A few small changes.

Thu Mar 05, 2020 1:53 am

Yep, that answers that lot. And yep, the credits and links pages could do with a bit of love.

What about the user_avatars and img_post folders? I'm not sure those images are being used anywhere.

Thu Mar 05, 2020 9:23 am

The img_post folder is one I used to upload images used in forum posts, either here or maybe at other forums. It looks like a lot, if not all of them are a bit old and can be deleted. The newest image in that folder is over 9 years old.

The user_avatars folder, I think, was used for forum members to upload their own avatars, although I don't recall why it's located outside of the forum directory. I know two of those are no longer active in the community and I don't use the me avatar anymore. I can't remember who used (uses) the Just-curious avatar but I don't recall ever seeing the other two used.

I'd say you can delete both folders.

If the 18WoS directory is still there, it can be deleted too. I don't remember if I deleted it before you took over or not.

Thu Mar 05, 2020 4:34 pm

I remembered seeing some of the images in img_post. Some are linked here: viewtopic.php?f=65&t=867
I'll leave that alone for now. It's not a big directory anyway.

The old gb and 18WoS directories seem to have been removed by you before I took over the domain, so no problem with them.

I can't remember who used (uses) the Just-curious avatar but I don't recall ever seeing the other two used.

I have a vague memory that orange46 used to use that one, but it's not showing in his posts now.
Grandma Ruth used to use us_uk2, but her posts are no longer showing that either.
I might just move them into img_post, since that's staying for now, in case anyone ever wants them.

Also, I ran a full search on the whole kaboodle and it looks like the gif directory is no longer used by anything. Search term was /gif/ and that should nail any calls for images from that directory, but none turned up. So I think that can go too.

Thu Mar 05, 2020 10:10 pm

Hey I updated the error pages just for fun. Look a bit more friendly now, and should be more useful.

Code: Select all

http://hawkdawg.com/400.shtml
http://hawkdawg.com/401.shtml
http://hawkdawg.com/403.shtml
http://hawkdawg.com/404.shtml
http://hawkdawg.com/500.shtml

Got me thinking though: there's no real need to parse PHP on all .html files. All the includes could be done with SSI instead, which is less overhead for the server. Not that we seem to be having problems with masses of users or anything.

Edit: Turns out the server won't recognise these if I just upload them myself. To get them to work I had to use the custom error pages creation gizmo in cPanel, which happens to save them as .shtml even if you don't actually use any includes.

Anyway, they're working now. Exact same code, just saved via cPanel editor instead of uploading them.

Fri Mar 06, 2020 1:06 am

Yea, that gif folder can go too. It was for some script that is no longer installed (I think).

I didn't, and still don't know anything about SSI. Hence the php include stuff.

I never knew what the old error pages looked like. Never bother looking and never got one. They were automatically created on the old server whenever a website was created.

BTW! Feel free to clarify who 'I' is in this section - http://hawkdawg.com/photos/ne-us/r-a.htm
I should have added something on that/those pages clarifying that it was me and not the current website owner that took that ride around before I turned it over to you.

Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:50 am

No worries. I can just add "by Hawk" under the title. Let me know if you spot any more of those, but they're hardly going to land anyone in trouble. Well I don't think so. I suppose I depends what you got up to.

I figured I might as well do the error pages. It's common to have friendlier ones these days and they're very simple to do.

I only started thinking about SSI because the old 401 file had an SS include on it. It turns out to be really easy. All you do is add your bits like this:

Code: Select all

	<body>
		<div id="wrapper">
			<div id="content">
				<!--#include virtual="cs/files/header.html" -->
				<!--#include virtual="cs/files/menu.html" -->

I decided to do them like this on local because my desktop server wasn't configured for running .htm and .html files as .php. I had to reconfigure something to get the relevant bits showing on my test pages, so it was either set up a rewrite for PHP, or just enabe SSI. The latter looked easier, so I did that. Now I'm thinking it might make sense online too. The server is bound to be set up for it already.

Had a bit of a brainwave about the map archives pages too. There's no need to code in the map regions menu on every page. That can be done as a basic include too. Then I can use some of that new-fangled CSS stuffz to play some tricks on it, and make the current page look like a header bar without touching any markup.

