New website: VF4fx (movies, locations, etc.)

Hey guys,

I just finished developing a new VF4 website that (hopefully) will be a good index of VF4 arcade locations in NA/Canada once the machines finally show up stateside. The website also features a repository of VF4 movie clips mirroring what's currently available on VF4@Movie and Daily VF4, as well as earlier movies that were rotated out of these sites, so you can get it all from one single location.

The FTP server used to store these clips is online 7pm-7am PST (0300-1500 GMT) weekdays, and all day on weekends. (I'm colocating my server at the office and I don't want to hijack bandwidth when everyone's at work.) Also, the movie download service may be disconnected once a week (for two hours, max) to preserve bandwidth for TeamSound voicecomms when I'm playing a Tribes 2 match. (Just a word of warning if you're on a 28.8k modem and you're downloading a 20MB clip on a Thursday evening, for example /versus/images/icons/smile.gif)

<font color=red>Here's the current URL for the site: </font color=red><A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.clandxm.com/vf4>http://www.clandxm.com/vf4</A>

-- feixaq

 

Nice start, FeixaQ.
Now I see why you've been so quiet for the past few days.


-<font color=white>Ghost</font color=white><font color=red>DOG</font color=red>

 

coo website! yea can't wait till vf4 final version comes.( which is probably around november or so) and yea can't wait to start challenging/winning again hehe. oh btw my name is Jason

 

Looks great!

 

hot daam! i'm impressed. excellent stuff you got there.



<font color=red>nAndato</font color=red>

 

Excellent job, Chris! Another excellent VF site arrives, I am excited!

Keep it up!

-Chanchai

 

Oh cool site. Just wait until the game releases. Your gonna have way more material to work with. But, we're gonna give the big K(kudos) for the site man.

 

Thanks, guys /versus/images/icons/smile.gif

Ghostdog -- yeah, that's why I was MIA for awhile. I'm pretty obsessive when I embark on a project... have to get it all out of the system, so like on Saturday, I was working on the site from 7am to 3am /versus/images/icons/shocked.gif. Spent mondo hours on Friday and Sunday too, including a drive to my office to set up the FTP server.

Jackybrothas -- ah, Jason, is it? Cool, I never knew your real name till now... can't wait till VF4 final makes its way to SVGL (or hopefully some place in San Fran so I don't have to spend 2 hours driving there and back just to play)

Myke -- hehe, after spending that much time staring at the screen, I'm sick of Dreamweaver right now. Gonna get some much needed SUN over the next few days... Sonoma County... pick up some nice wines... *ah*. But, let me know if you need any help on VFDC, I'll see what I can do. At the very least, I can beta test the new site if you think that's worthwhile.

Chanchai -- Site looks pretty different from the early beta screenshot I sent you, yeah? Originally all I wanted to do was just create *one* page that would list VF4 locations. For some strange reason that became a full blown site. LOL.

Kiuju -- Yeah, now I'm waiting for the machines to actually arrive, then the site can be more than a glorified movie mirror service. The good news is that I think the site can accomodate large data sets if necessary, so if we can a lot of VF4 machines (one can only hope), plus say some people want an extra window for Singapore VF4 locations... it's pretty easy to get that done.


<font color=red>Regarding the FTP service</font color=red>
If anybody has been experiencing problems downloading the files from the FTP site, please try again in awhile. (I've been monitoring the logs, and there have been a fair number of failed attempts.) I've upped the max concurrent anonymous users and decreased the idle time allowable, so that should help.

P.S. Today (Monday) the FTP service will be up all day since it's a holiday.

 

Myke (or anyone else who might have an idea),

I'm wondering if you know of any way to ping an FTP server to check online/offline status and then display the status on a webpage? Or use a clock (system or client side, system side better) to approximate online/offline status based on scheduled uptime and user time zone? I'd very much like to incorporate that into the movies download page.

