News from the Top

The Forums has been updated to 2.11. It fixes some minor bugs with the administration panels, and adds a new feature to the forums that will be unveiled along with the launch of SupCom Heaven in the upcoming days.

We’re looking for a programmer to assist with upcoming HeavenGames projects. This is a volunteer position.

• 2+ years of experience with making web applications in PHP
• Experience with SVN, Trac, and Smarty a plus

Interested candidates should submit a cover letter and resume to us at zen (at) heavengames (dot) com.

Once upon a time, broadband was limited to a handful of university campuses and companies that are tech savvy, and the majority of visitors were on 28K- 56K dialup. Because throughput was so slow, HTML coders had to invent ways to make a site load faster, such as heavy optimization of site graphics (which we still do), and also using non-standard HTML markup by stripping quotes from tags, as well as getting rid of Whitespace. That was 7 years ago.

Today, many web sites such as HeavenGames employ on-the-fly compression of HTML, often reducing HTML pages to 5-10% of their original size before they’re transferred to the user. This means you can safely put in quotes around attributes, format the HTML with whitespace and lines so it’s easier for your successors to easily pick up where you left off, as well as avoid messing up our frontpage when posting news.

I would really appreciate it if these basic tips are followed … at the very least it’ll save you from having to contact me to fix the HG Main page :)

• Close all the tags. This includes <img src="..." />, <br />, <hr />, <p> ... </p>, and <li> ... </li> tags.
• List Items (<li>...</li>) can not be standalone – they should be contained in an unordered list (<ul>...</ul>) or an ordered list (<ol>...</ul>). For example:

  <ul>
    <li>Bullet Item 1</li>
    <li>Bullet Item 2</li>
    <li>Bullet Item 3</li>
  </ul>
  

• Attribute values should be surrounded by quotes. Do <img src="http://www.heavengames.com/some_image.jpg" width="150" height="150" border="0" /> instead of <img src=http://www.heavengames.com/some_image.jpg width=150 height=150 border=0>

Want to learn more? HTMLDog is a great place to learn how to code HTML accurately.

The internal HG I.T. section have been updated – contains updates to the template specifications, as well as a new howto on how to use the user authentication framework.

We’ve installed a Trac for the current version of our forums. If you come across a bug in the forums, please report it here so we can track it down and fix problems. The current system is in maintenance mode as we work on migrating the forums to use a database backend. Also a word of caution about that previous sentence: Don’t get too hyped up about the new version, or expect too much from it – there’s a lot of things we want to do but we need to do it in measured steps.

A Trac for the downloads is being setup and will be announced soon.

It’s done, completed, merged, finished. After a lot of work comparing accounts, coming up with business rules and how to tackle conflicting account names, and worrying constantly about possibly breaking various programs that connect to the user database, we now operate on one database only. We can finally move on to other projects at HG :)

We’re looking at upgrading PHP on our servers from PHP 4 to PHP 5 in March of 2006. If you are in charge of maintaining PHP scripts for your site on HG, or are in procession of PHP script(s) that power your site, please test and make sure your scripts are compatible with PHP 5. At minimum, please read the PHP5: Backward Incompatible Changes to find out what is new in PHP5 and how new changes and additions may affect your application.

Lastly, if you’re curious about what’s new about PHP 5, check out the PHP: Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5 site. These are the relevant sections that I believe are must reads:

• New Functions
• Databases
• MySQL Improved
• New Object Model
• Error Reporting

Our installation of Ruby on Rails has been updated to 1.0 RC4. Read the official announcement if you are curious about what’s been changed, as well as steps needed to update your rails project to the latest version.

Our installation of phpMyAdmin has been updated from 2.6.1 to 2.6.4-pl3. Release Notes are available if you’re curious what the updates change and fix.

We’ve updated PHP to 4.4.1 on all our servers, which fixes some security vulnerabilities and bugs. Please read the Release Announcement and ChangeLog for more information.