That bar that says "Railroad Tycoon 3 Maps of Asia" is just a standard menu link that says "Asia" by default. The CSS looks like this:

Code: Select all

			.archives_menu {
				display: flex;
				flex-wrap: wrap;
				margin-top: 2em;
				padding: 0 28px;
			}
			.archives_menu li {
				flex: 0 0 auto;
				margin: 0 4px;
				font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif;
			}
			.archives_menu li a:link, .archive_menu li a:visited,
			#content>p:last-child a:link, #content>p:last-child a:visited {
				color: #4d2e14;
				text-decoration: none;
				box-shadow: inset 0 -1px 0;
			}
			.archives_menu li a:hover, .archive_menu li a:focus,
			#content>p:last-child a:hover, #content>p:last-child a:focus {
				color: #000;
				box-shadow: inset 0 -2px 0;
			}
			.archives_menu li:nth-child(3) {
				order: 9;
				width: 100%;
				margin: .75em 0 0;
			}
			.archives_menu li:nth-child(3) a:link,
			.archives_menu li:nth-child(3) a:visited {
				display: block;
				padding: 4px 6px;
				background: url(img/main/gw_bckgrnd5.jpg);
				color: #ffeb7f;
				font-weight: 400;
				font-size: 1.25rem;
				line-height: 1.375em;
				font-family: georgia, serif;
				text-shadow: 0 0 1px #000;
				border: 1px solid #000;
				border-radius: 3px 3px 0 0;
				box-shadow: none;
			}			
			.archives_menu li:nth-child(3) a::before {
				content: "Railroad Tycoon 3 Maps of ";
			}

The last few chunks are the relevant bits for the fake header bar. "Asia" is the third link in the menu, so sits inside the third li. Using order: 9; makes the li display last in the menu regardless of where it sits in the markup. Most of the rest is just to make it look like a header bar, and the ::before adds the content text in front of the link's visible text.

This means all pages can call the same menu bar markup, and most of the same CSS from an external file. For the current page all I have to do is have a small inline stylesheet up in head has those last three chunks, and I just edit the (3) to whatever number suits that page's link. Hey presto, instant header bar.

That wasn't my only brainwave either. I'm having too much fun here.

Anyway, that scaling of the one image to make the thumbnail on the main page and the bigger image inside the briefing. I added a bit more there, so now depending on which class I assign I can use straight crops from my box for new maps, but can re-use the existing images that are already on the server for all the existing maps in the archives.

In that screenshot, China Heartland is running a new crop from my box. Baghdad Railway is too, as I made one for it before I started thinking. Burma, Ceylon and Colonial India are all running their old image, just with a different scaling and positioning. This will save a lot of messing around, and makes cleaning up the whole thing a much less daunting prospect.

Fri Mar 06, 2020 10:01 am

Gumboots wrote: ↑Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:50 am No worries. I can just add "by Hawk" under the title.

I was thinking something like "A road trip story by Hawk", but whatever you like is good.

I'll have a look through and see if I spot anything else.

It looks like you don't like centering stuff.

Just a silly compulsion of mine.

You do whatever you want.

Sounds like you decided against converting the site over to a CMS, but you are making it easier for you to keep updated, and having a blast in the process.

Edit 1:

I took a quick gander and the Links page - http://hawkdawg.com/links.htm - needs some attention. The following links no longer work.

Under the Railroad Tycoon category:

Railroad Tycoon - JSS's site

Red Dingo's Australian RT site

Kurt's Railroad Tycoon Fan Station

AZ Rail Rat's site

Home of Sid Meier's Railroads - the link works but Railroads isn't there anymore.

Under the Railroad related links category:

South African Rail

Rail Georgia

Under the Non-Train related links

Design & Hosting by Hawk's Web

PHP Simplicity - the link works but it looks like the owner has cancelled all his projects.

Of course, it goes without saying, you can remove any other links you so desire, or the whole links page for that matter. I was just pointing out which links no longer work.

Fri Mar 06, 2020 5:14 pm

I like centering some things sometimes. I don't think it works so well for everything all the time. I sort of play it by ear.

I did have a look at the links page a while back. A lot of them were duds, but the South African group have a Facebook page now: https://www.facebook.com/friendsoftherail

Salvaging the links that still work, I was thinking I could do something like this, to match it in with the archives.

I'm not sure the site needs all the links to non-railway stuff, but I'm happy to consider any you think are a good idea.

Sat Mar 07, 2020 1:05 am

All the non-railway links is just stuff I've used to - in some way, work on the site. They most likely won't have anything to do with what you do. Feel free to delete them or add your own. Whatever you want to do with that section.

I'm looking forward to what you do with the site when you go live with it.

