Willy,

I am not sure when it happened, but lately I frequently find myself having to scroll horizontally to see the entire page. I primarily use Opera 8.02 but I also see the same effect with Firefox 1.0.6. It doesn't show up with IE but that is probably because IE doesn't have a toolbar docked to the side like I have in the others.

It is not a major problem, but something I find a bit annoying especially since there seems to be lots of empty space that could be better used. In particular the column on the left of the page (with shout box, etc) seems a bit wide. It would be nice if the page could be designed to rescale things to fit in the window.

Overall, I think boincstats is great! Keep up the good work.

smith

The width of the menu was affected by lines that were too long in the shoutbox. I already fixed that.

If possible, please make a screenshot when it happens again, so I can take a look at it.

I'm testing BOINCstats on FireFox, IE and Opera, and the only times a saw the problem width was with the shoutbox problem.

The effect definitely is related to the menu bar on the side of the browser because everything looks fine if I close the bar. It seems as though the site is trying to fit the page to the size of the browser without the bar which causes horizontal scrolling with the bar.

My screen resolution is 1400x1050 but I am posting screen captures at 800x600 of both Opera and Firefox. Note the horizontal scroll bars. I couldn't figure how to upload them directly, so they will be on my site for a few days.

Opera:

Thanks again for looking into this!

smith

P.S. As a side note, I also find your bulletin board is a bit strange. One can create topics but to reply to a post one has to register. Is this a security feature?

It took some time before I got into this.

At the time of your post, a lot of spam messages were posted into the shoutbox. These contained ling lines that I didn’t anticipate for, so they widened the site, except for the top and bottom, these are separate tables.

I can’t see the shoutbox in your screenshots so I don’t know if that was the problem.

I tried Opera myself, and I have no problems with sidebars. Do you still have the problem at the moment?

About the forum:
In some forums you can post as guest, but in none of the forums you can reply as guest. To ‘enjoy’ the forum to the fullest, you have to register. This is mostly because then I know who I’m talking with.

Willy,

The forum messages look fine, but the main page and the stats pages still require horizontal scrolling to see the whole thing. Resizing the panel width in Opera (or Firefox) does not resize the stuff in the main window, and this seems to be causing the troubles.

Unfortunately I don't know what it could be. Do you know if the code somehow queries the browser to find the window width in pixels and then uses that for calculations? Maybe it is not accounting for the panel? In any case, since it is not reproducible on your system, I guess it is something I will just have to live with. In the grand scheme of things it is pretty minor.

Thanks for the help and the quick responses! Also thanks for explaining the reasoning behind registration for replies. It makes sense. Keep up the great work!

smith

The width of the site is 1002 pixels. This is calculated for a standard browset, with a scrollbar on the right. BOINCstats can't be smaller, I need the space, so if you have a menubar on the left, or something else, and the available width is less then 1002, you will get scrollbars.

On your screenshot, the topbar is not aligned with the rest of the site. I thought you was refering to that.

Sorry for the mixup, but I think I understand at least the top bar. Looking at the raw HTML, the top bar is set to 100% width which makes it re-adjust to be centered on the page regardless of what size panel I have on the left. As far as I am concerned, it looks "fine". The remainder of the page however seems to be set to my screen resolution (1400 pixels wide) which causes the scrolling when I have the left panel taking up some of the width. So in short, the top bar is centered by definition of using relative sizing, but the rest of the page which uses an absolute size is screwed up in my Opera and Firefox.

To explain further about the screen size stuff, let me say that even with the side bar, my browser viewable area is still 1118 pixels wide according to a cropped screen shot I just took and so everything should fit. The problem I am seeing seems to be related to the extra wide margins around the left column with the shout box, etc (see the Firefox capture) which still exists even as I write this. The shout-box comments, etc is contained in a nice column roughly 150pixels wide but there are completely blank margins on either side of the shout-box column which themselves are roughly 150-200 pixels wide. Adding up the 1002 pixels you describe plus the two (weird) blank columns each about 150-200pixels wide gets something close to my screen resolution of 1400 pixels which is why I speculate that may be the cause of what I am seeing.

Anyhow, I hope this clarifies what my current thoughts are. I don't know what screen resolution you are using, but perhaps you can see the effect too if you use something larger than 1024x768? The weird thing is that nothing in the HTML jumps out as suggesting the page should have this problem, but I'll play around and see if I can discover anything.

Sorry for the hassle. I really do think you have a great page!

smith

My default resolution is 1280x1024.

But I'll look into this some more.

willy, if you use relative values instead of absolute ones then the page will auto-resize to the window area, but will obviously look best at a certain minimum resolution, which i think there are some tricks to set a min res but also using relative values to allow expansion

you also might want to consider making your pages valid using the W3C HTML Validator and CSS Validator

with valid pages and standard compliant browsers (IE is a bit lacking) your pages will display as they're ment to, and lots of other good, benificial things

for a bit of reading on "why validate?" have a look here and here

good CSS will help too, a lot of layout can be managed with CSS instead of tables, which works better and is easier to change/manage and is more customisable/scalable

I'm working on a completly new framework for the site, with lost of CSS, layers and stuff. Progress is slow as I'm also imlementing new features at the same time.

