| Author |
Changes to our site are coming soon.
|
|
| Webmaster 2001-05-05, 12:28 pm |
| Now I want to tell you all that for the past month I've been working on the new design of the site. As you may have noticed this site has not been changed in one year.
The new design is totally different and at the same time all the navigation links will be kept in the same places so that you will not struggle to find your way around the site.
The look of the forum will also change alot while all the links will remain in the same spots.
The registration process will be simplified alot. Now we'll only ask people to fill out the minimum amount of information, and then they will be able to come back and edit their profile to add alot more info like Yahoo pager, AIM hobbies, etc..
One more major change (if not the most important) is that user database will be used to grant access to several parts of the site. We'll have exam notes and other articles available in printable format. This will be available to members only.
Examnotes will be also available for download in PDF format for members only, access to our news articles will also require you to be logged in.
Registered users will be able to submit news and articles that will appear on our home page. Top news poster will be able to win prizes from all kinds of participating sponsors.
Moderators will be able to review and approve news that are submitted by others to our home page.
These are just the features that we already have.
Future plans include a links directory where members will be able to add links.
We also plan to have other cool features later.
If you already registered - fine, you will be able to use your account. You will also be able to login right from our home page and then browse the site and if you surf into the forum you will already be logged in.
I have to admit that I guarantee that there will be some bugs and broken links at first, but please be patient and things will get better.
Now for the bad news: There are couple of those:
1 - Netscape browsers will not be welcome on the new site. We will probably be redirecting all Netscapers to the page where we'll explain that our site will not look good in Netscape and to come back with IE 5 or above. If you are using Netscape now, please get IE 5.5 (don't use IE 6 beta, it has bugs in it) There is nothing personal against Netscape, it's just that it does not support some style tags and some JavaSctipt has to be written in 2 versions - one for IE and one for Netscape. We just don't have enough time and resources to write 2 versions of the site.
2 - During the transition to the new site the forum will be down for up to 10 hours. We will have to make some changes to the database and then to test it all. - During the testing stage the site will be accessible to only our staff. Don't panic when you see "Site cannot be accessed" message. The downtime should be limited to 3-4 hours. | |
| PCGuy 2001-05-05, 12:38 pm |
| Webmaster,
This sounds great! Looking forward to the new site. Good luck during transition. We appreciate all the hard work that you put into this site. | |
| imran1430 2001-05-05, 12:39 pm |
| Sweet!
It will turn out to to be awesome!
Once again, props to the webmaster!! | |
| darthw 2001-05-05, 1:16 pm |
| Sounds great here, too. Thanks for the hard work. I get a lot of use out of this site. | |
| Freddy 2001-05-05, 1:52 pm |
| This is my favorite IT site so I am really looking forward to the changes. I'm sure it will enhance the site and make it better for all of us. Thanks for all of your hard work in making this site. | |
|
|  This means for me I cannot access this site so often ... On my HP-UX box runs no IE ... Is there no way to access this site with Netscape???
regards
Cat | |
|
| quote:
Originally posted by Cat
This means for me I cannot access this site so often ... On my HP-UX box runs no IE ... Is there no way to access this site with Netscape???
regards
Cat
Yes, I like IE better than Netscape, but UNIX/Linux has probs with IE. I guess Opera and Lynx are out of the question? | |
| BootData 2001-05-05, 8:01 pm |
| dear Webmaster, i thought this site is COOL already - ...hence, with the new site most definitely becomes COOL-er!
great job!!! | |
|
| quote:
Originally posted by Webmaster
1 - Netscape browsers will not be welcome on the new site.
Too bad *nix users are left out...
dcm | |
|
| quote:
Originally posted by dcm
Too bad *nix users are left out...
dcm
Yeah, that's a bummer, but maybe Wine will support IE 5 soon to let us Unixkiddies use all the features. Or maybe I'll have to write me own browser to get the job done!  | |
| Terje 2001-05-06, 11:26 am |
| I hope the site will still work well without cookies or javascript so that I am not left out.
Also, I hope you will retain a design for those of us with slow Internet connections.
The quality of the forums is not much dependent on visual appearance but highly dependent on the participants of the forum. I have stayed in the Cisco forums for some time because I have felt the quality of the postings to be far above average for publicly available forums on the Internet.
Terje | |
| Webmaster 2001-05-06, 12:45 pm |
| The new site will use JavaScript in some of the navigation rollover effects, registration and in editing profile, but if you already registered it will probably still work.
Cookies are not absolutely necessary, but the site will use cookies to keep track of user sessions so that you will be able to login once and keep being logged in for the entire session.
