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Info: the Galactic Trade Federation website — Page 2

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very nice Russ,so how is the Eraser set?
DJ
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Originally posted by: joebshmoe
that website, while having a bunch of great information, is soooo painful to look at.

pleaaaase change it away from frames and poor quality images...


Did I just hear you say you are offering to do all the new coding work for Russ yourself?

Good man!

--SKot

Projects:
Return Of The Ewok and Other Short Films (with OCPmovie) [COMPLETED]
Preserving the…cringe…Star Wars Holiday Special [COMPLETED]
The Star Wars TV Commercials Project [DORMANT]
Felix the Cat 1919-1930 early film shorts preservation [ONGOING]
Lights Out! (lost TV anthology shows) [ONGOING]
Iznogoud (1995 animated series) English audio preservation [ONGOING]

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Originally posted by: SKot
Originally posted by: joebshmoe
that website, while having a bunch of great information, is soooo painful to look at.

pleaaaase change it away from frames and poor quality images...


Did I just hear you say you are offering to do all the new coding work for Russ yourself?

Good man!

--SKot


I was kind of hoping he was too..........

Meanwhile, I will stick to my begged, borrowed and stolen code, crappy frames and crappy images!!

Joking aside, any (constructive) comments or feedback and any help is always appreciated.

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Unless there's something going on I don't see, no coding is necessary for a static website like GTF. Only markup. And some good markup and CSS could make it look very nice.

First thing I'd do, is I'd take that banner, cut out all the black space, and make it a transparent PNG. That way, the starfield (or whatever background you use in the future) will be visible behind it, instead of a big black rectangle. Think of it as matte boxes vs. subtle matte lines. I've already done this, if you're interested. The file is slightly larger, but I might be able to trim it down a little by playing with the colors.

Next, I'd consider making the navigation more logical, or at least more readable. I often enlarge text on my monitor to help me see it; because your top frame doesn't have a scroll bar, when I enlarge the text it gets chopped off, or just invisible. This can be fixed by rethinking the frame layout, or ditching the frames altogether and doing something clever with CSS and/or javascript. (Make sure it works with a plain text browser before putting in JS tricks, please; many of us don't have or want JS.) I can come up with some templates that might look better if you'd like.

The page doesn't validate as HTML 3.2. It's closer to HTML 4 Frameset, but even then, it has a few errors. I'd fix those up. If you're going to declare an HTML DTD, you should conform to it.

It looks like you're using tables for non-tabular data. HTML should be used for markup, and CSS for style. In fact, I'm not sure what's going on here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/russdawson/gtf/dvd/OT/tr47.html
There's a couple end tags for tables that were never opened, and many elements put within tables that aren't allowed there. This can be avoided by separating structure from style. And two start tags for your body element.

If you write tag soup, you might be able to get it to work in most of the browsers used today. But it's much better to write to the standards first, and then make tweaks for the special cases that require it. That way you're not forever rewriting things to work in new user agents. It's also more accessible for visually impaired persons that way; I recall we had someone visit OT.com who used the JAWS screen reader, so we know there are people in our community who might benefit from that. (I commend you for using alt elements, btw.)

If you need a markup monkey to fix some of this stuff ... I've got some free time. I'd love to give something back to the O-OT community. Besides my wit and charm, I mean.
"It's the stoned movie you don't have to be stoned for." -- Tom Shales on Star Wars
Scruffy's gonna die the way he lived.
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It's so weird seeing my DVDs on there.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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Thanks Scruffy for that comprehensive reply to my request for assistance. I do not really understand or follow how HTML works. The fact that the pages have been done at all as well as uploaded for all to see is a major miracle!!!!!!!!!

I took a "very basic" initial framed layout, cut, copied, pasted, begged, stole and borrowed to get the "Grandson of Frankenstein" you see today.

Below is a reply to some of your suggestions. I will digest the rest later and reply in full

Unless there's something going on I don't see, no coding is necessary for a static website like GTF. Only markup. And some good markup and CSS could make it look very nice.
Looking nice is what I am looking for. I think it looks good as it is but realise that it is far from perfect for the masses.

First thing I'd do, is I'd take that banner, cut out all the black space, and make it a transparent PNG. That way, the starfield (or whatever background you use in the future) will be visible behind it, instead of a big black rectangle.

