33 replies to this topic

[Brito]

Hi everyone.

The main page of the site at http://boot-land.net is no longer maintained by mkPortal.

We are now displaying a static html page that uses nearly no server resources when being displayed.

The overall idea is to save the resources allocated by PHP and MySQL by multiple users.

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At the moment, I've just began improving the page. I'm planning on adding a more user friendly way to browse through the forum articles as time moves forward.

This static html page is generated by a second script that runs automatically at each 2 minutes that will keep the contents fresh and updated.

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I'll keep this thread updated as more changes are added.

[Lancelot]

An offer:

Can you put Amalux tutorial
LiveXP - Newcomer's Tutorial
to the top of tutorials

[Brito]

Unfortunately it is a script that will fetch the latest active topics and I'm unable to rearrange the order of a specific topic..

[paraglider]

Surely 'View New Posts' does the same thing although in a more jumbled fashion.

I think the front page should just be a small number of static links to useful information.

[Brito]

Yes, the code was made to resemble the View new posts function.

The difference is that you can specify the number of days in the past to search and output more details.

My idea was adding a sort of folder browsing that would ease the navigation through topics.

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This first version is mostly a test to the cron jobs that output the static html, so far the results are good and the static page loads quite quickly.

[Brito]

The active topics from the last 7 days are now organized into a treeview style structure without loss of overall performance.

This should ease the task of looking on new topics and still allow it to be indexed by crawler bots.

http://boot-land.net

[Brito]

Improved the visual a little bit and introduced the first topic of each mentioned thread to take a quick peek on the what the topic is about.

The task of replacing mkportal with a static html version is now completed and should add some extra ounces of performance on the server since the visits from bots or visitors don't require php or mySQL from here forward.

[pscEx]

I think (IMHO) that this could help a lot to make the site less interesting for bots and co.

Just a suggestion:

For human visitors it would be much more intersting to have the Portable Antivirus topic at top.

Peter

[Brito]

Ok, will take this into consideration for the future versions.

This portal is still the result of some experiments.

[TheHive]

Good job.

[paraglider]

I would like to see static links to the winbuilder stable download, latest winbuilder beta download, winbuilder on line help. That's the 3 links I always need and can never find them.

[Brito]

Ok, sounds a feasible request.

I was planning on adding a left column similar to the one found on the forum and then we'd be able to place links to other resources and projects like winbuilder for example.

The folder structure used on the portal can be employed on this left column block to add all the necessary links without cluttering up the overall look of the site.

[MedEvil]

You have this nice folder structure on the start page, but you forget to put some description on the page as to what this suppose to be.

[Brito]

That's because I'm not yet very happy with the present results.

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At the moment the portal page has rised to a size of 330Kb to include the text of the first topic which is not something I'm very proud of.

Would be nice to add some sort of Ajax to go fetch this data without leaving the same page so that the page would become as light to load as possible.

Better yet if we could use this sort of treeview structure to browse the forum topics, view all comments and reply back if needed as it is very interactive and intuitive.

With Ajax, I'm also interested in doing things in a way that the main user's page automatically reloads at 30 seconds to fetch the latest forum activity instead of needing to press the "View new posts" button.

This would introduce a 30 seconds delay for everyone to see the changes but would save bandwidth and wouldn't require a full page load.
Hundreds of users (and evil bots) would all read the same static html page instead of having hundreds of users clicking the "View new posts" at nearly the same time.

If this was done right, it might as well prove to be a worthy replacement to the current forum browsing structure but these are just ideas - it will surely take time to work on them and do my experiments.

Thanks for the feedback.

[MedEvil]

With Ajax, I'm also interested in doing things in a way that the main user's page automatically reloads at 30 seconds to fetch the latest forum activity instead of needing to press the "View new posts" button.

At the moment i wouldbe against this. The page load does not work flawless at the moment as you know and it would be real annoying if the little red squares where gone when i used them once, without being sure the page was even prperly displayed.

Thinking of it. How would you make it that everyone sees which topics he/she has already viewed if you wanna generate one page for all?

[Brito]

Thinking of it. How would you make it that everyone sees which topics he/she has already viewed if you wanna generate one page for all?

cookies are a way.

- Visit http://boot-land.net
- Open a few folders or files
- close the browser
- Open it up again and visit the same page
- the folder and files should still be open as you left them because cookies will remember it. (if you enable them)


Or one can also use mySQL to add this information - I *think* this is how IPB does it.

