OK, the index page and gallery page are finished for v2. Next I will work on the Tech Lab, write a lot of articles, etc. Then will come Wars, which will require writing more articles and adding Nibor's and some submitted ones. The rest of the main pages will be easier, but I'm saving the galleries for last. With so many gallery sections and so many new and planned pictures [several hundred], it is going to be a pain to work on.

The Movies section will no longer exist, instead, movies will be placed in their respective categories. Those modding movies will be findable in Tech once Nibor learns how to compress them.

I also made a slogan for SM, "Join the Revolution" , but it is not necessarily final. If you don't like it, now would be a good time to come up with an alternate slogan.

A few anouncements. Firstly, Dux has gotten the all go to buy soakermedia.net! Expect the title to change in a couple days. Sometime between 1-3 days to confirm the purchace and stuff. Also, we could use reviews, articles, and pictures. The more we have the better! Your help is greatly appreciated.

BTW, if the board doesn't have the images up, it's due to imagebucket doing some sort of reorganization overnight. Everything should be back to normal by tomorrow.

Especially articles, well written ones. I'm shooting for 300% more content than was on the v1 site. Triple the original number of reviews, articles, images, etc! We are really lacking in articles dealing with repairs, traps, and war stories. We only have 1 war story as of now!

yay for SM! hmm...i could take pics of 2700 internals...hmm...ive been into the world of paintball recently, so i have leaqrned a lot about paint mines and grenades, it seems all you'd need to do is fill a paint mine with water...i'll write an article when i get back...

I bid on a paintball mine a while back on ebay. Some guy got it from me because i went to bed. :rolleyes: Another idea similar to it is the portable spinkler system which I have been making designs for.

hmm...for grenades we could fill some LRT with water and figure out a way to secure it.,...

We could still use more articles on traps, repairs, and war stories. These are some things SM is currently very weak in.

You can add any war story I've written so far.

i intend to write trap articles soon....ive just been busy.

Thanks for the support-we really need as many [well written] articles as possible! B)

Bump:

Ditched the drop down bars and whole top menu bar. Now the site can deal with 800x600 resolutions without creating horizontal scroll bars. The side nav bar is being given a great re-coding. It looks so much better than before. When I'm done, I'll post a link.

SM v2 homepage

Has a few minor glitches waiting to be corrected, but other than that, is pretty much done.

When we finish the site, the images need to be in better condition. They're all pixilated and it makes the site look bad.

I know how to fix the gallery images, so I will deal with those, but you have to fix the front page images, which I cannot resize without negative effects.

Yeah...there was no chance of getting v2 finished by Jan 1. I'm shooting for March 1 at the earliest. This takes into account that making gallery images and pages takes hours per each photoset! I haven't been counting, but the number of pages on v2 could be well over 500, possibly even 1000 when it's all said and done.

I'm sure it will be well worth the wait!

Maybe it's time for a sneak preview article? ;)

How about the v2 Douchenator article I keep promising and never have gotten to writing? That would be a perfect example, seeing as there are both pictures and a video.

That would be great, seeing as WBL's are all the rage around here. :lol:

I'll write that today, after lunch. It may take a while to code, since there are no v2 articles already written that I can use as templates. Still shouldn't be too much of a problem though.

I've been purposely posting a lot today-I really miss the good days when we had 10 people posting and over 100 posts in a day. In these bad times, even 20 would be a miracle.

Any news on that article? ;)

I spent 5 hours today studying for midterms...tis a bad time school-wise. I'll try to get it done tonight since I have a track meet tomorrow which will be another all afternoon-evening-er [3 to 10 PM]. To work on the article...

Here it is! A taste of what v2 articles will be like:

Douchenator Article

Yay! It's up now. Great article, easy to read, nice layout, and it explains the douchenator well. Just wondering though, what about the k-mod and CVF videos?

:lol:

I really like the article, easy to follow yet informative. Nice work...it's interesting to see how big the douchenator has become.

