Would it be a good idea to update helixmod.blogspot.com?

Would it be a good idea to update helixmod.blogspot.com?

Yes
No
  3 / 3    
costiq, I like your changes. Dark text on light backgrounds is more comfortable to read.
costiq, I like your changes. Dark text on light backgrounds is more comfortable to read.

#31
Posted 02/26/2016 02:08 AM   
I am open to renovations but it would have to stay true to the motto that I set it up with security/simplicity for patchers. The main reason I am not around as much anymore in a patching sense is I burned myself out[and health issues] by trying to do everything. I tried doing videos,seperate blog, web-site, patching, admining, comment sections, etc it really adds up. So basically NO MATTER WHAT this can't be more work for people who patch. Here are requirements for any web-site ideas. -FTP/FILES are not to be changed. Its a pretty delicate system where I have everyone seperate with there own folders. I am able to see if someone starts sharing stuff other then files [basically so we dont get DMCA'D] -It takes at most a few minutes for author to post. -If YOU or WHOMEVER quits after web-site is up it. It won't matter. Basically self functioning. I would HIGHLY recommend remaining on blogger and just asking me for export data and redesign from there. Blogger is more robust then it seems and its not the reason the design is being held back. Not to mention we have like 600+ patches/pages of content. I really dont know about adding game images to each game in list because once the person who does web-site stops working on it. It really falls apart. Like over the years ALOT of people came and went. Like you might think you will be here forever and maintaining site but many people came and went. I think DHR is only one who has been around since beginning [I think mikear69 came around a year in]. Contact me - eqzitara@yahoo.com [ASK bo3b for his email since I won't post it here] and we will hash it out IF you are serious.
I am open to renovations but it would have to stay true to the motto that I set it up with security/simplicity for patchers.
The main reason I am not around as much anymore in a patching sense is I burned myself out[and health issues] by trying to do everything. I tried doing videos,seperate blog, web-site, patching, admining, comment sections, etc it really adds up. So basically NO MATTER WHAT this can't be more work for people who patch.

Here are requirements for any web-site ideas.
-FTP/FILES are not to be changed. Its a pretty delicate system where I have everyone seperate with there own folders. I am able to see if someone starts sharing stuff other then files [basically so we dont get DMCA'D]
-It takes at most a few minutes for author to post.
-If YOU or WHOMEVER quits after web-site is up it. It won't matter. Basically self functioning.


I would HIGHLY recommend remaining on blogger and just asking me for export data and redesign from there. Blogger is more robust then it seems and its not the reason the design is being held back. Not to mention we have like 600+ patches/pages of content.

I really dont know about adding game images to each game in list because once the person who does web-site stops working on it. It really falls apart. Like over the years ALOT of people came and went. Like you might think you will be here forever and maintaining site but many people came and went. I think DHR is only one who has been around since beginning [I think mikear69 came around a year in].

Contact me - eqzitara@yahoo.com
[ASK bo3b for his email since I won't post it here]
and we will hash it out IF you are serious.

Co-founder of helixmod.blog.com

If you like one of my helixmod patches and want to donate. Can send to me through paypal - eqzitara@yahoo.com

#32
Posted 02/26/2016 04:07 AM   
Re: game images - perhaps they could be pulled from Steam, so manual intervention is not required?
Re: game images - perhaps they could be pulled from Steam, so manual intervention is not required?

#33
Posted 02/26/2016 04:54 AM   
I think the mock-ups look [color="orange"]really [/color] great, but echo what others have said about the work and effort involved to do a migration, which will be a lot even with automation. And then maintenance... As a "user" of the blog, I don't care how fancy it looks at all, it still feels like Christmas if a game I like turns up with a fix - that's where the buzz is. The index list allows you to easily see if a game you are interested in is there. As a "contributor" to the blog, as a fixer, it's easy to add a new game fix once you have the initial accounts in place on AWS and the blog itself. Yes it's free form and we don't all put the same level of detail in etc, but it's easy, quick, and secure to get a fix out, which is what it's for. So I am with the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" faction.
I think the mock-ups look really great, but echo what others have said about the work and effort involved to do a migration, which will be a lot even with automation. And then maintenance... As a "user" of the blog, I don't care how fancy it looks at all, it still feels like Christmas if a game I like turns up with a fix - that's where the buzz is. The index list allows you to easily see if a game you are interested in is there. As a "contributor" to the blog, as a fixer, it's easy to add a new game fix once you have the initial accounts in place on AWS and the blog itself. Yes it's free form and we don't all put the same level of detail in etc, but it's easy, quick, and secure to get a fix out, which is what it's for. So I am with the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" faction.