Besides, what I was thinking was having a simple drop down list with topics according to the most recent active ones. It wouldn't need to remember who saw what, just list them. I remember how the IPB guys got in trouble to implement this memory feature - would be preferable to keep the resource usage to a bare minimum.

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At the moment i wouldbe against this. The page load does not work flawless at the moment as you know and it would be real annoying if the little red squares where gone when i used them once, without being sure the page was even prperly displayed.

Yes, you're right. But if the server goes down while using ajax, the rest of the page stays unharmed. You'd read the topics once it would be back online again.

[Arvy]

Ajax? Asynchronous Javascript and XML? Good grief! I thought your primary (even exclusive?) front page concern was the accomodation of web crawlers. Most web crawlers do not execute JavaScript code. So search engines won't be able to index it unless you're also going to provide another alternative to that alternative.

Besides, like any other client-side methodolgy, its usability is widely variable amongst the user population. What about those whose browsers don't support Ajax and those Javascript haters who simply have it disabled? They won't be able to use its functionality at all.

Just a few of many issues to consider.

[Brito]

Ajax? Asynchronous Javascript and XML? Good grief! I thought your primary (even exclusive?) front page concern was the accomodation of web crawlers. Most web crawlers do not execute JavaScript code. So search engines won't be able to index it unless you're also going to provide another alternative to that alternative.

Come on.. I was a bit smarter than that..

The server is doing the heavy work only once every 2 minutes and prepares a digested static html that is served to the portal page where the other (thousands) of visitors can read without extra load processing PHP or MySQL as I mentioned a few months ago.

Besides, like any other client-side methodolgy, its usability is widely variable amongst the user population. What about those whose browsers don't support Ajax and those Javascript haters who simply have it disabled? They won't be able to use its functionality at all.

Web crawlers and web browsers that don't execute Javascript can read perfectly the portal page as it is presently available, you're welcome to try it yourself.

I use firefox with the NoScript plugin for my testings and even though the page doesn't look so tidy (because all folders are expanded), they are still very readable.

Meaning that works good and looks good.

[Arvy]

I see. Well, obviously then, you require no input or cautionary advice from mere amateur dabblers like me. Carry on.

[Brito]

you require no input or cautionary advice from mere amateur dabblers like me. Carry on

If you're an amateur then by proportionality this would leave me in a category close to script kiddie.

Your help and experience are always welcome, for example - take a look on the header logo of the portal page

I don't know how to extend this code to fill up the whole horizontal space from one side to another without any border on the edges, a bit like you see on the forum header.

<table style="background-color: rgb(48, 59, 74); width: 100%; height: 69px; text-align: left; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th style="height: 70px;"><img style="width: 593px; height: 68px;" alt="" src="http://www.boot-land...logo.gif"></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="background-color: rgb(151, 155, 160); width: 100%; text-align: center; height: 30px;"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="height: 30px; width: 100%; background-color: rgb(228, 233, 240);"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

As you can see, help is needed without any doubt!

[rawr]

As you can see, help is needed without any doubt!

noproblem
try adding :

<style>
body{ margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; }
</style>
or :
<body style="margin: 0px;padding: 0px; ">

seems to work fine in firefox(1.8)&(ie6x)
style-css-fix

[Brito]

Perfect!

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Only one more question - on your example, the boot land logo is displayed exactly as shown here on the forum but at the portal there is a border on the bottom of the image - any idea what can be causing this?

Thank you - I've learned a new "trick" today..

[rawr]

on your example, the boot land logo is displayed exactly as shown here on the forum but at the portal there is a border on the bottom of the image - any idea what can be causing this?

oh yea!! ...

it seems to be the 'strict' -doctype

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR...l4/strict.dtd">

(i thaught to but! forgot testing with doctypes )

change the first TH style to:

<th style=";height: 68px;"

and add :

position:absolute;top:0px;

to '<img style='

example updated with doctype+changes
-----EDIT---
top:1px; should be (and now is) :0px; (same as example's code)

[Brito]

It's looking great now!

I've spend quite some time trying to figure why it wasn't working right, thank you again for helping!

[pscEx]

Looks really good now.

But it is important to mention for all 'NoScript' users:

You can see an expandable / collapsable tree only if you allow googleapis.com !

Peter