Johns Celestia Page

[John Van Vliet]

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[Jango Fett]

No offense, but have you considered designing your page? It's very useful though, but very ugly.

[John Van Vliet]

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[selden]

John,

There's no need to get upset.
Different people have different tastes.
And he could have been joking.
Or simply trying to get your attention.

At least your pages aren't as boring as mine

[Rassilon]

Yeah its best to not blow things up specially on the net...There are some who by saying the wrong thing too could become a real thorn in your side...so its always good measure to just take everything with a grain of salt on the net...Besides who cares what peeps think...We all do this for fun not to impress anyways

[Jango Fett]

I was't prepared for that kinf of reaction. Sorry if I have insulted someone, that was just my opinion. You guys are so sensitive about it, it seems. In Croatia I'm moderator on our forum and I used to discuss these subjects in a normal way: I give comment, and the other one request explanation, and reverse. The main quality of a good designer lies in capability to accept certain critics.

I know this discussion is not in interest of Celestia forum, and that's why I'm even more suprised with this reaction.

Just like Rassilon says: "We all do this for fun not to impress anyways"

Peace!

[John Van Vliet]

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[Jango Fett]

I am not upset it just took me off gard ,after a long day of getting rid of gonfigure errors with a php.ini and a httpd.conf files . I still am getting errors with one file but at least every thing is working



john

I didn't say anything about your knowlege of web developing and related stuff, I'm sure you have more knowlege than me. Your work is very useful and it's a great thing. However, my critics is on graphical design: except for using german gothic font for Celestia, and even in magenta (why???), some links are hard to see because they optically merge with background!

There's problem with alignment of whole page and all objects in it. Using inlogical combinations of colors makes it even more unpleasant.

Graphical design in your case is not a metter of hard work - it's very simple and it can be very nice. There's no need for complicating with complex archaic fonts and those combinations of colors which makes your page almost unreadable.

I know about this stuff a lot, I'm student of design. This is NOT matter of individual taste. I wanted to explain my critics cause I don't want to be considered as some guy from the Net who just wants to make samo mess here.

Bye!

[John Van Vliet]

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[Jango Fett]

On the color of the links i chose them to be contrasty for the curent;viseted;
and active links --if you have a better idia for there colors let me know--

Well, there's no efficient contrast. Colors with much light (white values) are always compatible with black background (black is, of coure, most suitable for space and astronomy subjects like Celestia), but common mistake is usually that people put images under text as backgrounds, and then some light elements on image merges with lightness of text color, and becomes unreadable. Desaturation, darkening and blurring of the background image should do the trick - than it would be real readable contrast.

For small text, it's always good to put fonts without serifs (little graphical ornaments/elements on the ends of lines in letters, for example, Times New Roman), because if they are small, those serifs loose their sharpness and become messy spots. In that case, you could put non-serif clean fonts, for example, Arial.

The main philosophy of good design is: you could be creative and free in your imagination as much as you like, but teverything you do in certain subject should follow some graphical logic - like telling a story.

On the font choice I happen to like the old style

Ok, but what if you get these questions: What is connection (following logic) between your subject (Celestia space simulator) and archaic, very old german font? Then, what is connection beetween old archaic german font and magenta color?

ps. ignore my spelling

It's ok. You ignore my spelling...


Perhaps I went too deep in this design philosophy, but if you welcome construtcive critic, there it is...

Bye!

[Jango Fett]

BTW, I discussed your web page on our forum, and everyone thinks it should defintely be redesigned. One guy measured loading time 48 sec on IE at DSL 768 kB/sec.... (first time loading)

[Guest]

BTW, I discussed your web page on our forum, and everyone thinks it should defintely be redesigned. One guy measured loading time 48 sec on IE at DSL 768 kB/sec.... (first time loading)

and, if it is any help to you John, to assist more visitors to your page, you might like to know that I am on a 56k dialup and I have attempted to visit twice now (once when you first announced, and then again as a result of this little contretemps ) and I still have not got past your front-entrance page !

[Rassilon]

Just a rule of thumb when designing web pages for 56k...keep all graphics under 30k...and if you have a picture or banner of 30k have only one...Use jpeg files compressed by 25% or more instead of gif files...Use only gif avatars if you have to...Avoid flash and animated gifs as much as possible....Also you might want to consider writing a bare bones verson...no graphics and and intro page allowing users to choose which to view...

Remember the bigger the file the longer it takes to load...That 70k banner on top of your page is the reason why most cannot load your page right off...Other than that john it looks ok...Colors might need a bit of working on but well its up to you...

[Jango Fett]

Rassilon, you're right - the BIG banner is probably causing this...

