New Guide Beta

[Kisai]

Okay, I spent several days working on this, so I need some feedback, especially if it looks totally screwed up in your browser.

http://guide.keenspace.com/beta

That will get you the index, currently only alphabetical and %page lists are being generated, are they any other "sort type" 's that people want, like "comics in the last 1 day" "comics in the last month" etc "new comics in the last 7 days"

A note about accuracy, due to some internal changes in the way things are, when I get the "editing" portion done, people who chose to use non-autokeen updates will have some control over what is displayed. Caveat... must either have separate comics with a prefix character, or separate directories (for the html files) Without a prefix character, there is no way to determine the difference between one sequence and another *poke*sexylosers*poke* So that's why sexy losers says 99 comics, the prefix character is set to 0, so it only sees 01-99. Do me a favor, anyone who goes their own with html generation, put some kind of prefix on the filename or use a single directory for the html files (like autokeen) as it makes counting the files easier.

Also auto-resolves are done for domain names, if you have a comic with a www address and it doesn't resolve to keenspace, it won't appear.

Banners... No way to change add/remove them yet, however I pulled the banner links for 468x60 200x40 and 88x31 from various sites on the top 15 or so between the keenspace top 99 and top 100, just to give you some idea how the banners look, and some sites I actually went and looked for banners. Not everyone has 468x60 banners, and so they have no banner whatsoever. MULTIPLE BANNERS ARE SUPPORTED, if you see one comic on one page, and goto a cross-referenced page, the comic might have a different banner. It's picked at random. The only sites that actually have more than one banner at this time are BmB,Adventurers, and reslifecomics.

Hmm whatelse... color scheme... like, hate? It's actually the "light" scheme I hacked together for the tag documenation for the first version.

Layout, It's kind of "card catalog" style... though I didn't originally intend it to be that way.

Editable information:
Continue to use the old keendex editor to edit your information, it will not be updated till about 5AM Pacific. Banners entered in it are ignored, as they are simply not usable in the newer system. (as the newer system allows multiple banners per size.)

Known bugs:
The index page doesn't list the style/content/r-content, nor do those pages have header indexes... reason is that you can't reference something that doesn't yet exist. The Index page will get done, but their might never be any navigation links for those pages except from the main index or cross-reference links.

Author and comic country links are broken, not done yet. You will get a 404 error for those.

Not tested on Netscape4, IE<6.0 or Mozilla<1.1.
Works fine on IE6, Mozilla 1.1 and Opera 6.05. If you are using Netscape 4.x, upgrade now, all 10 of you.

I repeat, MAKE 468x60, 200x40 and 88x31 banners, no other size will ever be used, except for newsbox II(coming soon, really) which has a yet undetermined size, might be set to 100x100, like the forum avatars, or might be something larger.

The 468x60 banners will be used on most of the pages, the smaller 200x40 pages will be used for something else I have planned(drop downs?). The 88x31 button banners I *might* figure out a way to use them with a "bar" like Keenspot has. However this is dependant upon people actually having 88x31 button banners.


Banner guidelines:
Do not abuse these guidelines, if people start to abuse it, I will change it, and you will have to wait for your banners to be approved.
1. Banners must be of 468x60, 200x40 or 88x31, the system will not reject other sizes, but it won't use them either.
2. Banners must be located on the keenspace server in your account somewhere, if they are located off-server, they won't be used.
3. Banners SHOULD NOT be over 50KB if possible (468x60), smaller banners like the 200x40 and 88x31 should not be over 10KB. If in doubt, don't animate, use jpeg.
4. Banners must be in GIF, JPG, or PNG... I was considering SWF, but then remembered that SWF's can become very large.
5. Banner Content: Keep the content of the banner within the PG area, avoid violence and sexuality. I really don't care, but others might complain.

Banners are symbolicly linked against your physical account path at this time, this is to reduce the amount of disk space used, and make the guide faster (as so only one connection is required to be made to the server.) If you change the banner, but keep the exact same filename, the banner will be changed on all pages that it shows up on. If you DELETE the banner however, then the link becomes invalid and will leave a broken link image on the lists till the next time the pages are generated. When I get to the editor's for the banners you should be able to edit/add/remove then at will. If I have to start "approving" banners, then I will not use this method, and you will not be able to "instantly" update your comic banner.

So any feedback, or are you all going @_@ now?

^^

02/25/2005 wonders who brought this post back from the dead *unstickyfies*

[Ghastly]

Blue and purple on dark green... not too good.

[John D Moore]

I like it, though the color scheme could use some improving. At least on the index, the blue and purple on the dark green makes it darn near impossible to see. Likewise, the blue links on list pages are bad. However, the lighter green looks perfect. The light scheme looks great.
Otherwise, I totally like it. I like the rating bar to the right. Interested to see how the banners will fit into it all. I like the inclusion of the percentages.

