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Post by Tenjen on Jun 12, 2008 9:03:12 GMT -5
I seem unable to load the pages with dobsons comics,
is this just me or? Getting slow loads and it then stops incomplete
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Post by Nixie on Jun 12, 2008 15:42:27 GMT -5
*Tests it* Huh. It does load slowly...
GAAAH. I know why. The pages are set to preload, but it loads them ALL AT ONCE, from the first page to the last, so the page that first pops up is the last one to load! GAH! T_T I need to get rid of the preloader....
In the meantime, you should be able to read the comics if you jump to the start with that lovely "Click here to start at the beginning" thing below the unloading page.
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Post by Tenjen on Jun 12, 2008 16:11:28 GMT -5
ah that explains why i can switch between the comics so fast.
when iam lucky enough to load it all without errors
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Post by Kristal Rose on Jun 12, 2008 23:55:02 GMT -5
I recently told you that method would be a problem. I once wrote you a precognitive sequential preloader slide-show. You should tear it apart and rewrite it yourself some day.
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Post by Nixie on Jun 14, 2008 0:51:33 GMT -5
I don't have that slide show anymore. You sent that to me before I knew you could save pages. I think I'll just get rid of the preloader.
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Post by Kristal Rose on Jun 14, 2008 1:49:25 GMT -5
I can send it to you again if you want.
Basically at it's core what it did was create and load an object with an image at the page onload. When that was done it would create and load the next one. The img names were from an array, the order was done by the 'precog' code. The slideshow then operated by copying the objects into a div. The array of img names also kept track of which ones had been loaded so far. Now that I think of it, even without the priortizer part, it was pretty heavy on the javasript coding.
Before you knew you could save pages? There was such a time?
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Post by Nixie on Jun 15, 2008 14:35:23 GMT -5
There was.
Uh, your code, would it require me to rename every comic page and make them all the same size??
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Post by Kristal Rose on Jun 15, 2008 22:07:54 GMT -5
The only requirement for the page names is that they all contain sequential numbers of the same length, ie blahblahxxxxblah.gif, the rest of their names are identical, and they alll reside in the same folder somewhere. I may have made the urls absolute, but you could change that.
It's been so long that I may have confused two systems, one that was totally automatic and used self sizing, which in the case of IE5 didn't resize after the first image was displayed, and another where all the images were in an array, and two fields contained height and width. Still the preloading and VCR controls were automatic depending on viewer position and what had loaded so far. Either way, it did more and was easier to use than creating a page for each comic. At worst, all you had to do was add a new line to the table on the one page.
I think it even supported framesets without redundant code running for multiple comics open, which was kind of an ordeal to achieve, because generally javascript prefers to operate in the context of the current page.
I think the last thing which bogged me down, but I did get working was an entirely js/html based thumbnail slideshow like those eBay shopping viewers which could scoot and accelerate in either direction depending on how you moused over it, and when you clicked on a thumbnail it loaded the main frame above it. That model used preloading for both the thumbnails and main images, and would use the main image as a thumbnail if no separate thumbnail was listed in the table. The slide show could be reversed to prior images, but would pause waiting for forward images to load rather than panning empty thumbnails.
I could email you all the code (or I may still have links to it), or if you really think you'd use it this time, I cold sort it all out and create you a version with whichever features you wanted.
Last time you complained about which active/disabled buttons of yours I used, which could have been changed by replacing eight image names. The point was never the formatting. The idea was that you'd place a slideshow object in whatever div you needed, and reformat the slideshow object to fit your page color/motif.
So if you're interested, here are your options: [ ] Be sent all the code to sort out yourself. [ ] Have me rewrite you a fresh tested version with any of the following features * [ ] Auto content populating (no reediting required) * [ ] Numeric Sequential preloading * [ ] Ordered preloading * [ ] Contextual precognitive preloading * [ ] Same preloading options for separate thumbnails too * [ ] Panning thumbnail filmstrip * [ ] Automatic contextual VCR buttons * [ ] Drop-down GoTo menu of whole series {triggers new loading context} * [ ] Drop-down GoTo menu of currently loaded pages.
My doing any or all of that would probably take less time than the sculpture project I haven't really even started for your birthday.
I could start with an array based ordered preloader (last page, first page, end-1, first five, every tenth) or context preloader with auto VCR controls, and send you a panning thumbnail slideshow later.
