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dagees
Starting Member
Netherlands
9 posts
Joined: Aug, 2005
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 Posted - 2005/08/16 : 00:05:00
Hi there, this is my first post here at happyhardcore.com.
I am a big happy hardcore fan, and listening to the style since 1995. A couple of years ago I discoverd the di.fm hardore channel (which name should be happy hardcore channel instead). Nowadays I have a gold account there. I am tracking this site for years now, and it is fantastic to see that people are running this site with such devotion. It is also great that this place has become such a big community site for hardcore fans all over the world. So, nothing but respect about that.
I used to run my own house related website in holland, where people could upload (home produced) house tracks and let others rate those tracks. I had stuff such as charts and everything. In fact, it was the most popular site in its genre in The Netherlands. For people who might remember traxinspace (or maybe the mod archive nowadays), it was something like that but then only for house related music. But things changed and I decided to shut the project down.
I still have the domain though: http://www.exploitation.nl, but it is used purely as a website for me and my friends. Waybackmachine cache shows a bit how it looked a couple of years before: http://web.archive.org/web/20030807023546/http://www.exploitation.nl/
(Copy / Paste the link, don't click it; snitz can't parse it...)
Anyway: I am a webdeveloper and build the site as a hobby in classic asp with interbase as a database. And although it probably didn't had to parse such large ammounts of data that the forum is consuming, the site was fast as lightning.
And now let me come to the point... This is a great site, but it is so slow... Searching in the forum seems to cost like hours, and I get SQL Server errors everywhere...
I know, this site is based upon snitz forums (didn't check that out). But, the site should be able to render a lot faster then it does now. To get this site to maximum speed, you should rewrite all code to asp.net and take advantage of precompiled pages and typed datasets. Beside that, I can rewrite the html source and would not need more then about 10% of the lines of html code to get the same layout.
Take for example all those lines of javascript in every page... Isn't it possible to put all that code in a js file? And what about cascading style sheets? When using css, you are not only saving on bandwidth and download times, but css also renders faster then large html tables. Same thing to say about javascript, those menu's are fancy but they require extra rendering time and can't be indexed by searchengines. In my opinion this site needs top / submenu navigation.
I am also interested in the way queries are done. I bet that the queries could be written smarter, so that less roundtrips to the server are required, less data needs to be transfered and the asp code needs to process less data...
I could go on like this for hours, but I made my point, I guess..
By the way, this post is not intended personally ofcourse ;) I hope that any of my advice might be considered when enhancing the website.. I know, it is a lot of work and at least someone is doing it. Respect!
One more point: it seems popular nowadays to use small font sizes in website design. Personally I think that reading a normal fontsize is a lot of nicer...
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silver
Admin
Japan
12,564 posts
Joined: Feb, 2001
894 hardcore releases
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Posted - 2005/08/16 : 10:37:52
Thanks for the reply, I am fully well aware that Snitz is not the Snitz but the shits, I only planed to use the software for a short period while I build my own system but the site became very popular very quick and I found myself stuck with the code and database design, which I think totally sucked.
In a effort to get rid of snitz, all the bugs and the crap coding I started to work with the developers of the software who took it personally that I was reporting bugs and deleted my posts about them. So I decided I would just go at it myself.
So I got to work on v3 of the site, I have re-written 90% of the backend of the site and plan to get rid of the rest later. There are valid reasons for everything on the site including all the points you raised. It's alot to do with time vs compatibility and being only a single developer as I'm sure you can understand running a site yourself.
I don't know when you wrote this message referring to what time frame but since v3 launched we have pushed the site 300% faster (v3 launched last week). Some of the site is already running on ASP.net (alot of the backend + tools) but it will take a little while to convert the main site into .net and get that further speed increase, that is planned for the future version of the site, I just had to get rid of all the spaghetti code and security bugs in Snitz before I could move onto that task.
The URL passing bug is actually a function I re-wrote myself if you had posted that URL in an early version of the site it would have looked really bad... I'll add it to the bugs to remove for v3.
If you interested we are looking for developers for the site - check your PM.
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dagees
Starting Member
Netherlands
9 posts
Joined: Aug, 2005
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Posted - 2005/08/16 : 20:00:40
Ok, you seem to know what you're doing ;) And no, I don't check this site that often, so I didn't notice a speed difference, if any.
Btw, you can't write a perfect working hyperlink parser. Think about it. I wrote one myself using regular expressions and ran into the exact same problems. You start parsing when a link starts with http:// , and you want to stop parsing at the first space " ". But some people post links that include spaces (%20). So you can't rely on that. And so, you don't know if a second http:// is still part of the first link or meant as a second link...
Good luck anyway!
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silver
Admin
Japan
12,564 posts
Joined: Feb, 2001
894 hardcore releases
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Posted - 2005/08/18 : 07:14:21
If your interested in helping out on the site let me know.
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