BTW, Rassilon, your page is in same category, very simple, but your page is easily readable and functional... except banner! Subtitle "Celesta Addons" is totaly unradable and looks like bad shaped 3D line effect in some cheap image editing program...

Title "Celestial Grand Wizard" - you like archaic fonts too? It's probably you're guys are from America - in Europe we like minimalism. This looks overdecorated.

Anyway, you're best man in Celestia world... I'm enjoying your creations.

I have one question: why does nebulae v380 disappear when I move from it a little further?

[t00fri]

Well well, following this loooong discussion is really something;-)

What is the problem?

1) After some planning, sit down and code some cgi-scripts and embed them into html.

2) Do a little bit of /functional/ graphics around them, by choosing fonts and colors that are pleasing and well readable.

3) Offer some real content;-)

Altogether, without much talking a matter of a good afternoon.


As an example, take my little Celestia TextureFoundry site

http://www.celestiaproject.net/~t00fri/texfoundry.html

almost 30000 visits & downloads within 6 months and not a single person has had any complaints...

That's it, not more not less

Bye Fridger

[selden]

Fridger,

You're assuming the owners of the Web server permit CGI scripts.

We usually don't allow them on the Web server that I use, for example. It's too easy to make mistakes in CGI scripts which can compromise the server. As a result, we require them to be written by particular members of our professional computer support staff.

Also, since CGI scripts run on the server, this can cause performance problems if the server is busy or slow.

Javascript or Java often are reasonable choices, since they offload the computing to the browser running on the client system. However, the author of the Web page must design it to still be functional if scripting has been disabled in the browser. There are many security holes in the script interpreters of many browsers, especially the older versions.

Personally, I've found that the things I want to provide really don't need the flexibility that programming provides. But I write dull pages

[Rassilon]

Rassilon, you're right - the BIG banner is probably causing this...

BTW, Rassilon, your page is in same category, very simple, but your page is easily readable and functional... except banner! Subtitle "Celesta Addons" is totaly unradable and looks like bad shaped 3D line effect in some cheap image editing program...

Title "Celestial Grand Wizard" - you like archaic fonts too? It's probably you're guys are from America - in Europe we like minimalism. This looks overdecorated.

Anyway, you're best man in Celestia world... I'm enjoying your creations.

I have one question: why does nebulae v380 disappear when I move from it a little further?

More like 2 minute job in photoshop cant be arsed to do better

Nebula disappears due to culling in the Celestia engine...Chris is working on a fix for this in the upcoming 1.2.6

[t00fri]

Fridger,

You're assuming the owners of the Web server permit CGI scripts.

We usually don't allow them on the Web server that I use, for example. It's too easy to make mistakes in CGI scripts which can compromise the server. As a result, we require them to be written by particular members of our professional computer support staff.

Also, since CGI scripts run on the server, this can cause performance problems if the server is busy or slow.

Javascript or Java often are reasonable choices, since they offload the computing to the browser running on the client system. However, the author of the Web page must design it to still be functional if scripting has been disabled in the browser. There are many security holes in the script interpreters of many browsers, especially the older versions.

Personally, I've found that the things I want to provide really don't need the flexibility that programming provides. But I write dull pages :)

Selden:

Is'nt John Van Vliet using his own server on the PC? After all, he
continued to report on all sorts of experiments with it and attempts
to make it more stable? At least this was my understanding on which my
previous mail was based.

In general I agree, beginners can do quite a bit of harm to server
performance this way. At DESY we have of course similarly severe restrictions
concerning WEB pages like you have at Cornell. I never had any
problems coding CGI on our WEB server, though, since the WEB committee
knew that I know...;-). But as I emphasized often here in the forum, I am not
allowed to use any of my professional WEB space for Celestia and other
private activities. That's why I was very glad that I could "emigrate"
to Seattle in that respect;-). I am also not allowed to make my
/private/ Apache server of my PC at home visible to the world outside of
the '.desy.de' domain to which that PC belongs.

After all the cgi issue was not the real main point of my previous
mail. Replace cgi->html if you prefer;-).

Bye Fridger

[Rassilon]

I am also not allowed to make my
/private/ Apache server of my PC at home visible to the world outside of
the '.desy.de' domain to which that PC belongs.

Bye Fridger

Not recommended unles you use Nortons security corporate edition firewall or a linksys router...or the like...generally peeps will leave you alone...but not me it seems

[selden]

Fridger,

Of course, you're right in John's case. I just didn't want other people to think they could do it on any server. And to remind John to be careful if he decides to do it himself, since it seems he's not a professional programmer.

The design of a "good" Web page involves many factors and trade-offs that can take a while to learn.