News moves to PHP, Blog takes over Site News
Friday, April 4th, 2008
This post delivers our aim of giving more to the blogoffice furniture in Bulgariaoffice furniture in Bulgaria
office furniture in Bulgaria
in two ways: firstly I’m updating you about site development, and secondly, more regular updates are guarenteed with the new integration.
Firstly, the move to PHP. For years now most of AAG has been powered by PHP with our lovely MySQL database sitting in the background. An exception to this has been the discussion board, powered by a combination of Perl and CGI that Dave has been hacking away at for years. While he’s not a fan of PHP, it makes sense to integrate with the rest of the site, and indeed we’ve wanted to change for a while. But the old tech has been serving its purpose and has also been powering our news and site news sections. Well, we’ve just made a big step away from the 2002 technology with the move of the news section to our main database, and it’s now also in PHP. You will likely not notice the difference - the posts and the index look pretty much the same, aside from a few minor tweaks which are nothing to do with the change of technology. The URL now works in the same way as the rest of the site as a result, too.
Complementing this is the integration of Site News into the Blog. We’ve always intended to post about site developments on here anyway, and so it makes sense to incorporate the announcements here too. As a result of this merge, we’ve freed up space on the front page which is duly taken over by a list of the latest blog entries. This mean you’ll also still see the latest site announcements in the same place. The integration again removes a tie to the old discussion board.
So what does this mean for its future? Well, we’ll discuss that in a future blog entry, but ultimately it will close in its current form, and the last of the old and nasty code from the aagV3 days will finally be gone.
AAG Redesign Teaser #1
Friday, April 4th, 2008
It’s now been a few years since we launched AAGv5, with a slight improvement over the (frankly very bad) colours that it launched with midway through its life. Now, whilst AAGv5 is certainly, in our opinion at least, an improvement over its predecessor in both design and underlying code, it’s still not the most modern looking design in the world. However, we have since enlisted external help, and as such, I’m pleased to reveal the first teaser for how we’ll hopefully look before too long:
…OK, the logo’s not final, and none of this has actually been coded yet - it’s just an image. However, hopefully it gives you an idea of the direction in which we’re going with our new look, and I hope you like it.
The Recent Downtime
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Well, I promised more updates to the blog, and then we disappear for a while. Sorry about that, but we really will now get on with giving you more details on here! With the integration of site news into the blog (to be explained in a post later today), I thought I’d re-post the recent site news item explaining our downtime below:
————
If you’ve been following the “AAG Temp Blog” that was up on allaboutgames.co.uk over the past couple of weeks you’ll be aware of why we went away. The main site was down for about two and a half weeks, and was the result of unexpected consequences of a server move, which have left the site out of action. With little notice the server needed to be physically moved, but problems were encountered at its new location, and thus prevented it from being set up again. The uncertainty over what would happen next meant it took a while for us to set up the temporary blog to provide you with some content until the full site was restored.
The new location is - as you can see from the restoration of the site - now fully set up and ready to bring you a full range of coverage once more. Further bad luck delayed this stage too - the server itself was actually damaged in transit, but thankfully the HDDs were intact, and we were able to eventually the restore the site on new hardware.
We apologise for the lengthy downtime, and we hope you will continue to visit allaboutgames.co.uk in the future - a future where we hopefully won’t experience anything like this again!
Blog to return to action
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
It’s been nearly 9 months since the last blog entry here on aag, so it’s about time we got back to action. As well as general musings, we’ll be keeping you informed of work on our upcoming redesign, which is likely to see further integration of the blog into the site. We also have other plans, like a forum migration and relaunch, and we hope you will be interested to see where we’re going with this, and provide feedback both on here and on the board.
I can’t speak on behalf of other writers, but I certainly hope to make posts reasonably regularly, so please stay tuned to the allaboutgames.co.uk blog.
A new server, a new stylesheet (and maybe some forums too)
Monday, February 26th, 2007
We’ve been planning to move servers for quite a while now, and over the past weekend we’ve finally been doing it. Along with this server move comes two things; 1) a new stylesheet (well, I say “new”, but it’s been in development for quite a long time now), and 2) the forums! Wahey!
With the new server switch, the forums being opened, and the new stylesheet, there may well be some issues, so please don’t hesitate to contact us if you spot anything broken or wrong or just plain ugly (with the one exception of various forum pages in IE6; they’ll always look wrong. Upgrade to IE7 or Firefox or Opera.)
That’s pretty much all I have to say except enjoy!
The current forums status
Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
I thought I’d just post an update as to the status of the forums. We’re postponing our switchover until we switch hosts, because of the dreaded CGI limits error you may have seen.
For the slightly more technical amongst you, the CGI limits error occurs when we have a whole load of hung Perl processes. I’m not sure if this is a bug in the UBB, or an issue with 1&1, since it only seems to happen every so often, but it’s happening too often to reopen the forums.
We should be switching hosts RealSoonNow, as we need to renew the domain hosting package soon, and it makes sense to switch then.
Charts Change, Driver Difficulties (Alliteration Affliction?)
Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006
As of yesterday’s charts, we’ve switched from the “Full Price” charts over to the “All Prices” charts. Why? Because of games like Liberty City Stories on PS2, and Brain Training. Hopefully this should mean that our charts now give a more accurate view of game sales.
In other minor news, I got a bit of a blast from the past when my new Super (Happy Fun Mega) Joy Box 13 GameCube to USB adaptor arrived yesterday; whilst it’s identified and supported in both Linux and Windows as a standard USB gamepad, to use some of the more advanced features (such as rumble) in Windows it needs a driver. This driver is shipped on a floppy disk. Since it’s probably been a long time since you’ve had to look at one, let me refresh your memory:
I had a hard time just finding a working floppy drive.
(I don’t get any commission from Console Plus, they’ve just been useful in terms of stocking less mainstream items such as GBA screwdrivers and extension cables for old consoles like the N64.)
“Sidebar being cut off” bug fixed
Saturday, May 27th, 2006
Thanks to a reference in IEBlog prompting me to search for information on the “Guillotine bug”, and /* Position Is Everything */ for providing a workaround, that annoying “sidebar gets cut off when the content is shorter than the sidebar in MSIE” bug that’s been there since AAGv5’s launch in 2005 is now non-existent.
<insert cheers here>
Internet Explorer 6 utterly, utterly sucks.
Saturday, May 20th, 2006
As per title. The forum topic code works in Gecko. It works in Opera. It works in KHTML. But does it work in IE6? Of course not! That’d be far too easy! Instead it is utterly broken, and will require more code for this one broken case.
End of rant.
Forum Progress Update
Friday, May 19th, 2006
Just thought I’d post an update on the status of the forums. I’ve now fixed the main issue that I was running into, and so hopefully not much will stall me from now until whenever we launch; I believe it’s simply a case of some extremely tedious code replacement from now on. I’ve done a few hours of this today, and this status update is as I finish for the night.
Once the forum code is all replaced, all that needs to be done is to sort out the new theme so that it doesn’t fall apart on lower resolutions, so hopefully we’re talking fairly soon. And I don’t mean that as in “8 months” (sorry about that).
If I’ve made any typos here, blame tiredness. Staring at my own crappy several year old HTML tends to do that to me.
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