I tried that and failed so I would love to have your fixed file.

Next, I'd consider making the navigation more logical, or at least more readable.

More readable is also what I am looking for too. The navigation seems to me to be OK, especially for the expansion I am planning but any specific improvements you could suggest for the masses would be appreciated. Doing something "clever" is beyond my limited skills.

I will respond more later.

Thanks again.

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I'll set up a site on my own server where I can keep changes I've made and maybe you can see them live and download them at your convenience. I'm not an HTML Jedi, but I can at least fix the formal problems with the syntax then we can hammer out logical and stylistic problems later. The site will eventually be up at http://www.ofkaiser.com/gtf/.

WRT the banner, it's not perfect, like I said it's a little bit bigger (20-30k) and there are black lines around some of the text. But those won't show up against a starfield, only against a lighter background -- an effect we know very well from the SW Trilogy. I just used the Gimp to add an alpha channel, then select the black regions and cut them away. I posterized the yellow aurebesh text to make the file 12k smaller then cleaned up a few stray pixels with the eraser.

"It's the stoned movie you don't have to be stoned for." -- Tom Shales on Star Wars
Scruffy's gonna die the way he lived.
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It has been a while............

I have just added loads of new titles and have a list of all titles still to add over the next few weeks.

More webspace - double the previous amount - has now been secured. Once I have all titles listed, I will go back to add more screenshots per title.

Finally, I took the plunge and got myself a domain name. The URL for this is http://www.galactictradefederation.co.uk/

The original remit for the site was to shed light on the very murky waters of the LaserDisc to DVD transfers. With the release of the GOUT, those titles are of far less importance. However, there are a massive amount of Star Wars "fan" titles out there which is where I now aim to concentrate my efforts.

Pop by and have a look what is going on.

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I can't get the site to pull up.

Edit: Nevermind, it is working now.


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For anyone out there who still refers to  my site   Galactic Trade Federation  I have dropped the domain name I bought and it is now back on my ntlworld free web space.

Apart from a few tweaks and making the site for preservation projects/releases only, I doubt that the site will ever change much in the future but it is still be a valuable tool and will be left online.

Please use the link above to get access if required.........

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Despite my last post I am looking to revisit my website and drag it up to date with all the preservations, re-creations, edits and other such releases from the last 4 years since the last proper update.

After that I might even get adventurous and give it a makeover.

All thoughts, ideas and feedback appreciated.....

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Thoughts:

1. This thread might be better in the preservation/other forum. I'll move it.

2. Yes we definitely need an up-to-date list and summary of the various projects created by members of this forum.

3. The current lists at the top of each forum (eg here) quickly become outdated.

4. A wiki-style approach seemed like a good idea, it worked briefly on that dvdholocron site, but takeup of the ot.com/fanedits.com project wiki (here) was disappointing.

 

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Moth3r said:

Thoughts:

1. This thread might be better in the preservation/other forum. I'll move it.

2. Yes we definitely need an up-to-date list and summary of the various projects created by members of this forum.

3. The current lists at the top of each forum (eg here) quickly become outdated.

4. A wiki-style approach seemed like a good idea, it worked briefly on that dvdholocron site, but takeup of the ot.com/fanedits.com project wiki (here) was disappointing.

 

1. Agreed. You saved me having to PM you to ask!!

2. Agreed and the GTF pages are probably the best place to start/continue with.

3. Agreed as well but I know from experience that you can spend so much time doing this kind of thing, leaving no time to actually watch the films. I truly respect those who are putting in massive hours doing preservations and edits. I do not know how they do it!!

4. Wiki-style. There is an idea. The current site look was cute 6 years ago but looks very dated now.

Keep those ideas coming........

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More suggestions, this time regarding: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/russdawson/mono/

The "play" buttons don't show up in Chrome, at least not for me anyway. They work OK in MSIE 8.

And it would be nice if the samples could be updated to use the restored mono mix, I think the samples there at the moment were taken from the old P&S bootleg.

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Virgin Media closed their webspace service (including ntlworld.com) in April this year. I was looking for The Starkiller’s Guide to The Star Wars Mono Sound Mix that Russ had hosted there, it’s available on the Wayback Machine but with no audio samples. However this was posted in another thread which gives a good comparison of the audio differences: https://youtu.be/aeXpcYcZNDw

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