Hub improvements so far... in BYOND Discussion

ID:138294
 
Nov 21 2000, 2:34 pm

I have made a few changes to the hub to make it more useful and also better looking. You will have to help me out on the better looking part, though. Add an icon or banner to your hub entry!

Eventually, the banners in the hub will be used to create banners in Dream Seeker, but at this moment, the two are still independent. One reason is the fact that Dream Seeker wants .bmp files and the hub wants more widely supported (and better compressed) .gif or .jpeg files. We will do some automatic conversion on the backend, but for now, you will have to do it yourself.

Banners can just be small little "Enter!" messages or whatever you want. They don't have to be full-blown graphics.

The DM Resources area is still incomplete, but there is a new Tutorials section ready and waiting for you to post a helpful little project.

Because of the recent savefile corruption trouble (now fixed), changes you may have made to the hub in the past are probably lost. Please try it again. This time it will stick!

--Dan

p.s. My apologies to Gughunter for the crappy job of image conversion I did on the Space Tug banner. That was my test case to prove that it worked! (I was very annoyed to see that the blue star didn't come through.)

#1 Nov 21 2000, 3:17 pm
On 11/21/00 2:34 pm Dan wrote:
Eventually, the banners in the hub will be used to create banners in Dream Seeker, but at this moment, the two are still independent.

Ah very good idea.

The DM Resources area is still incomplete, but there is a new Tutorials section ready and waiting for you to post a helpful little project.

I'll drive home now and do that!

About converting graphics...I pointed Tom at some package a few weeks ago...ah here it is:

http://www.imagemagick.org/

This looks pretty ideal, in that it's free, unix-enabled, and has a Perl module allowing you to do conversions on the fly.

This might be what you are already using, or you might have another solution -- just wanted to mention it in case it got lost in the server foo.
#2 Nov 21 2000, 10:27 pm
In response to Deadron (#1)
Okay added the Step BYOND tutorial to the Tutorial listings on the hub...
#3 Nov 21 2000, 11:35 pm
In response to Deadron (#2)
On 11/21/00 10:27 pm Deadron wrote:
Okay added the Step BYOND tutorial to the Tutorial listings on the hub...

I've been a busy little BYONDer tonight...

I added icon/banner for Living & Dead to the hub, and a temporary banner for DragonSnot, which is a logo designed by Andreas (Guy will be doing the official banner).

Living & Dead was moved to Polaris (I'll work on it again someday), and I submitted bmp banners for both games.

A look at the hub shows that the graphics definitely make things more eye-catching, but that we'll no doubt have more visual tweaking to do to make things look good.

A question that came up: in the hub how do I make a link that uses the Dantom cgi script for the website and the pure BYOND link for DreamSeeker? The hub seems to do that for itself, but the links I created in text had to be one or the other.
#4 Nov 22 2000, 10:20 am
In response to Deadron (#3)

A question that came up: in the hub how do I make a link that uses the Dantom cgi script for the website and the pure BYOND link for DreamSeeker? The hub seems to do that for itself, but the links I created in text had to be one or the other.

Yes, I was trying to avoid actually parsing html text by having the url in its own separate field. I see why you wanted the extra link--perhaps this should be standardized.

Otherwise, I suppose I could parse the html and convert byond links as necessary. If, in general, you just want a way to insert the main URL into your description somewhere, this could be achieved with a special tag. That way you wouldn't have to type the same address twice and I wouldn't have to parse the html.

--Dan

#5 Nov 22 2000, 11:44 am
In response to Dan (#4)
On 11/22/00 10:20 am Dan wrote:
Yes, I was trying to avoid actually parsing html text by having the url in its own separate field. I see why you wanted the extra link--perhaps this should be standardized.

Yeah, multiple reasons. The main URL might be a link to the source code, while the link in text is an optional "try playing it now" link, or we might want to put multiple links in the text...

The primary reason I was putting links in the text, though, was because of my experience with my home page. I have a home page I kinda like, in which you get to the major sections of the site by clicking on the image with that section name. However, I've found that many people never realize that they can click on the image.
#6 Nov 22 2000, 12:04 pm
In response to Deadron (#5)
Yeah, multiple reasons. The main URL might be a link to the source code, while the link in text is an optional "try playing it now" link, or we might want to put multiple links in the text...


One way to achieve this is to create entries inside of your main one with additional links. At the moment, this does not appear quite the way I would like, so I am thinking about ways to improve that.

--Dan