Talk:Main Page

GPFontaine's Feelings about the Main Page

Links/Videos of the Day

I think that it would be a good idea to have an actual page Link of the Day and Media of the Day with archives of the links that go on the front page. Gishman P. Fontaine 20:25, 1 January 2008 (PST)

New Edit Buttons

I added the following code to MediaWiki:Common.js

 document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="' 
          + 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:MarkS/extraeditbuttons.js' 
          + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&dontcountme=s"></script>');

It created a bunch of buttons that make editing a page much easier.

Front Page

The front page of a wiki doesn't need to be extra special.
It needs to give an idea as to what the wiki will help with and perhaps links to some general categories.
Still, if you chose to write out in huge letters FFIV > FFVI you would never hear me complain about it.

Menu Troubles

The trouble with using images as menus in wikimedia is that an external image marker will always place itself next to the image and the image will link to its wiki page.

An option is to get the images to refer to webpages, but when I tried to do that on your page it does not work. I think you might need an admin setting for redirects to work. Look into the command: #redirect.

I also played with CSS and Javascript. The problem is that many attributes will not work in a Wiki.

I hope that the ideas below will help you out. I'm not saying you should use them as is, but perhaps they point you in the right direction.

Wiki Tools

Seapine HTML to Wiki

Massive Redesign

On December 14th 2007, I redesigned the front page. I used a horizontal menu system and tables to structure the main page.

---

Good Luck

- GPFontaine

Thanks you

LOL Syd, thanks for the mention on the front page & Sysop Access.

I have a few more ideas for the design, but I want to work on a few other articles first.

News Scrolling Discussion

• The main page is looking great. The only thing that bugs me is that when you scroll through the list of red links, the "Reported by Gishman P. Fontaine" scrolls as well. Is there a way to fix this? - Syd Lexia

• The reason I have it scrolling like that is so that the news section can be long and not make the page huge. That particular news item was pretty hefty, bigger than they will be in the future. I think that when you see how it looks with a bunch of smaller news items it will look better. If you don't like it after another few items are posted we can look into alternative methods of posting. Gishman P. Fontaine 20:00, 1 January 2008 (PST)

• No, no. I don't mind that it's a scroll box. However, when you scroll through it, at least in IE, the little block of text that says "Reported by: Gishman P. Fontaine" stays in a fixed position within the scroll box, thus causing it to be superimposed over the other text as you scroll. Here's a screenshot: http://history.sydlexia.com/index.php?title=Image:Weird_scroll.jpg

• Yuck... I don't like the looks of that. I'll see what I can do about super gluing it down. Gishman P. Fontaine 12:15, 2 January 2008 (PST)
• Well, it looks as though that fixed it. I just tested on IE7 & Firefox and it looks good. Gishman P. Fontaine 13:38, 2 January 2008 (PST)

• It's still doing it for me. I'm using IE6. Valdronius 00:01, 4 January 2008 (PST)

• • It looks like IE6 is going to be lame like this. I hate to say it, but if a browser can't support using a DIV tag as a content holding block, then it is time to change browsers. Any current browser IE7, Firefox 2 & 3, Safari, Opera, Konqueror... all of them will work. RIP IE6. Seriously. Gishman P. Fontaine 18:17, 3 July 2008 (PDT)

HTML Issues

• I've had to fix issues with some of the html tags fucking up. The actual page will show the tag in text (ex: it will show < s>strikethrough< /s> instead of strikethrough, except without the spaces.), but when I open the page to fix this, the tags are instead a big mess of text and coding. I've fixed the pages that I saw the problem on, but I don't know the cause in the first place. I'm using IE6 right now, by the way, since I'm at work. Char Aznable 09:58, 4 July 2008 (PDT)
  • That was my fault, sorry. I wrote a script to automize changes to pages. Unfortunately my code was sloppy, which caused issues with pages that contained HTML code. I think I fixed the remaining pages that displayed markup now. -Tyop 10:09, 4 July 2008 (PDT)
    • Tyop, could you post your code (no matter how sloppy) in a code block so I can get an idea as to the type of idea you had? I haven't done any scripting with Mediawiki before, so I'm interested.
      • It's really just an ugly hack consisting of a couple of bash scripts. I wrote most of it about a year ago when I had to batch upload a lot of files to a wiki. I just made a few changes to make it work with Sydapedia and remove the [[Category:The Complete Sydapedia]] tags. All I did was copy&paste the names of the articles to a file named articles and then ran syd_change "sed -e s/\[\[Category: *The Complete Sydapedia\]\]//" `cat articles` on the command line. If you want to see the scripts I uploaded them here. I really don't recommend using them though. I fixed the problem with the HTML escaping, but it's still an awfully ugly hack. I recommend checking out Pywikipediabot instead. The only reason I didn't use that is because I was already familiar with the scripts I wrote. -Tyop 06:10, 5 July 2008 (PDT)

Redirect Arrow

The redirect arrow needs to be fixed. It was designed for a white background and it looks kind of awful.

Outside Links

Isn't there supposed to be a weird little icon after outside links? Instead there's just a space... it's kind of awkward. -Syd

• Syd, can you link a URL for me so I can see where you are talking about. I thought I fixed this the other day. Tyop and I were talking about it in the forums. Gishman P. Fontaine 10:32, 28 June 2008 (PDT)

• • Any of the links found in the SydLexia.com NES Championship - 2008.
    • Got it, this was fixed Gishman P. Fontaine 18:17, 3 July 2008 (PDT)

Random Aesthetics

Can we make it so that last modified and accessed appear on one line and Privacy policy, About Sydapedia, and Disclaimers appear on the second?