Rig: Intel i7-8700K @4.7GHz, 16Gb Ram, SSD, GTX 1080Ti, Win10x64, Asus VG278

#34
Posted 02/26/2016 05:15 AM   
If the backend was a simple form, that might actually make posts simpler. Text fields for issues fixed, issues remaining, installation instructions, the fix url, screenshot, and preset keys would make it pretty straightforward to post a fix with "correct" formatting. If that's not possible though, doing a nice page for every fix by hand wouldn't be worthwhile.
If the backend was a simple form, that might actually make posts simpler. Text fields for issues fixed, issues remaining, installation instructions, the fix url, screenshot, and preset keys would make it pretty straightforward to post a fix with "correct" formatting.

If that's not possible though, doing a nice page for every fix by hand wouldn't be worthwhile.

#35
Posted 02/26/2016 06:07 AM   
I had a dedicated system in mind for posting fixes, something in line with what Pirate just said where you have a pre-defined fields to fill in and they're formated accordingly 'for you' on the front-end but it can also be done with open-source cms like wp/drupal/etc. Im not sure what blogger allows in that regard. I havent been involved in maintaing this website so Im not sure how much would it add but finding a big background picture for a game and cover-art doesnt seem like much of a hassle especially that we dont really have several games posted each day. The initial migration of existing fixes could pose some trouble tho. Somebody mentioned text list, I personally hate it... like if I want to see if there is a fix for a game I have go to gamelist wait for it to load and look for title with ctfl+f which is horrendous... and the search at the top gives really werid results - aka http://helixmod.blogspot.com/search?q=witcher also with pictures I dont really have to read much as I usually know how the gamecover look like so I can identify it much quicker. I would much rather want to see 3 cover boxes after typing witcher in the search field. The reason I offered hosting was that I have my own host so it would be free but I see its irrelevant if you have the AWS paid upfront. I guess the two directions we can take it would be 1. Develop this as a standalone expansion to what we currently have but this posses an issue where it would have to be posted twice or even if the process would be automatic it would separate the rather tiny community we have. 2. Look into possibilities of making a blogger template. Although I was mostly thinking of this as a page for 3dmigoto. Thats also the reason why I havent used helix logo (the M currently there is something random I found on the net so it can be ignored for now I would have to come up with something better for it). The main reason why Im concerned is that I really dont want to spread fixes thought two sites. As for the donate / buy again I thought about dedicated system where a fixer can have those options in his account and he can either enable of disable donations, for buy game I was thinking something like https://www.g2a.com/?reflink=jackfrags&utm_campaig=goldmine_jackfrags so if people decide to buy games though that the fixer could benefit from it, same as with the donation its not mandatory, fixes are still free of charge. In most cases I buy games after they're fixed so if I can buy it by the fixer ref link I would be more than willing to. Games not having art would not be a problem, they could start with a default pic that can be overwritten by a specific game art if provided. This post is very chaotic :)
I had a dedicated system in mind for posting fixes, something in line with what Pirate just said where you have a pre-defined fields to fill in and they're formated accordingly 'for you' on the front-end but it can also be done with open-source cms like wp/drupal/etc. Im not sure what blogger allows in that regard.

I havent been involved in maintaing this website so Im not sure how much would it add but finding a big background picture for a game and cover-art doesnt seem like much of a hassle especially that we dont really have several games posted each day.

The initial migration of existing fixes could pose some trouble tho.

Somebody mentioned text list, I personally hate it... like if I want to see if there is a fix for a game I have go to gamelist wait for it to load and look for title with ctfl+f which is horrendous... and the search at the top gives really werid results - aka http://helixmod.blogspot.com/search?q=witcher also with pictures I dont really have to read much as I usually know how the gamecover look like so I can identify it much quicker.