Sat Mar 07, 2020 3:39 pm

Hawk wrote: ↑Fri Mar 06, 2020 10:01 am
Gumboots wrote: ↑Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:50 amNo worries. I can just add "by Hawk" under the title.
I was thinking something like "A road trip story by Hawk"...

Sorted.

I was thinking about the site menu. The current Stu monster is a bit of a nightmare to find things in. Mega menus were a phase that seemed cool at the time, back when people first figured out how to code them. Experience since then indicates that the users generally fare better if you have something simpler and cleaner in layout, with users just drilling down via links on pages if they want something way down the stack.

The other thing is that Stu's code is a nightmare anyway. I went through it the other night on local and got rid of literally half the code without changing functionality or presentation. I'm sure I could get rid of more if I gave it some more thought, but I was only doing a quick clean-up and eliminating anything obviously superfluous (ie: you do not need to declare everything from the top level, all the way down, when you only want to style the lowest levels).

I'm thinking it would make sense to have the top menu on the forum and the site matching for content. Apart from anything else it's only one lot of code for me to pig around with, which suits me when I'm feeling lazy, but it should also mean no mental disconnects for users when going from site to forum and vice versa.

PS: Oh yeah, one thing that drives me nuts about the current files (HTML and CSS) is the lack of clean indentation. I'm used to working with templates done in PHP syntax, and CSS files thousands of lines long. Proper indentation makes a massive difference to the readability of the code when you want to go through a lot of it quickly. If I want the CSS minified I'll do that after I've finished working on it, and I'll keep an un-minified copy as a backup in case I do want to work on it again.

This thing rocks: https://www.10bestdesign.com/dirtymarkup/
Does html, css and js. Even converts to HTML5 and spits out valid code for it.

Sat Mar 07, 2020 5:39 pm

The editor I use for html and css (Edit Plus) does indentation automatically (as well as color coding of code), making all the lines easier to read, so I never really gave it much thought.
I do know that opening up some of the stuff I did in other editors looks like a mess due to lack of indentation and color coding.

I did get pretty familiar with that menu after taking his basic code and creating the menu myself. Consequently, finding stuff was pretty easy for me.

I can see how it could be a bit of a hassle though.

I do agree though that the deep dive menu style has pretty much gone out of style. For that matter, so has html and css. I don't think any of the new generation web developers have a clue what html and css are. They all use those new fangled apps that do all the work for them, negating the need to learn anything. To me it does make the code a nightmare to read, but then - the browsers can read it so that's all that matters. Plus with connection speeds so much faster these days all those lines of code don't really matter like it used to back in the ancient days of dial up.

Sat Mar 07, 2020 10:14 pm

Just a quick observation to report: Under the 'Railroad Photos' main menu link, there's still a link to the now defunct Contact Page.

Sun Mar 08, 2020 4:04 pm

Got rid of that link.

Also edited the Mt. Washington Cog Railway image name while I was at it. Can't have spaces in url code, or it throws warnings about illegal characters when you run it through a validator. Could use the old %20, but I prefer an underscore for better readability. I'm going to go through them and sort this for all images, eventually.

This is just so that I don't have to wade through crud when checking in a validator, which is always handy if I mess something up. If the HTML is valid, that narrows down where the error can be. If it ain't, that's usually the first thing you want to fix.

Will also convert all .htm files to .html or .shtml suffix, which is quick and easy via command line. Can do any links to them en masse, via Notepad++. Ditto for replacing PHP includes with SSI.

I'm quite liking SSI now that I've got into it. It's something new for me, and seems to be very clean and easy. For example, the footer include for the copyright can be done with this:

Code: Select all

All Original Content Copyright &copy; 2001 - <!--#config timefmt="%Y" --><!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL" --> hawkdawg.com - All Rights Reserved.

That's all it needs.

Re mega menus: the thinking these days seems to be that a menu should be a menu, and that we shouldn't be trying to turn a menu into a web page. If a web page is what's wanted, makes more sense to use an actual page.

Sun Mar 08, 2020 6:40 pm

Gumboots wrote: ↑Sun Mar 08, 2020 4:04 pm For example, the footer include for the copyright can be done with this:
Code: Select all
All Original Content Copyright &copy; 2001 -  hawkdawg.com - All Rights Reserved.
That's all it needs.

So by doing that you no longer need the javascript in the copyright.html file, or is that SSI just a replacement for the php includes code?

BTW! That copyright code/link stuff was also used on the "The Most Hated Main in the South' pages. I'm not talking about the hawkdawg.com copyright. There's a separate copyright notice for Porter, not in the footer but at the bottom of his content.

