24 Oct, 2007, Asylumius wrote in the 21st comment:
Votes: 0
We could probably whip up something to do that. The only situation I can think of where that won't work is for the small handful of animated GIFs we have as banners, which (no offense to their owners) I don't necessarily like having in the header anyway.
I'll write a test script to do it tonight and run it on all the banner files we have to see how good/bad they look.
24 Oct, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 22nd comment:
Votes: 0
Asylumius said:
Although I tend to design for larger resolutions, I make sure that everything works as long as 800x600.
Yeah, that's a good minimum I suppose, but still it doesn't allow for narrow browser windows. I dunno, clearly I am in a distinct minority here, it's just that I really, really like being able to have several windows open at once. (FWIW, my main computer has a 1680x1050 monitor, so this has little to do with my available resolution.)
The only thing that bugs me about the banners is that they strongly suggest a minimum page width. I like having a narrowish browser window (another reason why I don't really like sidebars too much) but that means the top third of the window is taken up by banner#1, newline, MudBytes logo, banner#2.
That said, I think the banners should stay… it's part of the point of the site IMHO.
the narrow banner problem is actually fixed in the dev version of mudbytes, where it doesn't wrap. i'm assuming if this portion of the design stays, so will the fix.
25 Oct, 2007, Hades_Kane wrote in the 24th comment:
Votes: 0
Samson said:
Tangental question - suppose when a banner gets submitted we have something that generates a "thumbnail" version of it that conforms to our dimensions if the image doesn't fit? From my experience with the Sandbox image gallery the code that does that there seems to do pretty well scaling down the image to a thumbnail size without making a mess of it, unless you're talking about something really big condensed into something really small.
If I might make a suggestion about the banners, however… Would it be out of the question to limit their size to no more than 250kb? At home, it's no issue, but at other places (like work) where we are on dialup, it takes the site a really long time to load when a certain banner pops up that is about 1.25 mb, and speaking for not only myself, one of the nice things about this site is how much quicker it is to load than other MUD resource sites. The small banners are really no annoyance, but I imagine for people on dialup, anymore than 250kb really slows down the site, and would more than likely just lead to blocking them.
I don't block the banners here, by the way.
Or, if you don't just restrict it, maybe add that somewhere as a suggestion, and consider messaging those MUDs with banners bigger with that to ask if they would mind cutting their image down?
25 Oct, 2007, Asylumius wrote in the 25th comment:
Votes: 0
We can definitely limit the file size of the banners. We might already, it's just probably set too high.
I had quite a bit of success resizing all the banners with mogrify, it's just a matter of whether or not people are willing to have their banners forcefully resized.
25 Oct, 2007, Hades_Kane wrote in the 26th comment:
Votes: 0
It's not that difficult to make a banner to fit the size, and I think it reflects much better on your MUD when you do… Maybe also suggest they create a banner with the specific dimensions given?
For a gif, jpg or png file, 250kb is plenty in file size. It's when you start adding animation to the file that the size becomes a bit limiting. But small is what you would want to be aiming for when considering those on dialup trying to access your site.
25 Oct, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 29th comment:
Votes: 0
I'm of the camp that animated gifs are not necessarily desirable. (That counts for sigs, too. :tongue:) So yes, 250kb is definitely plenty for such a small picture.
If you could design something similar to that as the default skin.. :biggrin:
I think all of the Admins have agreed not to go with a fixed width layout. If memory serves, I mocked one up for the original design and we ended up finding we didn't like the way the forums looked. That layout looks alright, although right now we don't have anyone who can do the creating and slicing of the graphics for a skin like that.
Right now we're basically working on a lesser revamp of the current template since it seemed like the consensus was that the current color scheme (the orange/blue/black) seemed to work for most people and we wanted to retain our "look".
That won't solve the huge image stretching past the right side of the screen though. I'd rather have it thumbnailed to a maximum size if it's larger than something we set for it.
07 Nov, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 39th comment:
Votes: 0
That would be good, I think… anything bigger than (ballpark) 200px in either direction should probably be a thumbnail instead.
I'll write a test script to do it tonight and run it on all the banner files we have to see how good/bad they look.