KerbalBase - A website for your ships!

[Deadweasel]

Also another issue that has surfaced:

You're going to want to build in a method for users to upload their images to your site, and have a utility set up to receive and reduce the images to web-friendly standards. There are two reasons for this:

1. Links to full-size images mean visitors are going to have to wait for the whole thing to download for each and every entry they view on your site. If it's only being shrunk dimensionally in your site code, visitors are still essentially downloading the full original size image anyway, which wastes the bandwidth of both your site and your visitors.
   
2. Images hosted separately have a habit of going away as the user forgets he/she had something linking back to it, and cleans out unwanted entries in their galleries. Worse, the image host being linked to could go down, or simply block the image from being seen altogether because it's being referenced too many times (which can happen often if your site gets really popular). Either way, you end up with a situation like this:http://kerbalbase.net23.net/list/. Check the entry for Atmospheric Launcher.
   

So yeah, you're going to want to set things up so users have to upload their screenshots to your site instead of just linking to them, and either automate the process of making them website-friendly, or force the users to provide an appropriate size (like the KSP forums do for avatars).

Case-in-point: this is what is actually being downloaded every time the "Motherf***ing Eelloo Mk II" is displayed:

http://i.imgur.com/rfHgJ3z.jpg

That's a huge unnecessary hit on your visitors' bandwidth just to display what otherwise looks like a simple thumbnail. Forcing the image to resize in the browser doesn't make the image smaller to download.

EDIT: Looking further, I just realized you also have a larger-size version on the ships' individual pages too, so my suggestion probably means a fair bit of work would be needed. Fortunately there are lots of AJAX scripts out there that will accept an image and produce web-friendly versions of them in multiple sizes. For reference, CMS packages like Wordpress do this automatically.

Edited May 31, 2013 by Deadweasel

[Vilsol]

Obviously it has a database in the back. The problem is population... there is no way I could keep up with all the stuff that is coming out... I guess I will have to spend a night just writing links and names in the database...

[Deadweasel]

Well, Spaceport does have a feed... Might be worth looking at?

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/feed/

[Vilsol]

Thanks for the feed. The feed is only for the things that have been submitted the latest, so I still have to write every entry before the feed. Also for the image reduction, i have thought of this and fix is on the way. I will also soon add the categories and a search.

[Naten]

SpacePort is the official site for this stuff, and it WORKS, so anyone using this should really use SpacePort. And yes, SpacePort does have .craft files!

[Deadweasel]

SpacePort is the official site for this stuff, and it WORKS, so anyone using this should really use SpacePort. And yes, SpacePort does have .craft files!

Well, there's still the issue of a lot of n00bs either including a thumbnail that has nothing to do with their submission, adding the entire english dictionary to the tags list, or both. That's the biggest annoyance I have with Spaceport at the moment.

That said, it's unlikely KerbalBase will take off since it relies on the webmaster to babysit it substantially as it is right now. There's a reason CMS is such a Big Deal on the web, and automating the receipt of submissions, crunching images to be more web-friendly (and providing multiple pre-optimized sizes for different uses on the site) are just a couple of features those things can do right out of the box.

In fact, that's one aspect that has always confused me a little about this project. There's a specific claim to not using CMS, but in this case that's pretty much exactly what you NEED (not to mention that's essentially what you're building from scratch anyway). I guess what I'm getting at is that while the site does look nice and clean, it's pretty simple to achieve the same look, feel and functionality without having to hand-code every single aspect of it. I can think of at least a half-dozen ways I could get Wordpress to not only look and act like KB does, but to have it done and ready to go within a few hours. Not quite "drag-n-drop", but certainly quicker than coding by-hand a replication of a solution that already exists to address just this sort of thing.

[Cpone]

I have an idea of what you could do about the mod thing you could add like tick boxes for all the major popular mods like kethane or mechjeb and then there could be an other: tick box where you type in ones not on the tick list.

[Deadweasel]

I have an idea of what you could do about the mod thing you could add like tick boxes for all the major popular mods like kethane or mechjeb and then there could be an other: tick box where you type in ones not on the tick list.

So, basically what Spaceport (and every other major CMS out there) already uses?

[cy-one]

I have some wierd bug here... I just discovered the site, I'm not logged in, just opened it. The... I guess some kind of showcase on the front site isn't loading.

The arrow's are there, but the only thing inbetween is a loading icon.

I'm using Fx 22.0

[Deadweasel]

I have some wierd bug here... I just discovered the site, I'm not logged in, just opened it. The... I guess some kind of showcase on the front site isn't loading.

The arrow's are there, but the only thing inbetween is a loading icon.

I'm using Fx 22.0

Don't be too concerned. The site was just released, and is still in development. It's happening here too, Google Chrome. It's probably something on the site itself that's broken.

[Javster]

Good work. Really amazing.

[stupid_chris]

Guys, this dates from May, it's a very old thread. Since nothing is really adding to the main idea in a relevant, I'll close this thread. Don't necro if you don't have anything important to add guys, it just clutters up really. If OP is still working on this project, he can message me to see about getting this opened up again.

Thread closed.