Important news

[Chris Wilkinson]

As you may have seen in the 'Our Website Manager is gone.' thread, I'm taking over as webmaster of the site. If any of you have files/pages or whatever that needs to be uploaded/changed, please e-mail them to me so I can put them up (Richard, I've already got your tech file, I'll put that up ASAP).

Also, I'm currently working on a new design for the site. What I'll do is to put it up so if you have any comments or suggestions you can tell me about them (I'll start a new thread when a test of the main page is up).

[Beör]

As a newcomer I would like to suggest an important feature to be added to the website. Add a search feature. There is a lot of information, and for a newbie it can be very difficult to know where to find a particular piece of information.

I also think that it might be nice to have a thread in the forum, solely dedicated to anouncing updates to the website

[Chris Wilkinson]

quote: Originally posted by Beör on 09-09-2000 06:15 AM As a newcomer I would like to suggest an important feature to be added to the website. Add a search feature. There is a lot of information, and for a newbie it can be very difficult to know where to find a particular piece of information.

This would be useful, I'll look into this.

quote: I also think that it might be nice to have a thread in the forum, solely dedicated to anouncing updates to the website

I know that the news on the current design is rather 'hidden away', so what I was going to do was to devoted the front page to news. If anybody would like a thread as well, please say and we could do that as well.

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks for stepping up to this big job Chris!

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank both Dom and Paul for their long and distinguished service to Clash. Their site gave a serious boost to the project. I think it will turn out to have been one of the critical contributions toward Clash's eventual success! I personally greatly appreciate all the work that they have done, and wish them the best of luck!


We actually had a "Web site requests" thread when the former web page guys were actively working. Might I suggest we make a thread "Web Site News & Requests" so it can fulfill two functions. If it gets too much trafic you could always split them.

Kull and Dom looked into search capability and couldn't find a good way to do it. I hope you can, becuase as Beör says its a very important feature.

[Chris Wilkinson]

Mark,

For the search facility, would Apolyton mind if we used CGI for this bit?

Everyone,

How would you like the search facility to work? Would you like it to scan each page and find the search request, or make each page have keywords and it searches those?

[Beör]

Both, with an option of choosing either .

[Mark_Everson]

Chris:

Why don't you email Markos and ask him? I think it should be ok. Also, see if he has any suggestions. He didn't the last go-around, but that was many months ago.

Yeah I think Beör is right. But I think a page search is generally more useful, since by keywords you can almost guess at where to go from the site structure itself. The truth is, we'll take what we can get!

Mark

[Chris Wilkinson]

Richard, the team list is the first thing I'm going to change on this site. I won't fix the little problems you mentioned, but I'll bear this in mine and I'll check everything for when the new design comes up.

Mark, I'll talk to Markos then!

[Richard Bruns]

It is going to take a bit of effort to get the web site back up to date. A lot of stuff is seriously obsolete. I'll give a few examples:

The coder listed for the tech model is someone I've never heard of. Presumably he retired before Garth, who has also left.

The "current members" list includes over a dozen people I've never even heard of, and I've been following the project for almost a year.

Many other people listed have also retired in the past year.

F_Smith is listed as an inactive member!

I also have a few more suggestions, but those can wait until the new thread is made.

[Beör]

I agree - page search would be most useful.

I have another suggestion for the web page:
A chategorised link library of the contributors' favourite references. Somehow when I first looked at the web page I was very impressed, but it did cross my mind that some of the modelling seemed to take place in a vacuum. I am quite sure that this is not true, so why not give everybody else a chance to study the references.

Some suggested chategories

Programming
Game programming
Artificial inteligence
Graphics
Map programming
Algorithms
General programming
Java
OOA & OOD
History
Geography
Demographics
Economy
Political science
Future studies

[Beör]

Ooops, the indentation ran haywire there. Sorry about that, but I guess you get the general idea

[Chris Wilkinson]

Do you want one page with all the links on, or the links for each model on the individual model pages?

[Beör]

Dunno'

(I daren't say both - again )

I guess a single page would be easier to maintain, and if a link is really important at a particular point in a model, nothing will prevent the lead from putting a link in the text.

So - I opt for the one-page approach

[Chris Wilkinson]

Ok, I'll do this page for when the new site gets done.