

I'll join Ben, when you gonna be down in the sweat zone ?

[Joe]

I will be in Jamaica this coming weekend, does that count?

[Joe]

if you want to really help, one of you guys will sell the PC I just listed in the FS/FT forum!

I gotta sell that thing.... I love the lil box but money issues means its gotta go.

[Joe]

I am making some serious progress in the new site. Most of it has to do with making it look better, but I just got all the items I needed finished to start importing all the old site data into it. (which is a horridly manual process).

I wanted to get everything done that I can before I leave for vacation.

Lots of work I had to do has to do with the back end to get the articles input'd the right way, thats been pretty much taken care of now, so now I can start importing data, and once that is done go back to cleaning up the articles/reviews/front page and how those pages display the legacy/new data.

Theres also a few announcements that will come out right around when the new site is launched... so stay tuned.

Heres a pic of the categories that are in the system:

[Joe]

oh and one feature that wont be on the site right away is the Search feature... I mean the ****ers busted now... so no big loss

[Joe]

Ok now there are some damn funny moments when I am working on the new site.... this was one that I just started laughing at.

The random picture display from the forum can be quite entertaining at times.

[Joe]

I am back from vacation and am hammering hard core on getting all the legacy site data loaded into the new site. I am planning to have it all there by the end of tomorrow (it takes a shitty long time to do it, about 15+ minutes per article/review.)

But its all going very smooth now and I have all the bugs worked out. Once thats done I can focus on the final cleaning and setup of some pages on the site.

I should be good to go getting this up by the 28th.

The plan is on the 28th the site will go down for a short while, while I cut over the new site, and test everything.