I would much rather want to see 3 cover boxes after typing witcher in the search field.



The reason I offered hosting was that I have my own host so it would be free but I see its irrelevant if you have the AWS paid upfront.

I guess the two directions we can take it would be

1. Develop this as a standalone expansion to what we currently have but this posses an issue where it would have to be posted twice or even if the process would be automatic it would separate the rather tiny community we have.

2. Look into possibilities of making a blogger template.

Although I was mostly thinking of this as a page for 3dmigoto. Thats also the reason why I havent used helix logo (the M currently there is something random I found on the net so it can be ignored for now I would have to come up with something better for it). The main reason why Im concerned is that I really dont want to spread fixes thought two sites.

As for the donate / buy again I thought about dedicated system where a fixer can have those options in his account and he can either enable of disable donations, for buy game I was thinking something like https://www.g2a.com/?reflink=jackfrags&utm_campaig=goldmine_jackfrags so if people decide to buy games though that the fixer could benefit from it, same as with the donation its not mandatory, fixes are still free of charge. In most cases I buy games after they're fixed so if I can buy it by the fixer ref link I would be more than willing to.


Games not having art would not be a problem, they could start with a default pic that can be overwritten by a specific game art if provided.

This post is very chaotic :)

Acer H5360 / BenQ XL2420T + 3D Vision 2 Kit - EVGA GTX 980TI 6GB - i7-3930K@4.0GHz - DX79SI- 16GB RAM@2133 - Win10x64 Home - HTC VIVE

#36
Posted 02/26/2016 06:45 AM   
Voted yes because I like the concept and idea:). But, I stand 100% with bo3b on this one;)
Voted yes because I like the concept and idea:).
But, I stand 100% with bo3b on this one;)

1x Palit RTX 2080Ti Pro Gaming OC(watercooled and overclocked to hell)
3x 3D Vision Ready Asus VG278HE monitors (5760x1080).
Intel i9 9900K (overclocked to 5.3 and watercooled ofc).
Asus Maximus XI Hero Mobo.
16 GB Team Group T-Force Dark Pro DDR4 @ 3600.
Lots of Disks:
- Raid 0 - 256GB Sandisk Extreme SSD.
- Raid 0 - WD Black - 2TB.
- SanDisk SSD PLUS 480 GB.
- Intel 760p 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD.
Creative Sound Blaster Z.
Windows 10 x64 Pro.
etc


My website with my fixes and OpenGL to 3D Vision wrapper:
http://3dsurroundgaming.com

(If you like some of the stuff that I've done and want to donate something, you can do it with PayPal at tavyhome@gmail.com)

