The Mean Machines Archive

[Big Seany]

Oooooh - I can barely wait. I bet I don't even get a credit on the site for scoring you that book down the car boot sale. Name up in lights indeed.

p.s. in all seriousness - get those scans up there!!!!

[Yakumo]

It's coming with the next update...which is going to be MASSIVE! Trust me.

Nice one ! Looking forward to this. By the way, wasn't that Jazza figure originally red? I vaguely remember mine.

Yakumo

[Duddyroar]

The Jazza figure was white mate, I have mine in front of me!

Sean - I'll try and fit a credit in there for you buddy...you know I don't forget my 'special' friends...

[Duddyroar]

The cat is out of the bag...

As you can see, the site is currently undergoing a massive change behind the scenes. Darren (AllYourBase) contacted me a few weeks ago and offered to use his database skills to improve the site - something that I agreed to right away as updating the site on a 'page by page' basis was taking up too much time.

Daz has worked wonders over the past few weeks and the improvements are clear to see - all the reviews are now in a database and have additional content such as review comments, etc.

The site will be going live soon - so watch this space!

[Duddyroar]

The new site is slowly coming together.

check it out here...

Bear in mind the site is not 100% 'live' as yet and only a few reviews have been added...as you can imagine this is a time-consuming process as each review has to be re-ryped (OCR software simply couldn't handle the original scans).

Thanks again to AllYourBase for all the hard work!

[muse hunter]

how comes there is no avatars on your forums?

[Duddyroar]

The forums are still at a very early stage mate, like the rest of the site. Hopefully the lack of avatars won't put you off posting!

[AllYourBase]

how comes there is no avatars on your forums?

You can upload one now my friend!

[Mayhem]

You still need to do something about the font size though

(for us people who don't use "medium" in IE because it's usually too big!)

[AllYourBase]

That's the standard way sites are done now for accessibility. EM measurements are used instead of fixed pixel measurements which cannot be scaled on IE.... the size used really is the best for all scenario

Hold CTRL + scroll up, 0.1 secs and you're sorted! hehe


However, I am not a expert so if any other web-heads have any suggestions re: this I will listen to the mass consensus!

[Mayhem]

Spoke to my brother who's been doing websites for over 5 years now. He feels EM measurements are the minority and sites should really just either be using fixed font sizes (depending on the case) or percentages instead. Partly because of this issue with browser font size choosing I'm having, but also the fact you've used EM for the margin and padding widths as well in the style sheet, it can seriously screw up the layout as soon as anything apart from the "standard" font size it is designed with is used.

I give example by pushing the font one step in the other direction to make it "larger" (in IE terms) and the jump is absolutely huge and completely destroys the layout of the site. The jumps between are far too big and need to be reduced imo.

As said, you could try it with defined percentages instead, or have H1, H2 etc assigned to a particular size keyword (medium, small, xx-small etc) as I checked a few sites out that scale the fonts between the choices a lot better, and they all use either of those two methods.

[AllYourBase]

OK Mayhem I have changed the css to work with % as the increase when resizing in IE is less drastic - basically I want it to look at it's best for the most common users.... it will look best when the setting is at medium, but smaller shouldnt be as bad now

how's it looking?

[Mayhem]

Much, much better

As you said, it looks best at Medium in IE (which should be the plan), but at least I can easily read the text at Smaller compared to before heh.

[AllYourBase]

Theres been a few new exciting developments over at mean machines archive this weekend, in addition to the all singing all dancing new forum (not in any way in competition with the fine forum here I must emphasise!! ^_^) we now have a new look homepage which dishes out some random reviews, interviews and features - the rest of the site is very much in a beta state so please be patient while everything gets sorted out, but it is getting there!

http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/index.php

The latest exciting feature to be added is a search facility so you can easily find the mean machines review you wanted to read, pretty cool huh?

http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/review_search.php

[RetroRevival]

Now you just need to get it working with NTL

Regards
Simon