[ZOMBIE USER 8124]

Oooh, It looks like there's gonna be a spot for people to look up an authors bio...will we be writing these ourselves, or will this be some *very* general info based off what Keenspace knows? (I hope it's not the last one! ^^;)

[Ashess]

you know, you've got the broken white on the keenspace banner and the keenspace add (keenspace banner is definitely too big).
and you've got red, yellow and black in the banner itself.
why not try to stick with those colours?
exmpl:
broken white background for the 'table' (maybe true white for borders)
red for the links, and black for the text (like no. of comix)

oh, and it's not quite clear what the 2 rows of numbers mean. I assume the first (middle row) is the no of comics with this starting letter.

well, that's all my comics.
if I get ps intalled here, I'll see if I can scale down the banner for ya. it's not much work.

[Kisai]

Okay, I forgot to mention a few things:

Color Scheme: The current scheme is actually still the same scheme used on the current version, except the default is the LIGHT scheme instead of the dark. If you are running IE/Mozilla you can switch between the dark and light schemes, Opera is kinda stuck with the light scheme.

KeenSPACE banner: It's too big, That entire top piece is going to be reduced in size, and/or turned into the "bar" or something. I haven't decided on that. I don't personally like the color yellow, so that's why the color schemes don't use it (it's a direct conversion from the table on the original original site)

Author links: What I have planned but is a way off still is that it can be edited just like the comic data, and links back to comic(s) that you do. So you can do something like this if you want:

username->comic A->Author A
->Author B
->comic B->Author A

So if you were doing two webcomics, and someone else was helping you, you can actually add them as a second author. This is what I want to do with it, in actual practice it might vary. If you do multiple comics on one username, you can also list them as separate comics then too. (However the catch is that they will always appear one-after-the-other in the %page lists, since the webalizer only works on a per-username basis.)

Oh and the two columns of alphabetical, the larger number is "Alphabetical" the second is "Alphabetical (newer only)" which only lists comics updated in the previous 90 days and has at least 1 comic day page in /d or whatever is defined. )

[Lcachola]

In addition I like how you can sort the listings by number of comics in the current version (0-50,51-100 and so on and so forth). Seems to be missing in this version.

[Kisai]

Can't sort the new version, the javascript I used before only works on tables. They are pre-sorted alphabetically by the category they are in. The Javascript used on the old version took a painful long time to sort anything over 100 entries. I might put some kind of sort function into a search engine, but it's staying out of the flat files. (It only worked on IE/Mozilla anyhow)

The other thing is that the amount of html code is reduced by fixing the pages to 100, so you wouldn't really be sorting anything. So it doesn't take more than 20 seconds on a dial-up (each page is about 100KB) And since it's not a table, the page loads progressively instead of having to load the entire thing before displaying the table.

The old code would look something like:
tr class td class a url title /a
by author /td
td class url first comic /td
td class current comic /td
td ratings /td
td content/style td
td description /td
/tr , of which every single column needed classes IIRC for the sorter to behave... Just very wasteful when many comics didn't have anything in the table.
I might put up a new table set for those who really really want to sort tables, but tables can only be sorted client side.

The other problem with the javascript tables is that they silently ignore images, so if images are used, they don't sort any that are used "in place of" text links.

In short, I hated the javascript sorting and would rather not bring it back unless people REALLY want it. Unless you have like 1GB of RAM, sorting the entire thing takes several minutes as your computer appears to lock up. I can only use it with the tables, so that means I have to generate tables again too then.

[ZOMBIE USER 9264]

Okay, I've got some seriously n3wb questions for you guys:

1. How do I change 'comic style', 'comic content', 'description', etc in my 'The Guide' listing?

2. "N: S: V: L:" is listed beside my comic...what the heck does that mean?

and 3. What's the deal with Wristwatches? Why is time the only information we strap to our bodies?

[Kisai]

Okay, I've got some seriously n3wb questions for you guys:

1. How do I change 'comic style', 'comic content', 'description', etc in my 'The Guide' listing?

See the link at the top-left, edit guide info. This will load up the keendex editor, this will let you change your information for both the original and new Guide's. (I intend to replace it, since there are about a half dozen more things I added since then.)

2. "N: S: V: L:" is listed beside my comic...what the heck does that mean?

If you specify a rating, the rating box will appear, it might do wierd things depending on what you chose in the editor.

N: Nudity , S: Sexual Content, V: Violence, and L: for Language (as in profanity)

If no number appears, then you might have selected "unrated" in the editor.

The EDITOR doesn't have separate entries for S and N, they are the same thing, whatever you select for the S rating in the editor will appear for both S and N.

And as always, you don't HAVE to rate your comic, It's there for people who either want to find stuff that is only rated a certain level. If people are going to want to find more NC17 comics, they can now get a list of all comics that are self-rated NC17. (click on the rating on any of the beta pages to get a list of comics with that rating.)

and 3. What's the deal with Wristwatches? Why is time the only information we strap to our bodies?