#37
Posted 02/26/2016 11:44 AM   
Edit: I've re-read my post and it's probably coming off a little too negative. I do like the new design and if we decide to switch I'm not going to stubbornly resist, but I don't think we should walk into it without careful consideration of all options and consequences first. I've largely been waiting for a few other fixes to comment on this before offering my thoughts. Overall I like the design, but I have some reservations about the practicality of it, and the potential for dividing the already small community if we end up with two similar but slightly different sites. [quote="Pirateguybrush"]If the backend was a simple form, that might actually make posts simpler. Text fields for issues fixed, issues remaining, installation instructions, the fix url, screenshot, and preset keys would make it pretty straightforward to post a fix with "correct" formatting. If that's not possible though, doing a nice page for every fix by hand wouldn't be worthwhile.[/quote]On the other hand you've probably noticed that all my fixes include a 3Dfix-README.txt with the same text that is on the blog, and the reason is that except for the download link itself I don't write on the blog - I write notes in the text file that is tracked on github as I'm creating the fix (because I'm going to forget a small detail like changing a setting in the weeks it takes to create a fix if I don't), then that usually only needs a tiny bit of fleshing out when the fix is finally ready, which I can usually do fairly quickly and double check against my git history to remind myself what types of effects I fixed. It's formatted with markdown, which is designed as a highly readable plain text format that can easily be converted to HTML by script, which means I can just run a script and paste the result directly on the blog. Updating the text is the same process - edit the text file, run the script, delete the text on the blog and paste it again. If there are separate fields for each part that workflow would have to change - it might be relatively minor, but it would be more than I'm doing now and may well mean that I can no longer track the text in git, or would take more effort to do so. I do not want to edit text on a web page unless it saves drafts every few seconds (which blogger does) - I have lost huge posts far too often due to screwy browsers, internet connections and/or websites in the past. By far the most time consuming part of posting a fix for me is selecting which screenshots to use, and although the cover art does look nice in the mock ups I'm not too keen on having to hunt down something appropriate for every title, which might not be the right size - maybe I have to fire up an image editor and crop or resize it.... I'd reiterate eqzitara - I have enough to do already (you've seen my todo list right?), and adding more work is still adding more work, even if it seems fairly small, and unless we turn the site into a full on wiki I can't see the idea of leaving the cover art to others really working out since as others have said - people come and go (and if we did go with a full wiki we would need to be careful of who has edit access since a malicious individual could easily replace a download link with something harmful). I do like the aesthetics of the design though, and would not be opposed to modifying the blogger template along these lines. One shortcoming of Blogger is the previews are often not accurate when editing the template, so sometimes the only way to see what it will actually look like is to hit 'publish' and prey you haven't just totally broken it. For my own blog I haven't worried too much, but for something like Helix Mod it might be an idea to sort the template out on a test account first. Even then you would still have to go through all the posts looking for any that may have happened to use style="color: almost the same colour you chose for the background / link text / etc;" or something that the template's CSS doesn't handle. As for the idea of having this as a separate site... I don't think that's a great idea - not everyone would get the memo, so some people will be on the old site, some on both (until they decide which they prefer), and some only on the new site. Even if we try to keep them synchronised with automatic scripts there will be problems so unless someone is actively maintaining *both* things will eventually start to fall apart and both sites will diverge, then eventually one of the sites will go down, and unless they have been perfectly synchronised until that point we will lose whatever content made it to only one of them, and some of the people using the new site won't realise/remember that there was another site with mostly the same information - I've seen this type of thing happen before in other communities I've been a part of and it's not great having to hope that they way back machine archived enough of the site to find the information that went missing, and it's fairly rare for someone to bother resurrecting it. Google does have a poor track record for maintaining their services (there's actually a huge number of discontinued services, some well known, many less so: [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services[/url]), but at least for the major ones they do give plenty of warning before shutting them down and provide ways to migrate the data out of those services. It was before I joined the community, but I believe we originally started using the Helix Mod blog for 3DMigoto fixes to keep everything in the same place, and I think keeping everything in the same place is still just as important today as when that decision was made - if we migrated away from the Helix blog I would go so far as to suggest that the blog should be sunset and every page converted to a redirect to the equivalent page on the new site. For search I see no reason we couldn't implement our own - the game list is generated using entirely client side javascript that queries the blogger v3 api, and I don't see any reason the same couldn't work for search - I could probably add something like that to the game list, though I don't really see any advantage over it compared to the browser's built in search and don't want to add yet another thing to my ever growing todo list right now. Client side javascript would still mean waiting for the page to load - but is that really a problem for anyone? I'm in Australia on a pretty rubbish ADSL link and it only takes a few seconds for me (conversely, adding images to the results could slow that down noticeably) - I would think that anyone who has enough bandwidth to download the games through Steam has enough bandwidth to load the game list? If we really wanted to do a server side search we could still do so, though that would mean at least part of the search would not be hosted on blogger, whether that's on ian.ozlabs.org (AKA darkstarsword.net which already hosts the tweak guide and OpenGL lists that supplement the game list, which is why those show up slightly later than the main list - but it is designed so that the main list will still work if that site ever goes down, plus there's a copy of the lists on github in case someone else needed to take over maintaining / hosting them) or elsewhere.
Edit: I've re-read my post and it's probably coming off a little too negative. I do like the new design and if we decide to switch I'm not going to stubbornly resist, but I don't think we should walk into it without careful consideration of all options and consequences first.

I've largely been waiting for a few other fixes to comment on this before offering my thoughts. Overall I like the design, but I have some reservations about the practicality of it, and the potential for dividing the already small community if we end up with two similar but slightly different sites.