As I recall, my slideshow was buggy in IE6 and would reload thumbnails indefinitely until the memory crashed 10 hours later.
Arrays, not auto-naming, were the way to go to specify height-width, which was the only assured method of sizing for all browsers.
OR.. I could just dig up the critical few lines of js code of how to achieve any preloading at all, to preload and later display an object, and how to test the object or have it trigger the next preload, if you want to write your own preloader. Testing can be a huge pain. You have to empty your cache and temp files, and reload your browser between tests, otherwise your browser ignores all your preloading code and just digs up the copy in cache.
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Post by Nixie on Jun 16, 2008 11:41:34 GMT -5
Man, so complicated... I'm almost considering switching to having a frame for the comic and a frame for thumbnails or something. Tenj already expressed annoyance at seeing the bottom of the page before the top.
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Post by Kristal Rose on Jun 16, 2008 19:24:31 GMT -5
Frame for each? That's not a bad plan at all. Even then though, a sequential loader for the thumb nails, and a preloader for the main images would be good. Since the browser would automatically multitask between those two frames anyhow, at least the current loading main image would only be competing with the loading of one thumbnail at a time, and not with the loading of all of them.
Yeah, it is complicated. That's why some companies have been able to build themselves around a single slide-show product for store viewers, and why many prefer to do the background loading via Ajax in Flash. Even then those slideshows didn't have features I wrote. I've seen them auto-panning along, oblivious that the subsequent slides haven't even loaded yet. Of course if you did that in js/html instead of Flash, all your dimensional formatting would fruk up too.
Since I've got higher priorities and don't just do whatever it takes to be perfect these days, opting for practical instead; how about I dig out my code and string together the simplest effective preloader with VCR I can make. Well, maybe I could do one with a panning-slideshow-VCR, but it would still be simpler.
The last slide show used a table. I could do one this time with a two row table, where the bottom row has no images, but is a narrow line underneath images which switches background to indicate visited pages. Before, I had to mask over the ends of the slideshow where image widths compressed in and out of view. This time I could mask them with table cells containing the first and last page thumbnails in the background, and 'first' and 'last' VCR buttons in the foreground. Oh, I could also use another color below the thumbnails to indicate which main images have already preloaded.
I could probably have that written in [2 hrs: find and review old code, 4 hrs: strip and revise old code, 2 hrs: write new code, 2 hrs: testing and refinement] about 10 hours. It took me intermittent weeks to write (the preloading panning slideshow for my mom, not the auto-VCR preloaer for you).
All you'd have to do to install it is create a div with ID where the thing goes (or two divs if you want a version with separate slideshow and main-image for custom framing options without modifying the core html inside the script), load the js in the html header, and call the slideshow-init in the page's 'onload' method. Oh, and list all the image names and dimensions in the array.
Or I cauld just rewrite the earlier autoload VCR control which doesn't ever require ediing the image list, just specifying the image naming pattern when first installed. That one doesn't support thumbnails though. I could probably get that one running and verified in 2-4 hours.
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Post by Nixie on Jun 17, 2008 11:00:00 GMT -5
I'd like to have a site that I can fix on my own whenever things get messed up. I'll figure out something with frames and thumbnails, who cares about preloading...
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Post by Kristal Rose on Jun 17, 2008 20:30:59 GMT -5
How about I send you the basic lines of code used in preloading then, and the code to generate an html entity from a data array. Do you think you might have enough javascript skill to use that?
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Post by Nixie on Jun 17, 2008 20:37:10 GMT -5
... No, actually.
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Post by Kristal Rose on Jun 17, 2008 20:42:06 GMT -5
Didnt you take a js class? You really should if site design will be part of your career. At the mimimum as a front end designer you need to know all the onclick, onload, onchange sort of methods available, and how to ID your html such that programmers could programmatically replace contents and formatting.
For that matter, you should also be capable of supplying programmatically generated front-end content.
Your Flash tabs must have been slightly programmatic. Did you just use a template for that?
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Post by Nixie on Jun 17, 2008 20:47:20 GMT -5
Oh. I know about THOSE. But otherwise I'm kinda lost. I learned ActionScript, which is derived from JavaScript, only that's for Flash. There weren't any classes on Javascript at my college...
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