Dialup skin?

Kizzume · Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 12:04 am Post subject: Dialup skin?

I should work on a new "dialup skin". Hmm.... Get rid of all the textured patterns and make all the fades based on the 1pixel wide or long theory, which doesn't take barely any filespace. It would still have the color, just not the textures. I would also make the buttons be just text instead of graphics. It would probably take about the same time to load as the standard phpBB skin.

How long DOES this forum take to load on dialup? Would there be a significant benefit in making a "dialup skin"? I tried to keep the filesizes down, but I think after EVERYTHING gets loaded, it takes about 400k. Basically, for those that don't translate that well--that's 2/5 of a meg (megabyte). I really don't know how long that takes on a phone modem--it would seem that currently it would take somewhere around 50-80 seconds to load everything. If I make a "dialup skin", it would probably take a total of 60-100k which could cut it down to loading in about 16 seconds. But I don't know--how long are people with phone modems used to waiting for forums to load?

Segep · Joined: 10 Nov 2007 Posts: 221

The first time you load this forum, at takes forever, but after that it just uses the cache so it's no big deal.

Kizzume · Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 2:17 am Post subject:

That's very good to know.

Kizzume · Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2007 1:55 pm Post subject:

Now that I'm on a roll, although the other themes have a few bugs to iron out, I'm still going to make a dialup skin. There's the actual potential that it may take less time to load than the original unmodified subSilver theme.

I want to find out how people made their phpBB forums allow one to change the skin with a little menu at the bottom of every page, even when someone isn't logged in.

Kizzume · Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2007 7:36 pm Post subject:

Well, it looks like I'm not going to be able to do that theme until I figure out how to make it so instead of graphical buttons appearing, text appears instead. Then there's seeing if there's a way to have an alternate version of the "Advanced BBCode Box v5.1.0" be used for different themes, where I can make it all text descriptions with a | symbol between for a dialup theme.

There are ways of making it look decent too--there are standard fonts, like Impact, that can totally change the appearance. There's another font that's really narrow that's standard that would work well too. Myself, I'm kind-of weird--I actually prefer the text description more than the icon, although if there's a way to have both superimposed on top of each other in a way that both looks good AND both can distinctly be seen and read, I'd go for that, but that's rambling--I was really just trying to say that I like seeing the description. It's probably the C64 in me still... Laughing

The one thing I really wish was possible in CSS was the ability to make the color of text itself be a tiled image. If someone knows of some new way to do this that nobody seems to be using much, please let me know. It's probably a pipe dream, just like the ability to *gasp* embed fonts in something other than IE (oh my goodness did he just say those two words which should never be said?). I've done that, and it's a horribly tasking process that is tedious and frustrating, and even more frustrating when you find out it only works in IE and there's no getting around making people download a font or a font mini-installer of and for that font.

You can embed so many things, why not fonts? There's SVG, but then it DOESN'T work in IE, but I've thought about just doing it anyway. I would love to see if I could apply marquee properties to an svg, or apply a live stretching of the object--if so, and it isn't as tasking as moving a regular image, and one can indeed have multiple layers of transparency, then I could do some effects on this forum that may be alarming. I'd love to see if there's a way to have a the properties of those SVG images be based on something javascript that could modify them live so there could be morphing logos and such. Okay, blah blah--I need to move this thread into the rants area because I'm rambling so much.

If anyone is still actually reading this, thanks. Smile

Segep · Joined: 10 Nov 2007 Posts: 221

I have no clue how to embed fonts, but the simplest way to have text instead of graphics is to remove the graphic images. As long as all the images have "alt" tags. It will cause a ton of 404 errors that the user won't see but will show up on your server logs, but it's not a huge deal. The subSilver theme as far as I know is completely "alt" tagged throughout. What you need to do is download and install the Extreme Styles mod (very easy--no file edits) and clone the style.

Segep · Joined: 10 Nov 2007 Posts: 221

Oh yeah, and "change style on index" is the mod you're looking for to switch themes on the fly. It's another easy one. Smile

Kizzume · Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2007 11:25 am Post subject:

I have that mod installed now. Thanks Smile

archangelm · Joined: 07 Dec 2007 Posts: 49 Location: Ohio

How about a metallic skin? Like brushed steel? I've always wanted to see a skin like that, like something out of the original Terminator movie.

Kizzume · Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 8:00 pm Post subject:

I hadn't thought about doing totally different types of skins. Interesting.

As far as the dialup part though, the more I can keep away from using full-fledged textures and things that take up just 1k, like most of the fades that are here already that only take 1k, the quicker it will load on dialup, for a dialup skin...

archangelm · Joined: 07 Dec 2007 Posts: 49 Location: Ohio

Yeah, there's metallic, like what I posted above, and again below in a slightly more bluish tint.

And then, of course, there's marble.

I did the images in Adobe Photoshop. Smile

Kizzume · Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 10:27 pm Post subject:

That was a nice marble effect you did. Smile

archangelm · Joined: 07 Dec 2007 Posts: 49 Location: Ohio

Kizzume · Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 12:36 am Post subject:

The first blue marble one you posted--when I was messing with it trying to create a loop/tile point (since they did not have a loop/tile point), I started going crazy in photoshop and created some interesting things:

But as you can see, these loop pretty good, but they're not really related--I just sort of went off on a photoshop tangent. I love messing with textures.

archangelm · Joined: 07 Dec 2007 Posts: 49 Location: Ohio

Those are kick-ass!