DISQUS

Smith6612 · 7 months ago

Here's the ZIP I promised Phil.

http://files.filefront.com/Beta+Set+1zip/;13698...

Look at each file I have in there as well as play the video so that you can get a general idea of what the site looks like amongst several different setups I have here. Overall, the site's looking fine, nothing major going on with it. All it really needs is some layout adjustment, as well as some design repairs (like the curved corners not rendering on any browser but Firefox) as well as optimizing the site more for Mobile devices (my video will show one device that died over it). The site itself loads up within a decent amount of time on my gaming rig (bottleneck was connection speed, not the computer). Rendering on my Windows 2000 box did take a few seconds though with 100% CPU usage, but that was simply due to the large amount of text on the page. Other than that, the theme looks nice, and I hope to help test out newer features and changes as you roll them out.

As I noted in a .txt in the ZIP, I think it would be a nice idea for the mobile users, especially those using iPhones and iPod Touches, to upload the site videos to YouTube if at all possible so that those devices can play the video, as they cannot have Adobe Flash installed. On the PSP, unless the firmware is hacked, there's really no way you can get anything higher than Flash 6 onto that from Sony, that plus the PSP allows for a maximum of 2MB of system RAM with a processor underclocked to 233Mhz (it's factory clock speed is 333Mhz. Sony underclocked it to save the battery?) so it's quite bottlenecked unless you're running custom firmware on it with something such as Opera Mobile.

But all said and done, good work! :)

System Specs on tested machines (I forgot to include these)

Vista box:
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
Intel i7 Extreme @ 3.2Ghz.
4GB Kingston HyperX 1800Mhz DDR3 Non-ECC RAM
3x nVidia GeForce GTX280s (SLi Enabled)
4x Seagate Barracudas 1TB HDDs in RAID 0


Windows 2000 Box:
Windows 2000 Professional
Intel Celeron 2.4Ghz
256MB Kingston PC-100 RAM
nVidia GeForce 4MX
Maxtor 80GB HDD- ATA

I have some older boxes going all the way down to the Pentium III as well as an AMD K6 should you want me to try loading times on those machines.

Phillip Dampier · 7 months ago

Oh wow... this is incredible! Thank you so much for the enormous amount of work this must have involved. It's extremely helpful and I will be taking this back to the author to point out some of the theme coding errors.

I think the errors are mostly going to be from the number of embedded video players sucking tons of space. I will try an experiment in the morning by dumping out the videos. Let's see if that makes any difference. With embedded video players (one for each instance), it can consume lots of resources.

The reason I have traditionally used Dailymotion is the greater likelihood the videos would stay put (group copyright violation attacks on anything with certain call letters often ends up getting purged), and also before YouTube didn't really provide as good a resolution as Dailymotion could (and no damn ads on the bottom of the player). I might give YouTube another shot.

I will throw up a sample video from there and folks can let me know if it is playable where Dailymotion vids are not.

Smith6612 · 7 months ago

You're welcome. It was really about 2-3 hours of work getting everything put together, but it's not really a problem. CamStudio and FRAPs are such wonderful pieces of software :)

On a side note, how'd you like that little part in the video when I was recording the in-game browser, the location and time of day (morning sunrise) I had running in the game? Thought Crysis would have been a good pick simply since summer is around the corner and the game takes place on a tropical island (infested with aliens of course!), that plus it's the only game that is capable of stressing my system when the graphics are maxed out on every option (which they were when recording that). Since this site is after all Stop the Cap!, may I also mention to you that Crysis is nearly a 7GB download on Steam which is where I purchased the game. Certainly caps on my connection won't make the boat float for long.

BrionS · 7 months ago

As someone who cannot view YouTube clips at work but Dailymotion and Vimeo work just fine, I would prefer not to see the videos go to YouTube. I know YouTube is popular but they are also much lower quality (except the HQ stuff, but I don't know if those will play on the iPhone anyway).

BrionS · 7 months ago

Oops, replied to the wrong comment. Also did the 5 minute edit disappear?

BrionS · 7 months ago

Hmmm...now the comments are more confusing than before -- at least previously it said "Reply", now replies appear to simply show up below the original comment and any replies to replies are put at the bottom of the list of replies to the original comment. That's very confusing.

Smith6612 · 7 months ago

By default the iPhones and the iPod Touchs will play the YouTube videos on high quality, when it is available.

BrionS · 7 months ago

The trick with "below the fold" is to make the one paragraph enticing enough to read more. As a member of Slashdot that format works well for me, but I'm sure it does reduce the number of readers to the full article.

For that trade off of course you get a smaller, more condensed front page with more information available without scrolling.

I think two columns would work better primarily because lower resolutions will have an easier time of it. I still advocate (if possible) swapping the left and right columns so that the search and tag cloud are the narrow left-hand column and the content is the wide right-hand column.

Lots of text is fine. Lots of embedded videos and images on the main page is what makes the page load so slowly. Placing those things "below the fold" will help reduce the amount of non-text content on the main page (probably also reducing the load on your servers for any hosted images).

As for Google News:
1. Can your servers handle the traffic you might get from being listed there?
2. Do you consider this site a news source or more of a news aggregator for broadband caps with color commentary thrown in?

I consider it the latter because you are generally not reporting first-hand on the news yourself though you may be doing research that uncovers news reported (and ignored) elsewhere. I guess I don't see Stop the Cap! as being any less important than a news site -- probably more important in may respects -- but I also don't see being indexed by Google News as overly helpful to the cause. Certainly it would be an ego boost and I don't blame you for that. :)

I would hope that the premium template's CSS and template pages are designed well enough so you can make minimal rearrangement to the content layout without severely impacting the ability to apply updates.

Anyway, good luck. Site looks good. I'll keep checking back to see what's new and if any new problems arise. If you'd like something specifically tested please let us know.

BrionS · 7 months ago

Does this new theme have a place for you to put your tagline -- "Fight Back Against Usage Caps for Cable, DSL, and Fiber Optic Broadband"?

I personally like it and gives a 1-second vision of the site. I would be a shame to lose it.

Phillip Dampier · 7 months ago

The reason why Google News is important is because there are several astroturf groups that already are listed there and their "news" is given additional exposure from those listings.

Also, we have broken or been integrally involved in several major stories, from Rep. Massa's bill, Schumer's efforts, Frontier's internal company documents, account cutoffs for "excessive use" in Austin, the compilation of data on the 1Q results which also led to us breaking news on the DOCSIS upgrade in NYC, the usage cap commentary from the CEO, as well as our coverage on the NC municipal broadband story.

That's why so many news people head our way on many of these stories, because we are a part of them or involved drivers of them.

Google News brings enormous attention to issues we have, and can often result in other media sparking new stories because of other stories already appearing.

It's something we'll definitely re-approach soon.

Our tagline will be back, but will probably also expand to include 'gouging metered pricing.'