Pirateguybrush said:If the backend was a simple form, that might actually make posts simpler. Text fields for issues fixed, issues remaining, installation instructions, the fix url, screenshot, and preset keys would make it pretty straightforward to post a fix with "correct" formatting.

If that's not possible though, doing a nice page for every fix by hand wouldn't be worthwhile.
On the other hand you've probably noticed that all my fixes include a 3Dfix-README.txt with the same text that is on the blog, and the reason is that except for the download link itself I don't write on the blog - I write notes in the text file that is tracked on github as I'm creating the fix (because I'm going to forget a small detail like changing a setting in the weeks it takes to create a fix if I don't), then that usually only needs a tiny bit of fleshing out when the fix is finally ready, which I can usually do fairly quickly and double check against my git history to remind myself what types of effects I fixed. It's formatted with markdown, which is designed as a highly readable plain text format that can easily be converted to HTML by script, which means I can just run a script and paste the result directly on the blog.

Updating the text is the same process - edit the text file, run the script, delete the text on the blog and paste it again. If there are separate fields for each part that workflow would have to change - it might be relatively minor, but it would be more than I'm doing now and may well mean that I can no longer track the text in git, or would take more effort to do so. I do not want to edit text on a web page unless it saves drafts every few seconds (which blogger does) - I have lost huge posts far too often due to screwy browsers, internet connections and/or websites in the past.

By far the most time consuming part of posting a fix for me is selecting which screenshots to use, and although the cover art does look nice in the mock ups I'm not too keen on having to hunt down something appropriate for every title, which might not be the right size - maybe I have to fire up an image editor and crop or resize it.... I'd reiterate eqzitara - I have enough to do already (you've seen my todo list right?), and adding more work is still adding more work, even if it seems fairly small, and unless we turn the site into a full on wiki I can't see the idea of leaving the cover art to others really working out since as others have said - people come and go (and if we did go with a full wiki we would need to be careful of who has edit access since a malicious individual could easily replace a download link with something harmful).

I do like the aesthetics of the design though, and would not be opposed to modifying the blogger template along these lines. One shortcoming of Blogger is the previews are often not accurate when editing the template, so sometimes the only way to see what it will actually look like is to hit 'publish' and prey you haven't just totally broken it. For my own blog I haven't worried too much, but for something like Helix Mod it might be an idea to sort the template out on a test account first. Even then you would still have to go through all the posts looking for any that may have happened to use style="color: almost the same colour you chose for the background / link text / etc;" or something that the template's CSS doesn't handle.

As for the idea of having this as a separate site... I don't think that's a great idea - not everyone would get the memo, so some people will be on the old site, some on both (until they decide which they prefer), and some only on the new site. Even if we try to keep them synchronised with automatic scripts there will be problems so unless someone is actively maintaining *both* things will eventually start to fall apart and both sites will diverge, then eventually one of the sites will go down, and unless they have been perfectly synchronised until that point we will lose whatever content made it to only one of them, and some of the people using the new site won't realise/remember that there was another site with mostly the same information - I've seen this type of thing happen before in other communities I've been a part of and it's not great having to hope that they way back machine archived enough of the site to find the information that went missing, and it's fairly rare for someone to bother resurrecting it.

Google does have a poor track record for maintaining their services (there's actually a huge number of discontinued services, some well known, many less so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services), but at least for the major ones they do give plenty of warning before shutting them down and provide ways to migrate the data out of those services.

It was before I joined the community, but I believe we originally started using the Helix Mod blog for 3DMigoto fixes to keep everything in the same place, and I think keeping everything in the same place is still just as important today as when that decision was made - if we migrated away from the Helix blog I would go so far as to suggest that the blog should be sunset and every page converted to a redirect to the equivalent page on the new site.

For search I see no reason we couldn't implement our own - the game list is generated using entirely client side javascript that queries the blogger v3 api, and I don't see any reason the same couldn't work for search - I could probably add something like that to the game list, though I don't really see any advantage over it compared to the browser's built in search and don't want to add yet another thing to my ever growing todo list right now. Client side javascript would still mean waiting for the page to load - but is that really a problem for anyone? I'm in Australia on a pretty rubbish ADSL link and it only takes a few seconds for me (conversely, adding images to the results could slow that down noticeably) - I would think that anyone who has enough bandwidth to download the games through Steam has enough bandwidth to load the game list?

