Much Ado About the New Pascal Gamer Magazine Website

[deathshadow]

Hey everyone, I am pleased to announce the long needed redesign of the Pascal Gamer Magazine website!

It took a couple of weeks to get all the features required to host everything I wanted to put into the site, but low and behold here it is. A brand new site just in time to show off the next upcoming issue of the publication. Next issue has been 'cut and filled' meaning that I will not be adding any more pages to the next issue. All that remains is to finish off the last few game reviews, news posts and do a once-over spell/grammar check of the entire mag before I release it for publication on the web site.

I've also been holding off mentioning this until I had the time to really work on it, but I am also planning on setting up versions of the first two issues on my Lulu.com account for purchase. Fear not, the online downloadable PDF format version of the magazine will remain FREE of charge.

Go check out the new site at www.PascalGamer.com and get ready for another issue some time this month!

ooph, that's painful. I mean, not only is it fixed metric fonts, serif fonts, and frankly not much of a layout...

It's compounded by accessibility issues and outdated markup galore. A serious web developer would take one look at that and go "what is this, 1997?"

Tables for layout, tables for nothing (big tip, if your table only has one TD per TR you don't NEED a table), nothing to indicate any of the headings are headings or paragraphs are paragraphs - or even lists for menus to screen readers, search engines and other alternative browsing methods.

Much less the tranny doctype, non-breaking spaces instead of padding, and dozen other things that again, make it more 1990's code than 2010... as evidenced by the 5k of markup for 1.2k of mostly plain-text.

Though much of that can be blamed on Dreamweaver; as a recently departed friend was fond of saying the only thing you can learn from DW is how not to design a website - or my slightly more robust "The only thing about Dreamweaver that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting it's use"

No offense intended - you want some help cleaning that up give a holler. Are you running ANY sort of CMS under that, or is it all static pages?

[jdarling]

ooph, that's painful. I mean, not only is it fixed metric fonts, serif fonts, and frankly not much of a layout...

It's compounded by accessibility issues and outdated markup galore. A serious web developer would take one look at that and go "what is this, 1997?"

Tables for layout, tables for nothing (big tip, if your table only has one TD per TR you don't NEED a table), nothing to indicate any of the headings are headings or paragraphs are paragraphs - or even lists for menus to screen readers, search engines and other alternative browsing methods.

Much less the tranny doctype, non-breaking spaces instead of padding, and dozen other things that again, make it more 1990's code than 2010... as evidenced by the 5k of markup for 1.2k of mostly plain-text.

Though much of that can be blamed on Dreamweaver; as a recently departed friend was fond of saying the only thing you can learn from DW is how not to design a website - or my slightly more robust "The only thing about Dreamweaver that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting it's use"

No offense intended - you want some help cleaning that up give a holler. Are you running ANY sort of CMS under that, or is it all static pages?

Actually, WILL has done fairly well for someone who is not a web designer and doesn't proclaim to be a web developer. I can understand his decisions as in the end he is the one that has to maintain this thing, so if he prefers to use tables it doesn't kill anyone or any browser. There are issues, but he can work through those fairly easily and as his time allows.

He isn't running any CMS software at this time, though I have suggested a few, as he wants to use the site to learn more about PHP. Something (that as a dev) we should all be able appreciate.

So, here is an idea, instead of throwing a shit fit saying it sucks show something better and explain why its better.

- Jeremy

PS: Who did Catalyst for you, my 7 year old could do a better job and would know better than to use right aligned menus with flyout's that break in >2/3 of browsers. My gawd the search results page is pure Google instead of properly wrapping the API and displaying a page that fits your layout.

Here is a tip for you, before you crap on someones party, make sure your party doesn't suck just as bad. And, yes, I admit my own site is a monster, but hell it renders and my inbox says people are using it so I don't care how it looks .

