MRC moves and restyles again!

For various reasons we decided it was time to pack our bags and move to another host once again. We have now settled down at a fresh, new hosting location and hope it can fullfill our hosting needs for a long period of time to come. As we speak DNS records all over the world are updating their records. It can take up to two days until they are directing all our visitors to the right IP adress. Until then it might not be possible for all our visitors to use all features of our website, like the Spanish or Dutch versions of our website..

Apart from moving to a new host we decided to do a small makeover which resulted in various improvements, like:

Completely new, categorized menu on the left
Completely restyled news archive
Restyled 'downloads' and 'links' index pages
Quick reply form in the forums
When replying to a post in the forums you can see the most recent posts in that thread again
New, powerful search engine
Improved photo shoots section
If a user is on the contacts list and you are logged in, you can click on his name in the forums and watch his user profile
Various minor bugfixes and improvements

So.. have a look around on our website, let us know what you think of the improvements, keep (or start) sending in news, reactions and forumposts and... keep MSXing!

Comments (33)

By BiFi

Enlighted (4348)

22-03-2004, 07:56

It's a bit of getting used to, but I think these improvements rule.

By BiFi

Enlighted (4348)

22-03-2004, 07:59

Though I think in the forum there's a </table> tag missing, since the footer still isn't on the full width here.

By BiFi

Enlighted (4348)

22-03-2004, 08:41

I do believe this newspost should be an MRC topic, not Software.

By Latok

msx guru (3929)

22-03-2004, 08:50

Changed it to 'MRC'. Cheers, BiFi.

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

22-03-2004, 13:25

Great work! Speed is fantastic, and I'm sure it's not just the server. The lots of smaller and bigger things are undoubtedly a big improvement.
Personally, I think the new searchengine is the best new feature, because there were many teams I wanted to find something in the forums and wasted a lot of time trying to find it (usually failing as well).

Just two things...
- What exactly has been improved in the Photo shoots? All that I can see is that there are no longer description popups when I hover over the thumbnails
- Will the smileys list in the forum post/reply screen be coming back?

By ro

Scribe (4922)

22-03-2004, 13:56

Cool, I had troubles connecting to MRC last weekend. Now I know why.
Concrats.. so euh, 2nd server move this year? Which provider did we skip to this time eh?

The quickreply functions is like pretty cool'n stuff.

By BiFi

Enlighted (4348)

22-03-2004, 15:07

All I have in the photoshoot are a lot of script errors due to the hover thing apparently not working over here :/

By ccfg

Rookie (20)

22-03-2004, 15:11

Great improvements! Especially the new search engine and the menu order.
Thanks!

By snout

Ascended (15187)

22-03-2004, 20:00

Thanks for all the compliments and suggestions. Of course, the MRC is never finished. I removed several small bugs this evening and will continue to do so (as usual). The big improvement in the photoshoots module is the image quality of the thumbnails... I will have a look at the overlib script and see if I can fix it soon.

The clickable smiles might get back in the future... I think they will

By msxgamesbox

Champion (397)

22-03-2004, 23:11

Hmmm... can't use anymore Safari to access the MRC (( it looks awful. (see http://www.msxgamesbox.com/SafariCapture002.jpg)
In IE5, Camino and Netscape 7 however it looks OK.

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

22-03-2004, 23:27

That musy be a problem in Safari.

MRC is completely standards compliant now, and passes the W3 Consortium Validator tests.

By snout

Ascended (15187)

22-03-2004, 23:52

well.. we're -close- to standards compliance, but not quite there yet. I'll see if I can fix things for Safari without getting less compliant to the standards....

By mth

Champion (507)

23-03-2004, 04:51

When I tried, neither this page nor the front page passes validation...

By the way, rendering on Konqueror is acceptable, but not perfect:
http://www.treewalker.org/temp/msx.org.png

Like Safari, there is a 1-pixel black line above the light blue post heading. Also like Safari, the space between the post boxes in the middle and the links in the right column is a bit excessive. However, the right column is a bit narrow (but still usable), while it is very wide in Safari. As Safari and Konqueror share the KHTML rendering engine, the differences are actually more surprising than the similarities. I'm using Konqueror 3.2.1 by the way.

By the way, you could save quite a bit on the size of your CSS file by defining common style only once. For example, for "BODY A" you could define everything except "color" centrally and override only the "color" style for link/visited/active/hover. Also, instead of "H1 { S } H2 { S }" you can use "H1, H2 { S }".

You could also shorten the HTML by moving style from the HTML to the style sheet. Another way to save some bytes is to link to "/newspost1901.html" instead of "http://213.201.217.102/newspost1901.html".

I hope this bit of info is useful in making msx.org even better than it already is.

