Topic: Another in the wild sighting
http://www.jamieoliver.com/forum/viewforum.php?id=8
It has a custom index page hence the link to a viewforum page.
2 2008-04-23 01:37 (edited by sirena 2008-04-23 01:42)
- sirena
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Re: Another in the wild sighting
That's a very nice punbb implementation. The emphasis on trying to make the forum user friendly with the simplified index page and the flat forum structure is cool.
I also like the custom header image that appears on a per-forum basis. Is there a mod for that?
Don't like the site background image though, and the default font size is too small.
The forum footer also behaves a bit erraticly. When browsing the forums or reading a topic in IE6 the 'copyright -terms of use' etc links sometimes sit right over the top of the cover image of his book, or sometimes also jump up off the bottom of the page and sit amongst the Facebook etc logos. Must be an open CSS { somewhere in the style-sheet or something.
Re: Another in the wild sighting
Moved to Show Off
Re: Another in the wild sighting
sirena: Invalid CSS doesn't cause inconsistencies (except maybe between browsers), and anyway, his CSS is valid. 
- sirena
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Re: Another in the wild sighting
Looks like they make use of dynatext:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dynatext
http://www.artypapers.com/csshelppile/pcdtr/
on their forum index page to generate the nice font images for forum topics.
It's an interesting approach but if you turn images off you don't see the forum names and it also means search engines don't see the forum names either off the home page.
I imagine it would also add a bit to server load making those images dynamically - and mean generating a dozen more http requests than you really need too on the forum index.
Interestingly, you can also use the dynatext remotely off Jamies site: eg
http://www.jamieoliver.com/fonts/dynate … HelloWorld 
And they still have userlist.php floating around in the forum root too.
Re: Another in the wild sighting
sirena: That's what the alt attribute is for: search engines and people without images see plain text instead.
And looking at the dynatext stuff, it's essentially loading static images: the text that's generated is cached.
- sirena
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Re: Another in the wild sighting
You are right Smartys. I should have researched the dynatext a little further.
But still, it seems a too-fancy solution, IMHO, for a relatively simple web design problem.
More code to go wrong. And more code to audit for potential vulnerabilities too, which you don't always want on a high-profile site...
Re: Another in the wild sighting
It's fairly simple, well-written code that you need to audit once and forget it. And it's probably the easiest way to get a fancy typeface dynamically.
Re: Another in the wild sighting
I like it...
- sirena
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Re: Another in the wild sighting
Smartys wrote:
It's fairly simple, well-written code that you need to audit once and forget it. And it's probably the easiest way to get a fancy typeface dynamically.
Still... I don't want to think about the consequences for the server if - for example - someone remotely threw a 1,000,000 word dictionary at the dynatext script, and asked for the font size of each requested word to be 10000 pt, for example.
I don't know if it is possible, but that's just one example of what I'd be worried about.
Re: Another in the wild sighting
sirena wrote:
Still... I don't want to think about the consequences for the server if - for example - someone remotely threw a 1,000,000 word dictionary at the dynatext script, and asked for the font size of each requested word to be 10000 pt, for example.
That's not possible (the font size is hardcoded into the script). And a DoS attack using that script? It's just about the most basic script you could use to generate an image. CAPTCHA images are potentially an issue because generating some of them takes a lot of CPU (since there's a lot of image manipulation being done, not just putting a certain color/font/size text on a background), but this should be no more of an issue than any other script on the server.