Ha, okay, this isn't much of a game. But you should do it anyhow!
I'm almost done with a website for a cool local band that's got a big radio broadcast this Sunday night. They're going to mention the site on the show, so they're hoping to get a lot of traffic coming over. I've tested the site on Safari, MacIE, WinIE in XP, whatever version that is, and Firefox, but I don't have access to older IE's or Netscapes.
I'd like to have an idea of what's going to happen when a large number of people with various browsers/platforms hit the site before Sunday, so if y'all could please head on over and muck around in it, I'd be mighty appreciative.
(and yes, I'm aware it doesn't yet validate. I made some dumb mistakes with the doctype. I'm going through and fixing it, but it's going to take me a bit.)
[ March 04, 2005, 09:21 AM: Message edited by: Zeugma ]
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
It loads a bit slowly for me, and I'm on a full T1 here. If you're expecting massive traffic, that might be a problem. Your photos page is also broken in IE at high resolutions; it looks like Gallery isn't forcing itself to draw within the lines, and that's blowing your boxes to h**l.
Otherwise, it looks quite good. It's my opinion that the top photo should link back to the initial splash page, though.
[ March 04, 2005, 09:48 AM: Message edited by: TomDavidson ]
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
Yeah, we had to move the server to our business-class cable at home, and Time Warner is the devil. I don't think we're expecting *massive* traffic, but I do want to make sure nothing explodes.
I ran the schedule page through browsercam, and it looks like I have some alignment issues with Opera 6 and some Mozillas. Netscape 4's and IE 4's just totally kerplode, but I wasn't expecting much there. Is there any sort of rule-of-thumb for what browsers I need to be prepared for?
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
Okay, I'll check out the gallery layout. Good to know.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
I also think you might want to completely bypass the initial album index in this implementation of Gallery. Since you've only got one album (besides the test album), your photos link may as well -- at least for now -- take users directly to the entire gallery of photos itself, rather than to a screen that requires another click.
The music downloads work fine, although we're still not talking speedy. What kind of bandwidth monitoring are you doing?
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"Is there any sort of rule-of-thumb for what browsers I need to be prepared for?"
In an ideal world, all of 'em. But in the real world, IE5 and later, Netscape 6 and later, and Firefox are the biggies. Handling the PC implementation of IE6 takes care of something like 70% of your potential audience.
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Oh, one more thing: your schedule page creates full popup windows on event clicks, with title bars and everything. Why not use layers, or at least make the popups modal? (You might also consider, since you're using live hyperlinks to the web pages displayed in the event info, making the street addresses Mapquest or Google Map links.)
[ March 04, 2005, 09:57 AM: Message edited by: TomDavidson ]
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
Hmmm, bandwidth monitoring.... I'll have to ask Mark about that. I know he keeps an eye on it with all the MT comment spam we were getting for a while. Which, I just have to brag, he's totally eradicated. *swoon* Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
I thought about having the gallery link go straight to the album... it's how I have it working on our site. I'm planning on handing control of the content over to the guys soon, though, and I'm trying to make the functionality as obvious as possible. My fear would be that they'd just dump 300 photos at once into one hard to navigate album, not knowing they could do otherwise. It's the same reason I still have the test album up.
Maybe I'm not giving them enough credit...
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
No, you're probably right. I know too many Irish musicians. Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
How compatible are layers? They've always struck me as one more thing to go wrong in IE. The popup windows are straight from the open source phpicalendar project that the schedule is using, so I just went with what was there. What do you mean by "modal"?
Posted by Kasie H (Member # 2120) on :
I'm running Windows NT ... IE 6.0.???
Having trouble viewing the 'photos' page...it looks like it's replicating part of the frame/embedded table you have again on the right side. (I see the whole initial table centered on the page, and then about another quarter of it off to the right.) No problems with the other pages.
Edit: Yeah, I think this is the same problem Tom is having. Forgive me for not reading before posting...
[ March 04, 2005, 10:01 AM: Message edited by: Kasie H ]
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
Darn, I knew that Gallery installation was too easy. Posted by Beren One Hand (Member # 3403) on :
I think your site looks great.