Restrictions:
1. Must not be in ASP, PHP, or any other server side scripting language. (I'm trying to standardize all pages as .html, and ASP's a definite no-no because my website is running on a *nix platform and I'm not about to ask my webhost to switch my site over to an insecure IIS server)
2. Webserver and FTP server are running on different machines.
3. Javascript *might* work as a client-side approximation of server uptime, provided the user sets his time zone and time correctly. If you have any code that extracts this time/date/timezoe info, that would be great. (I'm gonna look it up later today, too.)
4. The best scenario, of course, would be a client- or server-side ping to the FTP server to check online status, before the HTML gets rendered on the client browser. Don't know if this is possible, though...?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

 

Yep, it's more impressive than what I had already seen by the beta shots, and I was surprised by this (was already looking good). Keep up the good work and it looks like you got the general groundwork done.

I have received one complaint though.... Linux users were telling me that the site wouldn't run on Mozilla (which is practically Netscape, someone else can tell you the differences and history). Something you might be interested to know and see if you can accomodate that.

Customizable GUI layout is cute and isn't giving me any problems (some sites that try to emulate GUI on their sites take forever to load, yours didn't seem bad at all). Is it possible to label each window in the movies section?

-Chanchai

 

Re: Linux Mozilla -- which version of Mozilla is your friend using? I've been meaning to install RedHat 7.1 for the longest time, but I never got down to doing it. (Too lazy, plus I'm running VOIP on my spare server so I don't want to double boot into Linux.) I do know that Netscape 6+ / Mozilla 1.0+ browsers should be able to view the windows at least, although I've heard that the text does not "flow" when you resize the windows. I guess the more important question is -- can Mozilla users at least see all the different windows (i.e. even if it's displayed in regular HTML as opposed to GUI layout)? Even if it's in an ugly layout, as long as they have access to the movie clips and locations, then that's the most important thing. But if the site doesn't run *at all*... hmm. Given enough time, I may try to move to a database/server side include model so you can access the site in simple or GUI layouts, but that's a fairly serious undertaking...

Re: Window labels -- um, they're not labeled? The windows appear as "new movies", "archived movies", "FTP Server", "File Transfer", and three "empty" windows. I left the empty windows in there for future data, is that what you're referring to...?

Thanks for the comments, btw.

 

The FTP server is running WarFTP Daemon, which allows you to configure user access based on time of day. I guess pinging the server isn't the solution, because the server is actually up 24/7, only it denies access during working hours.

Client side time and time zone check seems like it's somewhat tedious, plus not at all accurate. I'll probably try cron later this week.

Meanwhile, I've been cleaning up some of the pages to use .css more effectively. It's a pity Dreamweaver Ultradev 4 doesn't correctly display some custom .css styles when in design mode *sigh*.

P.S. Yeah, I could just post the scheduled times and dates the server is online. Actually, that's what I did. But that's the easy way out, I want to get it to work the hard way =P

Thanks for the tips!

 

WOW!!! /versus/images/icons/shocked.gif

Nice work you got there man.

CIN

 

Figured it out. At first I was thinking of using cron, but then I found out I have to go through my webhost tech support to get them to enable cron for me... bleh.

Then a friend of mine suggested stripping out the date/time header from the HTTP 1.1 protocol to get server-side time, but I don't know if there are any methods available in JS to obtain the header information.

Finally, I discovered that there are getUTCHours() and getUTCDay() methods available to the date object... so... problem solved (apart from the fact that this client side hack assumes client O/S has the correct time/timezone).

Yay! New code should be uploaded later today. /versus/images/icons/smile.gif

 

You DO know that Enoch Powell was a notorious racist right?

 

Yep yep yep, but, it's just a quote. /versus/images/icons/smile.gif

 

Nice site chris...very nice

soon as ol' danky melbourne gets one machine..I'll tell ya/versus/images/icons/smile.gif

Sonn as ol' danky melbourne removes it...i'll scream! /versus/images/icons/mad.gif

<font color=red>~~~ 'Flock off feather brain, or u can stick around and find out the hard way!/versus/images/icons/mad.gif~~~'