Some people go crazy without knowing how much longer they have to stay at work/school. ^^

[Twentyfour]

Actually Razi you can get wrist bands that show your heartrate and bloodpressure...in case you want to see how stressed out you're getting ast work/school because you don't know how much time is left until you can leave because you're wearing a stupid wristband that doesn't tell the time.... and God knows what they've invented in Jap[an that you can put on your wrist that serves no necessary purpose but millions of people buy anyway

[Krazy Krow]

Not to sound like a pre-pubescent girl whining for a pony, but I'd love to see some kind of "estimated readership" ranking. Like average pageviews per day multiplied by days between updates.

Razi: Rolex Submariners make fine brass knuckles.

[Kisai]

How would you propose that?

The current %pages and the beta %pages are listed by approximate % of total pages loaded.

Numbers are useless unless you know what they are for.

Are you suggesting a "activity" meter or something? Number of days updated this month/days this month so far? Rather tricky to set-up. I can divide the number of days with a comic by the number of physical days since comic epoch to get a value, but that will be rather low, and only "updates everyday" comics would wind up on the top, miss a day, and you end up below all the ones that do update everyday. Any site that doesn't use the autokeen method will have a score of zero.

I left out the "days updating on" from the beta version... primarily because it's a rather trivial thing, what if someone missed a day... what if someone updates only every second week... etc.

I'd like more information on what you would like to see.

[Krazy Krow]

If the guide is updated daily, that might not work. Would it be possible to take the previous two update periods, and count the pageviews within that period? What I would like to see is how many pageviews each strip gets, and a ranking. The % pageviews is fun, but as the disclaimer mentioned, it can't be used as a way of measuring readership. Daily comics will obviously get more pageviews per day than a weekly comic with the same number of readers.

[Kisai]

It *MIGHT* be possible to do that, but I have to alter the database itself to do it. ... Actually had I not "minimized" the complexity of the user database I could have... as I was actually tracking daily history for each site.

What I'm trying to do is avoid displaying any hard numbers for stats... as it's discouraging to learn that one comic outpaces another by only X page views, and thus having their readership repeatedly hit reload to try and inflate the ranking. (AKA ballot-stuffing as what happens on TOP whatever pages.) Or doing something that fudges the heck out of it (frames of frames...)

... and now that I think about it, I could just reverse engineer the webalizer history file to get the actual numbers (right now it just reads the monthly history, not the one that stores the values for each day and month.)

gaaahhhh! too complicated.... X_x

The best bet is to get the "bar" and keep track of unique visitors hitting it, assuming such a script doesn't choke the server to death. (Like what the ad-serveing server did for a while.) This would also have an advantage of figuring out "people who visited this comic also visited these..." type of things...

I'm sorry, I can't really think of a good way to do that right now...

Here is what I have access to, and what I can do with it:
I have access to the monthly values for one(1) entire year for all the base webalizer stats (hits,visits,pages,kbytes,sites,uniquevisitors)
comic stats (first comic date, first comic holder file (/d/YYYYMMDD.html), current comic date, current comic holder file, number of comic days, account size and amount used by comics (/comics), auto-update time, list(yes/no)

What I can do with it:

I can calcuate a % from any of the webalizer or size values
I can average the webalizer values by the number of days passed in that month
I can figure out which comics updated in the last X days by looking at the current date
I can figure out when comics started by looking at the firstdate

[ZOMBIE USER 9264]

Thnaks for the help. Everything is clear now!

[Kisai]

I've added a really low-tech search engine now

http://guide.keenspace.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi

It searches for words found in the title, description and location. Nothing else right now. I'm working on the editors... but ran into a snag... Mozilla isn't accepting the cookies properly, IE and Opera do. So I send a bug report off to mozilla.

Oh and the search is technically almost-real-time for dates, but not the stats. Manual updates are NOT taken into account. If a comic was scheduled to update at midnight, then by 1am it should show the current dates.

[Kisai]

I've now kinda done the author links ... however it's still rather empty because there was, and still is practically nothing for author information.

The "index" pages ARE broken for the authors lists ... the /beta/ part is missing.

[Taiwanimation]

About the banners, you say 468x60, which slot do you use, because right now there's an 80x80 slot but no 468x80

[Kisai]

The "edit" page doesn't have support for the new guide banners. The old guide uses the 200x40 banner only.

The new guide will let you have any number of advertisements (hopefully) but they must be of the following sizes:

468x60 - Large banner, standard advertisement size, used on new guide comic list pages

200x40 - Medium banner, used on new guide author list pages.

88x31 - Button banner, used for "the bar" if/when I get it to work. I might also use it with the newsbox.

The reason I can't use the old banners configuration with the new configuration is because the old version used relative path from /public_html/images/, so too much guesswork is required to verify that the advertisement exists because the new version uses relative to /public_html AND now checks that the image exists and is of the proper size and makes a symlink to it instead of making the advertisement get pulled straight from the website (and making your webstats inflate in hits, but not visits.)

What I've been doing for the new guide is manually entering advertisements when I've seen them on the forums or if I visit their website and they have them listed in their links/about-us section.

I can not visit everyones site, nor can I create a script that seeks out all the banners, since people have more than just their own banners on their sites.

As for odd-shaped banners, sorry can't use them. Even if it's 1 pixel out in any direction.