Come to think about it, when the new framework is finished I need to update it with the latest bell en whistles from the current site.

Ow, I'd like to add: webdesign is not really my thing. Writing code is.

while you're at it, you might want to think about caching

for more info i've got a thread over at SETI about it, but feel free to ask/comment here

The current design of the forum seems to have some problems.

It seems like the IFRAME isn't resizing itself properly at times, and I keep finding myself looking at a thread that's been clipped by the small IFRAME. All I can see is a couple of posts and the rest is hidden - there aren't any scrollbars to get to the rest of the thread.

Now the forum is opened in a new window, so there shouldn't be such a problem.

beware of opening links in new windows. That, and any form of frames, are bad for usability, and accessibility.

I have had this problem of having to scroll horizontally to see the messages on the right side of the screen.

I am using Netscape 7.1

Here are three screen shots:

Opps! I do not know how to save the screen shots to this note.
Please help.

I have bmp screen shots.

Thanks,
Richard

Put them on some photo album on the net, like www.photobucket.com or such and link them here.

That's probably all down to invalid markup, table-based layouts (which by default, stretch when long text-strings are used, but a fix has been found, see the BURP forums), fixed-width layout etc.
to be frank the site is a bit of a mess and in need of an major overhaul, i'm surprised there aren't more problems - but no dis-credit to willy as good web design/development is hard

The problem could partly be how well your chosen browser supports web standards (eg, valid (X)HTML and CSS)
when was v7.1 released?

From the little I know about recent versions of Netscape, I think their standards support isn't bad, but always worth a check.
[edit]After some investigation it seems the 7.0+ series is based on Mozilla, which has very good standards support[/edit]

A simple method would be to test in other browsers with known-good standards support, such as Mozilla/Firefox or Opera

As Saenger suggested, use an image hosting service, then link to them here with [ img ]http://your.url.to/image/location/[ /img ] (remove the spaces from within the tags)

I strongly suggest saving them in a more efficient format, JPG or GIF are probably going to be best, but PNG would also be better if your image software supports it. Bitmap files are HUGE (raw uncompressed data) and modem users will hate them, most other formats are much smaller (file-size wise) and much more bandwidth friendly

Mostly any image editing software should be able to convert the images (basically open them, use "save as..." and choose one of the 3 above formats (JPG/JPEG, GIF, PNG - try them out to find the best for your images) and use the new format instead.

If you're in need of an image editor The GIMP is a rather good, free application and should be more than capable of the task.

MS Paint can save PNGs and JPEGs (since Windows 98).

I remember when once my 'net was slow for a long-ish period, reason turned out to be my sister sending a 13MB BMP file (a photo) via MSN...

Thanks PovAddict, I couldn't remember
Paint is a bit archaic lol
Even though it does technically support the standards, it doesn't implement them very efficiently, either image quality is poor, or file-sizes are large(r)

lol, the delight of users :p
Another favourite of mine is users saving images is something like a word document, rather than as an actual image file lol, and we all know the high-quality of MS office products!

some further thoughts to this:
would it be possible to allow people such as myself to at least view the new design (in whatever state it's in) to comment and advise on various things (eg, accessibility, usability, efficient coding etc.) so that the changes can be made in the early stages when it's reletively easy to do so, rather than trying to retrofit the finished product later (which generally doesn't happen).
I mean the above from a point of view of wanting to help make BOINCstats better, if not the best BOINC statistics site around

Would it not be more sensible (and easier) to integrate the updates as early as possible, for the same reasons as above; not having to retrofit things.

Ah, well if you're a coder rather than a designer there's a book you may be interested in, writen for/aimed at coders/programmers (like myself) which teaches the principals of good visual design in a way technical folk can understand.
I have a copy and highly recommend it: The Principals of Beautiful Web Design, I'm not sure if there's a non-english version, but the language isn't complex, and it explains things well.

But again, making the new version available for interested people to view and give feedback allows designers to comment/advise on your design too

Is it still relevant, I mean the original posts on this thread were made way back in 2005!

Well that's the reason I posted my comments, to find out.
I've heard nothing to say that the new site is being scrapped, it's probably just delayed, which is another reason for posting; maybe willy just needs a hand lol.
Also lack of thread activity is caused by lack of posting, so surely the only remedy is to post? (which seems to be exactly what i did, and caused exactly the desired effect)

Lee, maybe throw some tips for webdesign over here.

By the looks of it they need you!

Ouch...

That is a very errrrrrrrr colorful page....

my god - I assume it's safe to say they've not heard of readability or colour-blindness, nevermind accessibility, usability, or just good content authoring.

I'm actually quite impressed with BS compared to the ameteurish attempt at something supposedly resembling a web page.

I also assume I'm one of the few hits they get in their server logs every few months with a site like that