Without cookies if you leave the forum and go to other parts of the site, when you come back to the forum you will have to login again.
I don't see any reason why people would want to disable cookies. If you don't like cookies, there is a setting in the IE browser to not accept cookies that are stored on your computer but to still accept per-session cookies that are only used for the duration of the browser session. That's the type of cookies we'll use.
As far as "Slow connection" template, I will probably use the old "Slow connection" template at first and then I'll design the new "Slow connection" template that will match the new site's design.
We will continue to use GZIP compression on our forums and possibly throught the entire site. You need HTTP 1.1 compiant browser to accept compressed pages. IE 5 and above (and I think 4.0 also) support the HTTP 1.1 | |
| dentonb2000 2001-05-06, 12:46 pm |
| I too am a little disturbed with the lack of Netscape support. But, being a webmaster a few years ago, I can understand the reasoning behind it.
Webmaster, great job here...keep the great work up. | |
| Webmaster 2001-05-06, 12:54 pm |
| Here is the deal with Netscape - only 8% of site visitors use Netscape when accessing our site. Of these 8% I'm sure that at least half also have IE installed on their computer or can install it if they wanted to.
It takes more than twice as long to design the site that looks the same way in IE and Netscape. Some Javascripts and style attributes has to be written twice - one for IE and one for Netscape.
I just don't have the time to do the double work just to please the 4% of our site's visitors.
Just get IE, it's free.
Maybe in the future I'll try to go over the sites' pages and to some touch ups so that it looks OK in Netscape. | |
| Paisleyskye 2001-05-06, 5:31 pm |
| I for one and very excited about the new changes that are coming to the forums. It seems like it was only yesterday that the forums were last upgraded - oh right- it was!
I'm just kidding, they were upgraded just recently and I thought nothing could be better, but the new changes that the webmaster is talking about seem positively amazing.
I can't wait to see it!!! | |
|
| This is great!
I can't wait, too. | |
| SasiSan 2001-05-09, 7:40 pm |
| I think the changes sound great! Good luck with the implementation.
Netscape users -- while very VOCAL -- are also the extreme minority to my site so I do not blame you for optimizing to one technology! | |
|
| quote:
Originally posted by Webmaster
Here is the deal with Netscape...
I wasn't talking about Netscape; I care about accessing the site from Unix boxes. Can you suggest a browser that would do the trick?!
dcm | |
|
| quote:
Originally posted by dcm
I wasn't talking about Netscape; I care about accessing the site from Unix boxes. Can you suggest a browser that would do the trick?!
dcm
Try Opera. It has UNIX ports and can identify itself as IE if you choose. Very fast as well. Far, far better than Netscrap in my opinion. I've never had trouble with it here. | |
|
| quote:
Originally posted by Randy
Try Opera. It has UNIX ports and can identify itself as IE if you choose. Very fast as well. Far, far better than Netscrap in my opinion. I've never had trouble with it here.
I have a Linux only laptop on which I installed Opera a few month ago. It (Opera) crashed every five pages or so... Not very useful.
dcm | |
|
| Did you get the newest version? You may want to try a re-install. Let me look about and see if I can find a good browser for *nix that might take up less memory. I'll let you know if I find anything. | |
|
| quote:
Originally posted by Randy
Did you get the newest version? You may want to try a re-install. Let me look about and see if I can find a good browser for *nix that might take up less memory. I'll let you know if I find anything.
OK, got the new version. Didn't crash so far. But it screwed up when I started the spell checker (this is the second time I reply...)
Now the question becomes: will this browser be supported? What about HotJava? Or is it that examnotes will be an IE-only site?
(un-spell-checked  )
dcm | |
|
| Well, so far I have no problems with using Opera here as I have with Netscape. Since it can identify itself as IE 5, I am hoping that it will work OK, since I use Linux to get to this most of the time. Opera supports Java now, but I guess we will just have to see. Too bad these browser companies wouldn't stick to some sort of standard. | |
| girltecht 2001-05-11, 8:20 am |
| I'm looking forward to seeing the new changes. Any timeline on the date it will go down for testing? | |
| Webmaster 2001-05-11, 10:43 am |
| I plan testing between later today and Tuesday next week. Not sure yet when it will be completely updated. | |
|
|
OK, got the new version. Didn't crash so far. But it screwed up when I started the spell checker (this is the second time I reply...)
Now the question becomes: will this browser be supported? What about HotJava? Or is it that examnotes will be an IE-only site?
(un-spell-checked )
I'm using Netscape 6 here at the site now . . . everything seems to be working . . . even the spell-checker!
Later: Netscape 4.7 seems to be doing the trick as well. |
|
|
|