[deathshadow]

Actually, WILL has done fairly well for someone who is not a web designer and doesn't proclaim to be a web developer. I can understand his decisions as in the end he is the one that has to maintain this thing, so if he prefers to use tables it doesn't kill anyone or any browser. There are issues, but he can work through those fairly easily and as his time allows.

I understand that - but apparantly god forbid you point out when something is bad. Automatically it must be a personal attack because I'm unwilling to slap the rose coloured glasses on his head while blowing smoke up his ass.

He isn't running any CMS software at this time, though I have suggested a few, as he wants to use the site to learn more about PHP. Something (that as a dev) we should all be able appreciate.

Indeed. It's why I asked the question as I saw the .php extensions and was curious. He wants to write his own, I'm willing to give pointers on it, I'll even send him a copy of my "poor man's" setup (which is what's behind EWIUSB.COM and DEATHSHADOW.COM) since that would allow him to retain control over the markup and learn some php while at it.

So, here is an idea, instead of throwing a shit fit saying it sucks show something better and explain why its better.

Which I offereed to help. You call it a shit fit - I call it a rational analysis of the page saying what's wrong - and most of what's wrong is decade out of date sitebuilding techniques. I should know, I dealt with trying to fix decade out of date websites for a good long while before I retired from full time web dev work.

What if that was pascal code where ten unused variables were declared, simple commands like modulo and multiply were wrapped in functions for no reason, with manual counters on top of an incrementing pointer? That's what we're talking the equivalent to.

PS: Who did Catalyst for you, my 7 year old could do a better job and would know better than to use right aligned menus with flyout's that break in >2/3 of browsers. My gawd the search results page is pure Google instead of properly wrapping the API and displaying a page that fits your layout.

... and was written six years ago and seen four different maintainers since I last had ANYTHING to do with www.classicbattletech.com (which I'm assuming is what you refer to since catalyst's own website is an even BIGGER train wreck) - many of the design decisions and shoehorning of content running entirely contrary to my advice and opinions on the subject. In fact, most of the things you pointed out I've been bitching about since that theme launched, but they wanted all that extra crap.

Gonna point the finger back, do it at something where my involvement is something more than just providing their hosting and keeping the forums running. I'd probably fix it if they were willing to pay me to do so, but since it's not my site...

Here is a tip for you, before you crap on someones party, make sure your party doesn't suck just as bad.

Personal ****
http://www.deathshadow.com
http://www.ewiusb.com

Client pages (older, I've been retired for about a year)
http://www.publishorperish.net
http://www.topgamez.net

(the latter he's made a lot of changes to)

And, yes, I admit my own site is a monster, but hell it renders and my inbox says people are using it so I don't care how it looks .

Odd, I have a broken layout here in Opera... and in IE7... Possibly related to the use of dynamic fonts inside fixed containers, broken attempt at a fixed footer resulting in MULTIPLE scrollbars, and the 75 validation errors meaning the code is not HTML, it's gibberish.

You'd think as pascal programmers you'd understand the value of valid code; since if this was pascal it wouldn't even compile.

Though if you want to see his page done better, I was planning on tossing together a sample template to show how to bring it into THIS century.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Lets call an end to this before it gets out of hand.

deathshadow... I was contemplating posting something like jdarling, but as an admin, I thought better of it. That said, if you feel that strongly about things, don't belittle people and their work in such a crass fashion in public send them an email or a PM. There is a radical difference between constructive advice and something that does appear to be just a plain slap in the face (as your comments have clearly been interpretted as by at least two people), so learn some tact and diplomacy before you post another "rational analysis" of someone's work.

[chronozphere]

I agree with deathshadow that there are some flaws. Using tables for layout is not a good thing. Also, the XHTML has "some" errors:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...idator%2F1.767

On the other hand, I totally agree with AthenaOfDelphi that your post sounds somewhat offensive (allthough this is probably not your intention). Note that we are not experienced web developers, so please don't make us feel like we should've known better. We're all still learning, you see.