Actually, in the broad daylight, I don't even understand why the third line catches an URL like /amiga/index.php?args=0;0;0;0;... at all, because the rule clearly has the end sign right after .php. More confusion

I could help, since I did my URL rewritting also with regex and did some jobs with it at work.

Unfortunately I hate regex and drunk too much beer this evening...

But I'll take a look tomorrow, when my head is clear and I understood what you mean...

Edited by dregenrocks at 00:33 on February, 19th 2006

I know I'm fishing in the dark here, but I guess it can't hurt to ask: Anyone here good with regular expressions? Old links should still work when the new system is launched, and generally, they do, because the backend didn't change much. Just one issue. Before, all subsections had their own index page (so there was /index.php, /amiga/index.php and so on). The new system just has one (/index.php), and all requests to the subsections are redirected to that page via Apache's mod_rewrite. Here's the entry:

RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ index.php?systemtemp=$1 [L]

This is working fine. Old links sometimes go to something like /amiga/index.php?args=...., though. So what I'm trying is to forward these options as well. Here's what I came up with - it's not working:

RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/index.php?args=(.*)$ index.php?systemtemp=$1&args=$2 [L]

For some reason, when I call a link in that style described above then, I get a 404 'not found' error, claiming /amiga/index.php isn't there. Which is true, it doesn't exist. However, why does it even try to find it from that rule? I don't get it. The best I came up with so far is this:

RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/index.php$ index.php?systemtemp=$1 [L]

That would send all old links which point to a subsection to the intro page of that subsection. Might be good enough, but not perfect.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't bother reading up on it. It's not the most fascinating topic. However, in the unlikely case anyone is spots my mistake immediately.... shoot!

Finished the comics section and I also wrote quite a long editorial about how different browsers render this design and why I didn't do any 'better'. I'm not going to upload this finished version to the preview area anymore, because I really want to publish it on the site's birthday and in case you find any additional issues with the version which is currently there, I'll 'backport' fixes to the non-public version.

All the better.

As I said on January 23rd, I'm aware of that, and I don't care People who are stupid enough to use that abomination probably wouldn't be smart enough to handle the advanced search features anyway

That's very strange, indeed, since the box definitions are the same on both pages. I guess it's not that fatal, though, because the text starts at the right point. Everything's still usable. It has to be related to the two-column contents on the main page, but that's clearly another browser bug then.

Now the screenshot of a detail-page.
As you see, the menu behaves in another way.

As I saw that screenie of dregenrocks, I found another interesting issue concerning the menu.
In this screenshot you see the index-site. The menu to the left isn't outside the contentbox ...

Spamboard does not take my screenshot as attachment, so look here:

http://www.dregenrocks.de/transfer/screenie01.jpg

Edited by dregenrocks at 14:14 on February, 15th 2006

Can't reproduce. But the submenus don't show up in IE6.

A screenshot says more than a thousand words (attachement).

Can anyone reproduce the non-appearing test bug in IE?

Seems to working with my IE 6.

@max-width: Ok, it's a feature *ggg*

Tried another fix for the left-menu-in-IE problem. Better?

That's intended. I set a minimum width (570px) and a maximum width (760px). If the window size is somewhere between that, it flows with that given size. I assume your browser window is occupying more space, so there's emptiness on the right

Uh... I thought I had fixed when I noticed it yesterday. Back to the testing booth...

Well, in my Firefox 1.5.0.1 it has still the "small" design as it it isn't using the whole width. But nonetheless I like that design

@IE: Is it sufficient to say that I hate the IE and its none-standard? It isn't looking that bad, but the menu (I mean the one on the left hand side) is inside the content-box and hiding the text. As far as I know it should work just to switch the div-boxes. At least it was enough on a site I had to build. Although it isn't really nice to have, in my case, the header-box at the bottom of the source-code ...

EDIT: With Opera 9 Preview 2 it looks quite fine.

Edited by Sir_Tyrann at 21:38 on February, 13th 2006

I'm well aware of the difference between not showing any interest and not having any, don't worry

Edit: For some reason, it's currently showing an ISE. No idea why, it's working fine here locally.

Edit2: Fixed.

Edited by Mr Creosote at 16:03 on February, 13th 2006

I'm still interested and reading, but don't have the time to help at the moment, sorry.

New version uploaded:

What's new:
-subcategories with different logos and colour schemes

Fixes:
-moved left menu to the left again for IE (thanks for not telling me it was sitting over the main text, everybody)

Issues:
-centering the games menu (ugly workaround applied)
-main page link on the logo not clickable (workaround: put main page link in left menu)
-comics section not touched yet
-IE sometimes just doesn't show the text in the main box at all. Status: Unknown cause.

In case anyone's wondering why I'm posting about the progress at all here in spite of nobody showing any interest - these are also reminders to myself.

Since nobody has suggested any solutions yet, I've uploaded yet another new version now.

What's new:

-fully working, i.e. all pages should appear and work (apart from missing images)

-categories for applications implemented (just two placeholders now, as I'm still waiting for suggestions)

Issues:

-centering the games menu (ugly workaround applied)

-main page link on the logo not clickable (workaround: put main page link in left menu)

-subcategories for each system have to be defined (stylesheets) / linked

-comics section not touched yet

Unless something really ugly turns up, I guess it can be published the way it is if no better solutions to the remaining problems are found

I uploaded a new version to the preview area. No testing has been done with IE, so if anyone could have a look, I'd be grateful.

Problem: The logo box is as wide as it can get, but the games menu is of fixed width. How to get it to the centre? If everything were positioned 'absolute', I could just use the old left:50%; margin-left:-halfofwidth; trick. However, if I use position: absolute, the elements without fixed width don't stretch to their complete available space, but only get as large as necessary (i.e. small).

I know I can do this by nesting divs, but that's an ugly hack. Any other ideas?

Additionally, I looked into the font size problem, and I can't recreate the error with Opera. The only options I have there are page zoom which leaves the relations between elements intact (still don't know why other browsers didn't pick this up), but nothing about just making fonts larger. Have you set some kind of minimum font size?

Other browsers can produce this problem, of course, but I'm not sure there is a real solution. Everything is already defined with px which is an absolute unit and it has proven to be the most 'robust' when switching around between different systems.

Third problem is the placement of the choice indicators in the logo box. I had to place another div over the visible one, and now it's not possible to click on the logo to return to the main page anymore.

Edited by Mr Creosote at 17:20 on February, 10th 2006

Aside from the fact that I had a deadline and got a grade for one and nothing out of the other

Seriously: There are two weeks left until the site anniversary. In spite of exam time beginning, I'll try to finish it until then.