BYYB Forums

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I made it Frank.

Greetings,

The site looks nice and all that, but …

I’m using Firefox on a Laptop with a touchpad for a mouse (plus I am a really old-school computer geek) so I like to scroll around screens using the keyboard … mostly the PageDn, PageUp, Tab and Backspace buttons.  The home pages seem to work ok, but as I drill down into the forums, the browser loses focus somewhere between all that unnecessary javascript and those evil in-line frames “<iframe>”, and my buttons stop working until I re-establish focus by clicking anywhere on the page. This is very annoying.

My workaround was to examine the page source to find the target of the in-line frame and call that directly … in this case “http://byyb.info/forum”  … which seems to have fixed the focus problems.  Additionally, since I eliminated the container frames, I get back the 100 or so pixels wasted on those pretty side margins and the 200 pixels at the top of the screen.

Speeking of frames, I remember, once upon a time, the major web crawlers from the search engines like Google and Yahoo refused to index the contents of frames, the reason being that it was impossible to resolve the page they were crawling down to a single url, as each frame in the frameset had it’s own unique url.  Is this still true?  Is this true with in-line frames?  If it is, then contents of the forums will never make it into Google, et al., and I for one think that would be a bad thing.  The more exposure the BYYB gets on the web, the better chance we have of attracting dues paying members.

No so cheery,
Tom

(11-08-2008, 05:57 AM)tombayus link Wrote: [ -> ]I’m using Firefox on a Laptop with a touchpad for a mouse (plus I am a really old-school computer geek) so I like to scroll around screens using the keyboard … mostly the PageDn, PageUp, Tab and Backspace buttons.  The home pages seem to work ok, but as I drill down into the forums, the browser loses focus somewhere between all that unnecessary javascript and those evil in-line frames “<iframe>”, and my buttons stop working until I re-establish focus by clicking anywhere on the page. This is very annoying.

I tested with my laptop, but I tend to use the touchpad for all things people would do with a mouse.  I'll take a look at the navigation issues with it, and see if there's a work-around.

Every CMS I know of uses iframes to wrap the "external" content like forums, the gallery, etc. within the site, although we could break it out differently (using a similar header, etc.)  The use of a wide template, dumping the left hand menu, means it would be easy to re-create the look and feel of the entire site with just the header and the breadcrumb menu.  We can try that if the Executive Committee wants to.

As to using a CMS itself, a CMS makes management of the site easier for non-professionals and non-techies, a situation that arises often with organizations as they change the people in charge.  The forum software, SMF, and is valid XHTML using CSS, as per w3.org.  It is also less often hacked than the old software, a problem you had in the past.  The main reason is that SMF is very easy to update.

(11-08-2008, 05:57 AM)tombayus link Wrote: [ -> ]My workaround was to examine the page source to find the target of the in-line frame and call that directly … in this case “http://byyb.info/forum”  … which seems to have fixed the focus problems.  Additionally, since I eliminated the container frames, I get back the 100 or so pixels wasted on those pretty side margins and the 200 pixels at the top of the screen.

Speeking of frames, I remember, once upon a time, the major web crawlers from the search engines like Google and Yahoo refused to index the contents of frames, the reason being that it was impossible to resolve the page they were crawling down to a single url, as each frame in the frameset had it’s own unique url.  Is this still true?  Is this true with in-line frames?  If it is, then contents of the forums will never make it into Google, et al., and I for one think that would be a bad thing.  The more exposure the BYYB gets on the web, the better chance we have of attracting dues paying members.

Most people run at 1024 x 768 resolution now, so the site is designed with that in mind.  Are the side margins really a problem for you?  As to indexing, you have found the answer; Google will index the forums at the /byyb.org/forum/ URL.

Hi Frank, Thought I was lost for a minute ???. I didn't know you were working on this. Everything looks good here, using Firefox. 


joel

I'm in, and it looks good.  I'm using Chrome and a lappy trackpad with no trouble.  Thanks for the hard work guys.

i made it and i love the new look. 

I have also made it ;D

Yo . . .

ho, ho, and...
Looks Great!

capnpablo