Downtime 05/05/07 -- Finished

[Spriggan]

TWG will be down from around 10pm MST Saturday till hopfully Midnight MST, we're moving to a new server this weekend.

Anyone that has a TWG e-mail that wants to keep it needs to PM me or e-mail me if you want to keep it since I'm only transfering ones of the people I've already talked with.

[Spriggan]

Ok we're over on the new server, hopefully there wasn't anything lost in the transfer so let me know if there is anything missing or not working right, we still have 9 days left at Bluehost.

[EUOL]

Sprig,

Can't get any of the department pages to work.  Has someone else mentioned this?

[Spriggan]

No, I didn't notice this until last night when you mentioned it in the call for articles thread.

[Spriggan]

Instead of implenting the old deparment pages I'm coding a new system.  You can see what I doing at this code: http://www.timewastersguide.com/?dept=VG

Also if anyone with edit powers notices bad characters please fix them, a lot of our special characters (e.g. ',",:,;) didn't make the transfer from one database to the other and come out looking really crappy.

edit: Or better yet if someone will post a translation guide as too what gibberish equals what character I'll write a script that will fix everything.

[Spriggan]

ok department pages are up.  The trick to them is they generate their own blurbs by trying to grab the first paragraph of the article, the script does this by looking for the fist set of <p></p> tags (as is proper XHTML).  If only the article title is showing that means it couldn't find the correct set because there isn't any and if the whole article is showing that means you've got a <p/> tag which is a no no.

This is pretty much the method I'm going to stick with, it's better to generate the intro blurb this way then typeing our own so this means Nessa is going to have to add to the style guide how to deal with placing anything but the opeing paragraph first (like publisher, author actor info).  I'll be happy to help in this, I'd suggest header tags, like h4 as seen here after my modification
http://www.timewastersguide.com/view.php?id=1510

we can discuss font size and weight as well since I can change all of those.

[Spriggan]

we now have clean URLS for both the departments and the articles.

so for movies you'd goto http://www.timewastersguide.com/deparment/Movies
and for an article you can use http://www.timewastersguide.com/article/1510 or http://www.timewastersguide.com/review/1510

Why is this good?  Well now Google will index all those pages, search engines don't like anything after the file type (the ? and beyond) so they only index those via direct link and not via spidering a site.

[Spriggan]

Ok I'm going to have a few more changes, the article/review title can be placed in the URL like thus:
http://www.timewastersguide.com/review/1535/Doppleganger

articles with spaces in the name should be done thusly: http://www.timewastersguide.com/review/1540/The-Fresco

This is not nessacery but I'm going to start manually doing this in places where possible.

[Spriggan]

so here's a list of special characters I've found that need to be fixed, if anyone else has any more let me know ASAP.

’ = '
“ = "
” = "
— = -
é = e
�  = tab or multiple spaces (indents)

Also I believe I have the article urls just how I want them.
so spaces are replaced with - while , ; " ' / and just about every symobol I could thing of are removed completly as in this example:
http://www.timewastersguide.com/article/1237/A-Geek-Girls-Guide-to-Spreading-Tolerance

lastly & is turned into and

[Spriggan]

ok special characters are fixed, sort of.  I went and copy and pasted everything from the old database to the new one so there's no more jibberish.  However we still have the problem of having word's magic quotes and other things stored in our database so they won't export correctly to a dump.

also, we lost 2 blurbs (the one's from this week), sorry nessa I forgot to back those up.

[Fellfrosch]

The search function is totally dead.

[Nessa]

also, we lost 2 blurbs (the one's from this week), sorry nessa I forgot to back those up.

I had them backed up at home, so it's ok.

[Spriggan]

The search function is totally dead.

Fixed, just needed to change a pointer to a file.

I'm probably going to change our search function, we're really not using a effective method.

[Spriggan]

We now have a space for the ISBN/ASIN of an item, if this is filled out an image will appear form amazon in the deparment page and on the article itself.

If you need this for movie reviews, nessa, just do a search for the movie at amazon in the DVD section and grab it there.� Amazon has all the new movies up on their site so people can do this.

I'm also going to add a custom image slot eventually so articles like the nerdery and geek girl can have their own picutres.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I nominate Sprig for the "Rocks the Casbah" trophy