If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the
FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to
register or
login before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.
| 22 OCT 2008 at 6:54am |
| Deleted User | Originally Posted By TAS (22 OCT 2008 2:08am)
I just removed the thick white tape from the nose bridge of my glasses and realized I'd grown a mustache!
Now, back on topic: I agree.
Actually, a third-party volunteer might be welcome to scrape the info and cook up a new data stew.
[smiley=laughing.gif] at all the 'geek' comments;
And, Traveler, it's the groupies of course. - Halcyon - groupies don't go for geeks - do you see any around Bill Gates? :
...and back on topic - I think you guys are right. As we have already seen, the idea of starting a seperate thread for recent games only, is simply not working. People are just happily posting in the thread I started to this end, the same way as they are posting in the similar thread started by Andromus; - with chatter about recent and old games mixed together. :-/
|
| 22 OCT 2008 at 4:13pm |
Terry PenrodGrand Inquisitor
Posts : 6693
Joined: 16 OCT 2004
Location: US, Texas
Status : Offline | .
Would it really be that hard to implmement a free, open-source database system to manage sections like reviews / walkthroughs and to add a basic search feature with standard drop-down lists for filtering?
Several of my smaller business clients use those programs for online catalogs, etc. and they have zero IT experience. The only real difference is that the main listings here would be game titles instead of product names and the text + graphics that load for each linked page would be reviews instead of product specs, etc.
The same open-source software also has a global auto-dating feature, so the site administrators don't need to mess with adding or updating that information manually. They can also set groups of highlighted info like client quotes and recent news blurbs to rotate automatically every time a page loads or refreshes.
Cheers, Terry
|
| 22 OCT 2008 at 8:07pm |
RecklessJourneyman
Posts : 962
Joined: 14 NOV 2002
Status : Online | Work was done on such a thing (I even have a demo site that's still running you could laugh at!) but ultimately I'm certain things went way too slow and communication wasn't very good.
A couple of years (yep, it's been years!) have been wasted first with something that never happened, then waiting for something that never worked out and finally working on something that whilst looked good maybe wasn't what the doctor ordered?
There were some cool ideas floating around and the demo site showed some of them off but it meant a pretty large change in how the site was constructed. I've no real evidence but my guess is that it was too daunting to migrate the existing data :-/
[url=http://leisuresuitlarry.dyndns.org/]Leisure Suit Larry Archive Site[/url]&&[url=http://www.adamhearn.co.uk]Hearn Garage[/url]
|
| 22 OCT 2008 at 9:00pm |
Terry PenrodGrand Inquisitor
Posts : 6693
Joined: 16 OCT 2004
Location: US, Texas
Status : Offline | .
I just thought that one of the newer open-source modules designed to handle simple online database searches might work (for this limited application and without the need to revamp the whole website).
Of course, I don't know exactly what would be involved because I'm not a programmer. But those free apps have worked well for several smaller business clients of mine and none of them have any real IT experience.
Cheers, Terry
|
| 22 OCT 2008 at 10:56pm |
JKingSchattenjger
Posts : 2349
Joined: 4 MAY 2008
Location: 0
Status : Offline | Originally Posted By Terry_Penrod (22 OCT 2008 9:00pm)
Of course, I don't know exactly what would be involved because I'm not a programmer.
More importantly we (or at least I, anyway!) don't know what the current JA backend looks like. All other things being equal retrofitting a static-file (or simple templated) system into a database-backed one is usually trivial so long as the data being retrofitted is largely uniform (which JA reviews generally are), but there may be complicating factors, such as rigid existing software which makes this difficult or impractical, or matters of load balancing and redundancy which would be disrupted by such a change, or a number of other problems.
Personally I'd much rather see some URI restructuring first. It's non-trivial to navigate from one document/section to another via only URIs on JA. For example, /yabb/ will not bring you to the forums, /reviews/ will not bring you to the review index and /reviews/Alida/ will not bring you to the relevant review, though all these really should work thus.
You can't kill someone in a studio.
|
| 22 OCT 2008 at 11:05pm |
Terry PenrodGrand Inquisitor
Posts : 6693
Joined: 16 OCT 2004
Location: US, Texas
Status : Offline | .
Sounds like you would be a good person to assess the backend JKing.
If Randy had no objection to letting you to take a look, would you be willing to give it the old once over?
Who knows? Maybe it wouldn't be all that hard to integrate a limited database search feature on the site - or at least for a couple of specific sections like reviews and walkthroughs.
Cheers, Terry
|
| 22 OCT 2008 at 11:27pm |
RecklessJourneyman
Posts : 962
Joined: 14 NOV 2002
Status : Online | I'm sure there's no harm in letting you take a peek.. be warned it's not themed :-X
[url=http://leisuresuitlarry.dyndns.org/]Leisure Suit Larry Archive Site[/url]&&[url=http://www.adamhearn.co.uk]Hearn Garage[/url]
|
| 23 OCT 2008 at 3:15am |
JKingSchattenjger
Posts : 2349
Joined: 4 MAY 2008
Location: 0
Status : Offline | Originally Posted By Terry_Penrod (22 OCT 2008 11:04pm)
Sounds like you would be a good person to assess the backend JKing.
I would if I wasn't so lazy and also already busy with something else.
If Randy had no objection to letting you to take a look, would you be willing to give it the old once over?
Who knows? Maybe it wouldn't be all that hard to integrate a limited database search feature on the site - or at least for a couple of specific sections like reviews and walkthroughs.
One never knows. Certainly almost anything is possible if you're willing to devote enough time and effort to engineering it (and you have decent tools). Even if a database backend for reviews could not practically be implemented within the current JA framework, one could still nevertheless construct a script which updates several sorted tables based on data scraped from the static review list and reviews linked therefrom, and presto nothing need ever change for JA editors and the feature takes care of itself.
Just a thought.
You can't kill someone in a studio.
|
| 23 OCT 2008 at 6:00am |
Lucien21Guild Master
Posts : 4876
Joined: 9 JUL 2003
Location: 0
Status : Offline | Originally Posted By Reckless (22 OCT 2008 11:27pm)
I'm sure there's no harm in letting you take a peek... be warned it's not themed :-X
That at least looks a lot neater if a tad plain.
Certainly a step in the right direction though.
Dear Diary, My teenage angst bullsh*t now has a bodycount.
|
| 23 OCT 2008 at 7:24am |
CarolineJA+ Overseer
Posts : 16540
Joined: 28 JAN 2007
Location: AU
Status : Offline | Wouldn't Susan, Goddess of the SUR be a handy person to speak to about this subject? Afterall, she must know what games have been released recently.
|