If we really wanted to do a server side search we could still do so, though that would mean at least part of the search would not be hosted on blogger, whether that's on ian.ozlabs.org (AKA darkstarsword.net which already hosts the tweak guide and OpenGL lists that supplement the game list, which is why those show up slightly later than the main list - but it is designed so that the main list will still work if that site ever goes down, plus there's a copy of the lists on github in case someone else needed to take over maintaining / hosting them) or elsewhere.

2x Geforce GTX 980 in SLI provided by NVIDIA, i7 6700K 4GHz CPU, Asus 27" VG278HE 144Hz 3D Monitor, BenQ W1070 3D Projector, 120" Elite Screens YardMaster 2, 32GB Corsair DDR4 3200MHz RAM, Samsung 850 EVO 500G SSD, 4x750GB HDD in RAID5, Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7 Motherboard, Corsair Obsidian 750D Airflow Edition Case, Corsair RM850i PSU, HTC Vive, Win 10 64bit

Alienware M17x R4 w/ built in 3D, Intel i7 3740QM, GTX 680m 2GB, 16GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM, Win7 64bit, 1TB SSD, 1TB HDD, 750GB HDD

Pre-release 3D fixes, shadertool.py and other goodies: http://github.com/DarkStarSword/3d-fixes
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DarkStarSword or PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/DarkStarSword

#38
Posted 02/26/2016 03:16 PM   
You've made some good points there, I've got some thoughts on how they might be addressed. -For the cover image, instead of a design that uses a large banner (that would have to be hunted down for each game), could we pull Steam's header images, as I suggested earlier? The design would need tweaking to accommodate the change, but I imagine that would be possible. Steam stores it's headers at http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/<gameid>/header.jpg so if it's possible to somehow integrate with Steam's API to select the game, the cover image could then be retrieved. If a game is exclusive to uPlay/Origin that doesn't help much, but that's a relatively small number to do manually. The banner size appears to be standardised, which I imagine would help with this. Failing that, we could probably just go download/rehost it for each game manually, it's not much work when you don't have to go searching for an image of the appropriate size/quality. -Nice approach for generating the blog text, but I see how the alternative setup I proposed would make this difficult. But in practice, I'd imagine you could probably do it the same way as before - just when you do the copy, copy it in separate parts. It's an inconvenience over the old method, but it would only be separating it into 4 parts (issues fixed, remaining, installation, preset keys). I'm with you on the "all-or-nothing" approach, splitting things over two sites seems messy. But rather than closing the old site, it's probably better to put up a big "we have moved" link in the banner, disable new comments, and stop posting new content. Otherwise, existing links will break. If this did go ahead, I imagine it would be a huge task, which would take a great deal of time and effort to put together,
You've made some good points there, I've got some thoughts on how they might be addressed.

-For the cover image, instead of a design that uses a large banner (that would have to be hunted down for each game), could we pull Steam's header images, as I suggested earlier? The design would need tweaking to accommodate the change, but I imagine that would be possible. Steam stores it's headers at http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/<gameid>/header.jpg so if it's possible to somehow integrate with Steam's API to select the game, the cover image could then be retrieved. If a game is exclusive to uPlay/Origin that doesn't help much, but that's a relatively small number to do manually. The banner size appears to be standardised, which I imagine would help with this. Failing that, we could probably just go download/rehost it for each game manually, it's not much work when you don't have to go searching for an image of the appropriate size/quality.

-Nice approach for generating the blog text, but I see how the alternative setup I proposed would make this difficult. But in practice, I'd imagine you could probably do it the same way as before - just when you do the copy, copy it in separate parts. It's an inconvenience over the old method, but it would only be separating it into 4 parts (issues fixed, remaining, installation, preset keys).

I'm with you on the "all-or-nothing" approach, splitting things over two sites seems messy. But rather than closing the old site, it's probably better to put up a big "we have moved" link in the banner, disable new comments, and stop posting new content. Otherwise, existing links will break.

If this did go ahead, I imagine it would be a huge task, which would take a great deal of time and effort to put together,

#39
Posted 02/26/2016 04:12 PM   
  3 / 3    
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