Now that I see it up close, I think I liked the old Douch paint job better... But nice article anyway! ;)

P.S. Is it Dooshenator or Dowshenator?

In this case, the Douche is sounded as Doo-sh, like the French word for shower and the English word for...yeah...you know. :rolleyes:

They were accidentally taped over. Ask Nibordude for more info on that. We will make new ones, but not for a while.

I took all the SM images offline. I'm re-compressing everything from the raw images. 80% quality at 500x375 is the new standard for the pictures. The standard it is replacing was 95% quality at 500x375, which really ate space due to the 95%. An average image was about 120,000 bytes, and now the average image will be around 50,000 bytes, saving us an immense load of space. B)

I'd think you can get away in most cases with 70-70% JPG compression and save even more bytes. Unless the image is very complex (in terms of lots of different colours next to each other), I like aiming for file sizes to be less than 60K for graphics.

For reference, all of the Defender images I posted on iSoaker.com (except for the boxed product images) are all smaller than 60kb (most are smaller than 50kb).

B)

Most of our pictures happen to be complex and therefore will lose quality if more than 80% is taken out. Additionally, I made a pledge that SM would have high quality images, way back in Fall-2004, which I plan to keep as long as there is space. B)

I'm looking forward to the new site, especially the homemades/mods section. If it looks easy enough I might just try it. B)

Ok, seems to me that people want to see modding, and in particular, homemade building guides. SO...that is the new priority #1 in regards to new v2 content. Plus, since I haven't been able to glue that new homemade yet, I can make a video of how to assemble and glue a homemade for the article! Perfecto! I'll start writing up the guide during school tomorrow.

Yup! Exactly what I want. B)

Any idea when v2 will actually launch? B)

Oh gosh...maybe like...over the summer? It's frighteningly massive. I have over 500 images to compress, over 50 articles to put together/write...not to mention the term papers, labs, projects, normal hw, 3 homemades to finish, and a huge Nerf war to prepare for, all this in the upcoming month. I'm going to have to pull time out of nowhere in order to get this "update" done.

Revised Layout

^Not too much looks like it has been changed, but the backend is totally different. The Nav Bar is no longer an independent float, it is merely a piece of the layout taken over by the CSS. I also put in some more shortcuts via the style sheet.

When you go to print a page, the content will actually print without the nav bar, kind of like a "printer-friendly version" without the extra link! The only bad thing is that in resolutions such as 800 by 600, the main content gets pushed under the nav bar since that content is no longer locked in place as is default on most websites. The simple solution is to get a better monitor! :P

Almost every link I click there brings up the message "404 not found". Is that because there is nothing to go there, or is it a problem? The only link I could get to work was the Douchenator link.

The other pages do not exist yet. The problem with the site work is that I keep finding new ways to do things better than before! So the core code keeps changing and I have been reluctant to go for pages since I would end up having to revise them. Although I like the coding implemented yesterday, so I guess I could go back to making pages. I'm also really busy most of the time, so things have been very slow.

I've been working on the wars section recently. Added the Battle Reports Page and am putting up those reports. Also added a Completion Meter to the index page. Right now it is at 0.5%, but that will go up as I keep doing more stuff. The meter is actually based on math. 1000 pages is the target, so each individual page is 0.1% of the site. 10 pages = 1.0% of the whole site.

Something that will hopefully be changed:
The page always has a horizontal scroll bar no matter how wide I make the window. It only allows me to scroll about 1 pixel, but it's kind of annoying to see a scroll bar down there.

I don't know if this is supposed to happen or not, but when I click a link and then go back, the text for the link I clicked is bigger than the others. I guess I'm just used to the link staying the same, or being a slightly different color.

Neither of those problems should be happening. SM is designed in Firefox, but displays correctly in IE 6, Safari, and Maxthon. This is at 1024x768 resolution though. Link size problems are probably browser-related; scroll-bar problems are probably resolution-related. Get a standards compliant browser or get out of 800x600 and there should be a difference. I know that the site does not function well at 800x600 rez due to the code that allows you to print pages without having the navigation bar taking up space on the left.