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.
New AAG theme in development
Wednesday, April 19th, 2006
As the title says, I’m working on a new AAG theme. It’s not revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination – the main elements remain the same – but it should be less dull than the current theme. You can switch to it by going to the Change Theme page and selecting “Newtest” (i.e. “new test”, not “that which is most newt”).
First off, before you select it and hit that reply form to say “This new theme sucks!”, this is by no means a finished style. At the time of writing, links were all pink. I’m quite sure that won’t be in the final version. The intention of posting it to the blog is to get some feedback/inspiration; suggestions of colours that do work together, ideas that I hadn’t thought of, things that definitely don’t work, and so on. If someone’s using an exotic browser that Does Strange Things with the theme, I’d like to hear about it before we make it the default.
On a related note, if there are any CSS masters out there reading this, feel free to develop your own themes if you feel like it; we’ll be happy to modify the HTML to accomodate anything you need to get it to work, and we’ll be happy to add finished themes to the CSS selection box, with obvious exceptions such as obscene themes.
New AAG ‘MegaFeed’
Monday, April 17th, 2006
I’ve just created a new “MegaFeed” for AAG; it provides the following data in RSS format:
- Reviews
- Previews
- Cheats
- Articles
At the moment you can only see reviews and previews, as we are in need of new articles and cheats, but they should just appear when applicable.
As for why I’ve not included news or the blog, I feel that they are better-served by separate feeds:
- News has the potential to flood the content provided by the megafeed off, whilst reviews, previews, cheats and articles are lower-volume.
- This blog is more of a separate kind of content; reviews, previews, cheats and articles are typically specifically about games, whilst this blog contains non-gaming content such as this post, and a more informal style of writing even when talking about games – our articles, news and previews all go through proof reading to spot grammar/spelling issues, and to point out where something doesn’t scan. Blog entries are just written on a whim. Fundamentally I simply feel that it is a different style of information.
You can find the feed at megafeed.rss in /feeds/. I’d be interested to hear any comments (either via the comments form or e-mail) on whether new data should be added, existing data should be taken out, or any other changes which may improve its usefulness.
After a while of no complaints I’ll set this as a replacement for the individual feeds – the individual feeds will still be available, but won’t be cluttering up your “Add RSS Feed” options.
Welcome too!
Thursday, April 13th, 2006
I don’t think Dave should steal all the “Welcome” thunder, so I thought I’d post too, and welcome you all to our new blog, which we think is doomedhas a lot of potential.
Hopefully you’ll find it interesting enough to keep visiting, and maybe even subscribe to our RSS feed. We’ll try and not disappoint by posting regularly – or at least semi-regularly.
So what have I been doing recently? Some reviews and previews, but news posts mainly – which is why we need a new news editor… (applications to the usual address) I’ve also been trying out the Xbox 360 on my new 19″ Viewsonic VX924 monitor – oh the joy of HD (with widescreen borders admittedly).
Welcome to the allaboutgames.co.uk blog!
Thursday, April 13th, 2006
As the title says, welcome! We have now finally jumped on the blog bandwagon, so as to keep you, our readers, up to date on the latest happenings in AAGland, and whatever else we want to boreentertain you with at the time.
If you find any issues with the blog, of any kind, please e-mail me with details of the issue, and I’ll try to sort it out.
To wrap this first post up, here’s a status update on the forums: I’m still working on it, the main issue is that there are still layout issues to sort out though. I know that they are being missed, and I am trying hard to get these issues sorted.
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