1992casey

Cool! You did that fast. Do you plan on submitting these engines to MyCroft? You'd probably get to put your name on them and indirectly promote this site. (Baseball-Reference.com is already there.) Is it possible that Google's search plug-in could be modified to search within a specific domain? If it is, it could in effect become a substitute for sites that don't use the 'get' method.

I have some search questions. 1. When I search the forums, I run into a situation with white text on a white background. I know the text is there because it appears when I select it. Is there a CSS issue with the search results? I know it isn't a matter of reloading the page or clearing my cache; this has gone on for a while. I'm getting the same effect in three different browsers (Firefox, Safari, and IE?all Mac). Here are two pictures. I'll provide links rather than using up bandwidth. Screen capture: without selected text Screen capture: with selected text 2. Is there a means to search the articles, transactions, etc. on the Brewerfan.net portion of this site? I thought there used to be one but I'm not finding one now. Maybe I'm just crazy or blind? http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/eek.gif 3. Have you ever considered writing Firefox/Mozilla plug-ins to search this site? It'd be really cool to see Brewerfan.net drop down from the search box, one for the forums and one for the rest of the site. I've looked at the directions for creating these things. I almost understand them; that's kind of scary. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif It tells me, though, that the task might not be very hard for someone who knows what he's doing. (Note: there's a big chunk of white space near the top of the directions page; scrolling down gets you to the content.) The only restriction seems to be that these plug-ins seem to need to use the "GET" method, whatever that means. It's easy to look at examples. Do a search for 'google.src' on your hard drive and you'll find the folder containing the engines you already have installed. They can be opened in any text editor. Here are a couple source codes online: Google Baseball-Reference.com Thanks! http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

Brian, This is really slick how you have this set up. Your really detailed e-mail update checklist makes it really clear what we're getting. Thanks!

This looks very good and to the point. Are first and last names shared anywhere on the site? Can we opt in and out of that via the profile? I spent an entire day trying stuff out in Thunderbird because I really wanted to use it. But I found it didn't do a few things that I absolutely depend on in Eudora. I figured I'd fire up Thunderbird the few times I wanted to send an e-mail with decent HTML; Eudora absolutely mangles it. It sounds like Thunderbird is the way to go for RSS, though. If I can set up the program to never check my e-mail automatically, I'd keep it running for just that one purpose.

I usually only see these privacy policies when I sign up for stuff. Way back when, for instance, I would have read ezBoard's. If I find one in particular that could be a good model, I'll post it. In the meantime, a Google search for 'privacy policy' pops up a ton of them. I'd guess most are way too complex for what this site would probably need. As a matter of fact, I wish more of these could stick to a couple brief paragraphs or a short list. I think these would be people's main concerns: 1. Assurance that e-mail addresses wouldn't be shared with advertisers or be published on a web page where spammers could collect them. If there's any intention of doing something like this people should be able to opt in or out. One thing that drives me nuts on some sites: they ask if you want to receive e-mails from 'partners', then have the checkbox or radio button already selected for you. It should be the other way around; people miss that. 2. Giving people a choice about any personal information that might be posted in any member directory. I certainly wouldn't be concerned about people in this community, but of course, being on the Web, information becomes available to the whole world. Here's my general comfort level around the Internet. I don't put my real name in these directories. A nickname suffices. I usually give a general indication of where I live. If people can e-mail me through a form, I'm comfortable with that. Likewise, I understand that if I use that form to e-mail someone, s/he'll have my e-mail address at that point. Of course, that should be made clear to people who don't automatically figure that out. And it's good to allow people to opt out of that. You might want to look into something about being over or under the age of 13. I don't know that this site would need do anything different in regard to age, but some sites exclude kids from certain types of e-mails they might send?mainly advertising. I notice some signups simply have checkboxes where you can say "under 13" or "over 13"; I don't know where they go from there. This might be better discussed in another thread, but I'd like to know more about RSS: what it is, and how it works. I only have a vague idea. All I really understand is that I signed up for it and have some new bookmarks to read because of it. Maybe that's all I need to know? http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif

This is a really good idea. A couple of questions: 1. Is there a privacy policy posted? Actually, this would be a site that would be among the least of my concerns, but it's always nice to see one. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif 2. What does this offer in comparison to your RSS feature? Is the RSS feature still around? Right now, I'm not seeing the RSS thinger down in the corner of my Firefox browser.

Read this phonetically: catching WOAH SOLVDD Then check out the thread that began the forum.

The issues forum is probably the last one new users bother to visit unless they actually run into a problem. Maybe the FAQ can be posted more prominently. It could be a sticky on every message board or a link at the top of all forum pages. It'd be nice if new users could be forced to read the FAQ at during the registration process, but with the forums being open to anyone who signs up with ezBoard, that's probably not a possibility.

I like it better this way. (Not that it wasn't great before! http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif) To get at the sidebar, it's easy to open a tab with one of the other pages.

Everything seemed to return to normal a little before 1:00 CST today.

It seems to be happening again right now (getting to anything under the brewerfan.net domain).

It turns out that there is an 'exact' way that we're supposed to give out our addresses these days; it has to do with computer databases. Someone (the post office, I think) standardized these a few years ago. I had a UPS delivery get stuck in transit a couple of years ago just because of this. We can't say 'County Trunk', 'County Highway', or 'County Trunk Highway' anymore; it has to be 'County Road'. (The locals here always used the abbreviation, 'CTH'.) The post office is able to deal with variations in how addresses are written just because people in the local facility know what to do. However, other carriers may have a problem.