By ro

Scribe (4922)

23-03-2004, 07:35

funny, here we are. Old-time hard-core coders who analyze every line of code just to see if we can loose a byte or two.... But the dude's right on some degree. ah well as Wolf said before "we're just ant-fucking here"

By Bart

Paragon (1422)

23-03-2004, 08:25

Safari is the worst browser I've ever witnessed. I'd rather use Linx. Even Mac-minded people admit it sucks. Waste of time fixing MRC for that piece of crap software IMHO

By msxgamesbox

Champion (397)

23-03-2004, 09:25

I just like Safari, sorry - though sometimes I switch to Camino

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

23-03-2004, 13:24

When I tried, neither this page nor the front page passes validation...
It's just whining about some <UL>'s which IMO have every right to be there, and it complains about <TR HEIGHT> which even if wrong shouldn't cause horizontal layout problems.

Like Safari, there is a 1-pixel black line above the light blue post heading.
That's SUPPOSED to be there! It's always been there, on the old site too.

By jalu

Master (158)

23-03-2004, 16:27

Even I as full-time Mac user don't really like Safari, simply because imho the render-engine it uses is not as good as Gecko/Mozilla. It is very fast though, that is a big advantage, mainly on older, slower machines. And the compatibility has improved quite a lot since the first version, Safari is getting better and will someday equal Mozilla, I am sure.

Anyway, back ontopic, I have another weird problem. On Mozilla Firefox ánd regular Mozilla 1.5 on Windows XP, MRC doesn't look right. The colors of the letters seem wrong (blue or black on a dark-blue background?). Strangely enough, it looks EXACTLY as expected in Firefox on the Mac(almost identical to how it looks in internet Explorer on Windows). I don't get this at all. What's up?

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

23-03-2004, 20:52

I use regular Mozilla 1.5 of Windows XP, and there's nothing wrong here...

By snout

Ascended (15187)

23-03-2004, 21:13

I will try and see if I can improve things without getting less compliant to the standards. I am working with Firefox on WinXP, no trouble whatsoever over here...

By msxgamesbox

Champion (397)

23-03-2004, 21:45

One more little remark about MRC & Safari - the display is only wrong on the homepage (sorry I did not try to go further when I first posted), all other sections display well...

By Jorito

Mr. Ambassadors (1788)

23-03-2004, 22:12

First, congrats with the succesful move and the improvements to the site! However, you know me, I always have to nag about something I always use Opera (/Linux) to browse, and the current reincarnation of MRC has some problems... Check out http://www.bombaman.net/download/opera.jpg for an example. This happens in other pages (Articles, Photo Shoots, and more) as well. Looks a lot like a missing WIDTH in a TD or so...

By snout

Ascended (15187)

23-03-2004, 22:29

width is set in colgroups, which is standards-compliant. I'll add some widths for TD's as well to prevent this from happening in Opera/safari etc.

By jalu

Master (158)

23-03-2004, 23:09

http://picserver.student.utwente.nl/view_image.php/MSPB034LZ005/picserver.jpeg

That is how it looks on Mozilla 1.5 on my Windows XP box at home. Firefox on my XP machine at work gives the exact same result...

By jalu

Master (158)

23-03-2004, 23:16

I'd love to be able to edit my reactions here

Anyway, little addition: as you can see in my screenshot, the columns on the left and right of the frontpage seem to align not at the top of the page but in the middle of it. Again, I am puzzled, since others claim it's working as expected on Mozilla/WinXP, and it also works perfectly on my Mac using Firefox...

By Arjan

Paladin (782)

23-03-2004, 23:34

maybe a refresh would help?

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

24-03-2004, 00:25

Yeah, maybe you guys are still using cached CSS sheets or something?

I'm really using Mozilla 1.5 final (Gecko/20031007) on Windows XP, I've triple checked this. So there must be something wrong at your side....

By snout

Ascended (15187)

24-03-2004, 04:08

Thanks to GuyveR800 and a sleepless night the frontpage (and quite a lot of all other pages on the MRC) are now completely HTML 4.01 Transitional compliant. I also added some extra TD widths, which will hopefully improve frontpage display on safari/netscape/opera.

By jalu

Master (158)

24-03-2004, 08:20

Well, it does look OK at work (Firefox/Windows XP) now(did take a refresh indeed), so I guess it was a problem with caching indeed. Anyway, nice work, it looks fine now. I'll try Safari tonight, just for the sake of knowing whether it's OK now.

By AuroraMSX

Paragon (1902)

24-03-2004, 09:33

Sorry to bug, but in my Firebird the texts are all close to unreadable: links in the menu's appear in blue (very nice on a dark blue background) and the text in the articles are rendered black. :-(

By AuroraMSX

Paragon (1902)

24-03-2004, 09:36

I can't show any shots from here - will add those tonight...

By snout

Ascended (15187)

24-03-2004, 11:38

Aurora - Jalu just reported fixing that same problem with refreshing. It's probably a cache problem, could you let us know if that is the case?

By AuroraMSX

Paragon (1902)

24-03-2004, 14:46

Check! One hit on the [Refresh] button changes all texts to nice readable white...

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