A Modest Proposal (Forum tweaking)
By
Father Xmas,
Posted on: 2009-10-27 02:09 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
I'm using Firefox and I simply used Adblock Plus to block it. Of course I was motivated to do it because I'm on dial-up.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
I've switched to using Firefox for the forums thanks to the work of Zombie Man, Aggelakis and some others whose names I can't remember.
I've got Stylish installed and I'm using Zombie Man's Hero Skin (the Villain Skin is nice as well, but I'm a Blue fan). I've also installed Greasemonkey and I'm using the Forum Signature Tamer and the Sticky Fix scripts with it. I've also installed FFvB to handle a few vBulletin items, or at least make them easier to manage.
I "think" that Stylish may work with Chrome, but I'm not certain. I've heard that it works with Opera as well, but haven't tested it.
I'd recommend trying it out to see if it's something you can use on your systems, even though you may need to change browsers to get it working correctly.
If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.
Black Pebble is my new hero.
Quote:
I do exactly the same thing even though I'm on a business class DSL. It's a ridiculously large image.
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Originally Posted by Father Xmas
I'm using Firefox and I simply used Adblock Plus to block it. Of course I was motivated to do it because I'm on dial-up.
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Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
Thanks for the tips. I'm fairly certain I'm going to move out of Safari and into Chrome once it leaves dev status on the mac. The biggest stumbling block is for the iPhone, since it has the lowest processing, storage, imaging and network power. Anyone have any tips for handhelds?
This has been nagging me lately but I've finally gotten around to looking at why the forums have been dogging me out since the change over. While there are some stylistic issues that I have with the site, I just want to point out a couple of things that might improve the boards without drastic thematic differences.
One of the things I've noticed is that I rarely visited the boards anymore on my iPhone...it's just too slow. I also see reloads on pages from Safari on my mac being a bit pokier too, although on Chrome/Win7 it is pretty quick.
One of the things I saw was that the background image is pretty big, so I decided to download and take a peek. BG image is located here if you want to see it.
It is almost 400k in size (384k). It's big, beautiful and hogs a lot of space. It would make a great poster, since it is 1920 pixels in width. If you could cut it down in size it would save a lot of space/time/bandwidth etc, and possibly would speed up browsing for limited devices such as the iPhone.
So I decided to cut it down a bit to see what can be done to reduce the size.
This is what I came up with. The image is substantially the same but just fades to black on the arcing portion.
(I linked it as a URL instead of inline). The image hosting might change the resolution settings etc. but it was 167k, a pretty substantial savings. The image quality is the same as the original, but a heck of a lot shorter in height.
In addition to being smaller, the center section is punched out to black. The width of the black area is defined by the narrowest width I could make the browser before the table divs started breaking out in Chrome (browser). A side benefit is also when the browser window is wider than 1920 pixels the center portion shows through, but having a black hole hides the background showing through.
The downsides are that the city image is gone down the sides of the edge of the screen (not that you really noticed it on the original pages), and on really really short pages you can see the bottom portion of the city on the original but on the modified image, it's just black (like the normal and long pages are on the original). This would only really affect the error pages etc. Most pages would be unaffected by the background image height change.
Another optimization I was thinking was to add a third option in the bottom pulldown theme, where you could choose Hero or Villain theme/skin. Perhaps a "Lightweight" option could be provided, where the background is suppressed altogether and various other graphics are reduced in size (like the City of... logo). It would really go a long way to restoring the ability to sneak onto the forums while at work (during my break, of course)!
Anyhow, just my 2 cents on trying to save the pipes of the interwebs from being clogged up.