Allowing the cookies did it! I can now see all the neat stuff on this site once again! http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif I leave cookies turned off and use an exceptions list. 'www.brewerfan.net' is now added to it, and things work fine. You might save inquiries if the error message mentioned the need to allow cookies. Just out of curiosity, what does that cookie do?

That could be it. I have cookies turned off. EZboard is on my exceptions list; that would explain the forums working fine. I'll turn the cookies on, play around, and report back.

On another forum, I saw your reply to my message about the FAQ. I'm actually having trouble with a lot of links. I'll try to explain as succinctly as possible and give a list of some links where this is happening. Essentially, when I try to follow many of the links, I get a message that looks like this: If I chop off everything beginning with the semi-colon, I can get to the page. In other words, http://www.brewerfan.net/ViewTransactions.do ;jsessionid=BB2EE414348927DA2BBB26D2194264CE won't work. http://www.brewerfan.net/ViewTransactions.do works fine. Here are some of the links where I find this happening: If there's a pattern, it would seem that links in the horizontal menus are causing the problem on my end; the vertical left-hand set of links seems to work fine.

Another note on fonts. Firefox and Mozilla Suite allow users to choose a minimum font size. That overrides what the web site authors do and makes sure all text is at least a user-designated size. It's possible that other browsers offer that option, too.

It was interesting how those EZboard ads worked. Apparently they were able to determine what should be advertised based on the text of posts. When steroids were being discussed on the forums, ads for sites selling steroids appeared.

Internet Explorer is a lousy browser, plain and simple. Amazingly, the Mac version of IE, which I believe is about 4 years old, is still a better browser than its current Windows counterpart. I think whizkid would find that he, his wife, and kids would be a lot happier by switching. A real problem with IE is all the spyware it lets through. It just doesn't happen with other browsers. The only problem I've seen with Firefox has nothing to do with Firefox itself. It's the fact that web site developers don't use proper code. Keeping another browser around as an occasional backup gets me around that. Firefox will be providing an official release soon, moving it out of the 'beta' stage. If someone hasn't used it before, that might be a good time to consider it. But really, the betas have been extremely stable. Another browser to consider is the Mozilla Suite. It's very much like Netscape, in that it includes an e-mailer and other features. However newer versions of Mozilla Suite are noticeably faster. Mozilla Suite is also out of the beta stage. I usually bump up the default font sizes in my browser preferences. But as Brian mentions, changing font size on the fly is very easy, and can be done in both Firefox and Mozilla Suite. CTRL-Plus increases it, CTRL-Minus decreases it, and CTRL-Zero takes you back to the default.

I'm not the expert that Brian would be, but from what I can tell, the coding on this site is excellent. From posts in other threads, I know the Brewerfan.net staff is well aware of proper coding, validation, and cross platform issues. I wish the same could be said for some of the really big web sites out there. Firefox is probably the pickiest browser out there, so if the bulk of the development is done within Firefox, pages are checked for valid code, and cross-checking is done with various browsers and platforms, things should be fine. Couple that with the fact that Firefox for Windows, Mac, and Linux is 99.9999999 percent the same product. CSS (which, among other things, provides the colors and style) is frequently challenging. It's possible to write perfectly valid CSS and have it still throw up on you. The major culprit is Internet Explorer; it has a history of not handling correct CSS properly. Newer versions are apparently better, but not perfect. To clear Firefox's cache, go to its Options (Preferences); you'll be able to do it in the "Privacy" area. If you really want to make sure your Firefox cache is gone, exit the browser and delete the cache folder from your profile. That could be in a number of places, depending on your platform and version of Firefox. Here's a list of the possible locations of your profile. (Note: This page refers to a "Firefox" folder. If you're using an older version of the program, you may be looking for a "Firebird" or "Phoenix" folder. I generally find the easiest way to jump to that folder is to do a search of the hard drive.)

I'm happy with the team graphics the way they are. The fact that they're smaller is an improvement to the look and loading time of the pages. I could see a couple of them getting crowded (and thus, less readable) by providing the extra information. Given the factors involved, I think the right decision was made.

rainman and Katuluu, Did you see Brian's earlier suggestion about clearing Firefox's cache? That worked for me. I've looked at the site in 4 different browsers (Firefox, Mozilla Suite, Safari, and IE-Mac). Unless there's something that's supposed to be below "Powered by ESPN" in the Major League Player Search, I'm now seeing everything. CSS changes tend to mess with browser caches, especially when a site has been visited recently; this issue could potentially apply to any browser. I'm guessing that those of us who've noted specific problems with Firefox use it as our primary browser; we probably haven't had the pages cached in the other browsers we've checked.

Brian, Thanks for the cache information. It worked like a charm. I'm running into some dead links, but I'm assuming you're aware of them. If not, I can list them.

This might be one of your kinks. I'm running into a color problem in Firefox. (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1) The two side columns display black text on a black background. Here's a partial screen capture: http://personalpages.tds.net/~shepherdmix/zzzzz_board_pics/brewerfan.jpg The text is definitely there. When I "Select All", it shows up. Everything appears in Safari, although the white and gray text on the black background is a little hard to read. I've done nothing to change the default way either browser handles colors. It looks like the site will be a lot easier to navigate. Good work!

More often than not those ?s show up as the result of using curly quotes or apostrophes in a word processer. That preference has to be turned off when typing or they have to be fixed via 'find and replace' when the article is done.

1-0, still in the top of the 1st. Scott's stolen his 70th base.