Code: Select all

?php include("../../../cs/files/copyright-HM.html"

All those htm files can be found in rrt\rrt3\hm

Interestingly enough, I never did add a copyright to the "Heineken & Pacific Railroad" pages.

http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/hp/hp.htm

Sun Mar 08, 2020 7:33 pm

Yup, don't need the javascript anymore. The SSI does it all.

TBH I find the H&P pages almost impossible to read. That background is seriously nasty. It needs something easier on the eyes, IMO.

Mon Mar 09, 2020 7:22 am

If I remember right, I just used the same background he used when his site was live. I did that so folks would more readily recognized it.
It could use some gussying up though, if you even want to keep it.

Mon Mar 09, 2020 5:04 pm

Yes I get that you would have just copied what he had.

I have had a look through it and there's not much information there that isn't already on this forum, so I'm not sure keeping it is worth the hassle. Could obviously still have backups of it stashed, in case anyone wants one, but I'm thinking it might be better to drop it from the live content and just add any useful tips to a sticky here.

Been thinking about the phpBB thing too. It occurred to me that they don't really do stable versions. Ever. What they effectively do is an endless strings of release candidates. IOW, when you're running a release candidate or beta you expect changes every few months, and you expect to have to replace all site files and rebuild your custom styling every few months. That's just how development cycles go.

PhpBB's approach is like this, even though they call their released versions "stable". They can't stop tinkering with them though, and they've always just assumed they can lumber people with a painful upgrade process and get away with it, so its just like another RC every time.

What they really need is genuine stable versions, as you would expect from other forum apps or from an LTS version of an operating system. Get the thing stable, then only issue essential security patches for it, and issue them in a simple format that will patch the necessary files quickly and easily while leaving everything else alone. That's what the average forum admin wants. It lets you get on with setting up your site, and then get on with doing things apart from constantly setting up your site again.

Tue Mar 10, 2020 2:20 am

Personally I found the HP&P pages have an interesting take on the game. You can obviously tell that there wasn't an "established" play style that the collective of map makers have since steered strategy towards. If it's a problem to keep it updated, could it be "frozen" in terms of format somehow? Idk about such things, maybe even as a PDF?

Tue Mar 10, 2020 5:31 am

I wouldn't really mind keeping it, but it'd have to be in a cleaner format that matches the rest of the site. Which is something I haven't quite decided on yet. I have the archives worked out, which I'll start implementing live soon. The rest will evolve as I get ideas.

Sun Mar 15, 2020 8:10 am

Here's where I'm up to with site ideas. I sort of went with keeping the old feel, with bits of wood and brown colour scheme, etc but added some eye candy and some more modern typography. It's not completely finalised yet, but I have a range of pages running live on my desktop server.

The home page looks like this:

RT3 map archive pages look like this (one archive menu button is showing the hover effects):

Map briefings are currently like this, but I may go back to a greenish background for them to keep the RT3 feel.

I came up with a good trick for these. They're set up to pull the briefing texts in via SSI includes. This keeps the archive page .sthml file a lot simpler, and a lot easier to compile and debug. It only has to include the basic framework and image calls for each map. It also means debugging briefings will be a lot easier as they will all be separate and compact files.

The site menu dropdowns look like this (basically the same code as the forum's top menu bar):

This is the main index page for the railroad history section (all of the history files and pages it links to are also working in their new formats):

And this is a rough guess at a links page, with the footer peeking out at the bottom:

Hawk & Badger Railroad Forum

A few small changes.

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Thu Mar 05, 2020 1:53 am

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Thu Mar 05, 2020 9:23 am

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Thu Mar 05, 2020 4:34 pm

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Thu Mar 05, 2020 10:10 pm

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Fri Mar 06, 2020 1:06 am

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:50 am

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Fri Mar 06, 2020 10:01 am

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Fri Mar 06, 2020 5:14 pm

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Sat Mar 07, 2020 1:05 am

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Sat Mar 07, 2020 3:39 pm

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Sat Mar 07, 2020 5:39 pm

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Sat Mar 07, 2020 10:14 pm

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Sun Mar 08, 2020 4:04 pm

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Sun Mar 08, 2020 6:40 pm

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Sun Mar 08, 2020 7:33 pm

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Mon Mar 09, 2020 7:22 am

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Mon Mar 09, 2020 5:04 pm

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Tue Mar 10, 2020 2:20 am

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Tue Mar 10, 2020 5:31 am

Re: A few small changes. Unread post Sun Mar 15, 2020 8:10 am