One little suggestion. Your text in the popup windows is black. It is a bit hard to read with the green background.
Posted by Kama (Member # 3022) on :
The gallery works in Opera.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
You know, it actually occurs to me that what you want is the exact opposite of a modal window. You want something completely unobtrusive and as small as possible, ideally a frameless window without a title bar, that does not require user input and can even close without being clicked.
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
Like a little rollover-dealie? Mouse over the event, get a little box with info?
It wouldn't take me long to have something like that looking good on a standards-compliant browser *cough*, but doesn't that kind of thing tend to go all wonky cross-browsers?
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
I'll fix that font color, Beren! Thanks!
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
Okay, I think I got the Gallery thing fixed. Yes?
Posted by Farmgirl (Member # 5567) on :
Ooo! I love the "calendar" feature of the events schedule - it makes everything so easy to understand.
How do I do one of those calendars on my site?
Farmgirl
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Yes, it works.
And I think most modern browsers, even ones that aren't completely standards-compliant, support mouseover windows of SOME sort. *grin* You can do a chromeless popup window in Javascript, for example, or you could use a CSS object, either setting it visible or changing the z-index -- both of which should be supported by all major browsers.
Posted by HesterGray (Member # 7384) on :
It's all working for me. I'm on XP with IE.
Posted by Farmgirl (Member # 5567) on :
I really love the site - I think you've done a great job of design.
When I went to the "listen" page and tried to play one of the mp3s, however, it began to load (quicktime) and even played the first few notes, but then it totally crashed my Firefox.
I will try again and see if this is a problem.
Farmgirl
edit: okay the second time I tried it, both MP3 links worked fine for me -- good music!
[ March 04, 2005, 10:49 AM: Message edited by: Farmgirl ]
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
Whew, glad it worked!
Farmgirl, I'm using a project called phpicalendar to set up the calendar. This will let the band set up their events in Apple's free iCal program, all nice and easy-like, and have them automagically published to the site every time they make a change. It also let me set up a restricted calendar that only the band can see (if I got the login stuff working right, it's still a little shady). I'm sure there are other calendaring programs out there, too!
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
So, as far as the band editing the site goes, here's how it will work:
"About", "Mailinglist", and "Listen" page content (content only) will be in a yet-to-be-installed Content Management System, so they can make changes to member bios and such without screwing up my code.
"Schedule" will be updated by one of them adding events to iCal on their computer.
"Photos" will be uploaded directly from iPhoto, where they can name, edit, order, and put them into albums offline.
Whew! I'll be glad when this thing is out of my hands!
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:"About", "Mailinglist", and "Listen" page content (content only) will be in a yet-to-be-installed Content Management System, so they can make changes to member bios and such without screwing up my code.
If you don't want to do full CMS, you might look into server-side includes.
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
That's true, I had that on one of my earlier sites. Not a bad idea.
On the beer site, Mark set up Smarty templates for them to update content. Maybe I should look into getting that going for Traonach.
Posted by Fitz (Member # 4803) on :
I like the site a lot. Just thought I'd mention that I saw a little typo. In the about area, under The Band, you have a double "that":
quote: Years of playing together have created a tight, driving sound that that has moved audiences at festivals
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
Thanks Fitz! I got it fixed.
So, I emailed the guys the site, and in true band fashion, they asked if they could have a different schedule view, since the calendar makes them look like they aren't doing much. I think March looks packed full for a small local band, but hey.... so I whipped up this: http://www.traonach.com/schedule/
Is it working? Any comments?
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
"Does this schedule make my butt look fat?"
Posted by TMedina (Member # 6649) on :
Now that my co-workers are gone, I can comment - the new schedule looks fine, but the plain white text disappears into the green, black and bold white.
-Trevor
PS And never having seen your backside, I can't comment either.
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But in the real world, IE5 and later, Netscape 6 and later, and Firefox are the biggies. Handling the PC implementation of IE6 takes care of something like 70% of your potential audience.![[Blushing]](graemlins/blushing.gif)
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