Test site still underwork Please check it out

amandaph

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I'm still working on it. Its not done yet still alot more to go. Its me testing.

I'm looking for way to make a c.g.i form for fanclub its been years since I have made a website

I can use some help help!! WIth that. I'm doing this for no profit at all!

http://amandaPhillips.elementfx.com
 

cybrax

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Pretty good so far, though I'd probably use a slightly narrower CSS template to hold the page (remember some folk have smaller screens than you do). Not many use the 'RealPlayer' format for video either, I don't think Firefox even has a plugin for it at all these days and both Chrome and IE have no built in support. So you may want to look at using Youtube to embed your video or hosting it yourself as an FLV file and use something like Flowplayer to display the video or use the newer HTML5 <video> tag system
 

essellar

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Please -- a warning whenever a site is going to autoplay sound would be much appreciated. And a way to shut it off, or at least turn it way, way down would be really nice. I'd much prefer it if it never, ever happened. You don't know where I am when I visit your site, or whether full-blast music would be appropriate. Heck, I might have been listening to a song when I hit your site, and not everything mixes well. If I didn't turn it on, it shouldn't happen — getting the baby back to sleep might take a while, or I might be facing a data cap on my service plan and your site may have just cost me money I can't afford. If I can't adjust the volume, it shouldn't happen.

As it was, I couldn't stay there long enough to give the site a going-over, examine style sheets, and so forth.
 

jensen

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Nice page with nice menu and pleasant to the eye (I turn off sound most of the time)

How about using a CMS like WordPress to run your site? Then you don't have to think about contact managers, coding for the album page and so on.
DRUPAL would be better but then it just takes a lot of time.

You can still use your design but WordPress runs the site so you can focus on content.
 

amandaph

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Thank you so much. . I'm a little old school and I took your advice very well thank you. Do you know much about C.G.I forms and how to make them mail the webmaster on submit?


Its been a long time. Hmm Html 5 handles media! intresting. Its been a few years since I've made websites. Everyone says word press and soo on. back in my days I never liked bs tags in my html so I used a program kinda like notepad to help with tags and layouts to be in the correct locations other than that. Its been all books and ref from websites!

I see Firefox also has problems with php too


Is there a way to make the page auto adjust on load to user display device I find little info about that not much help ugg
 
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amandaph

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People keep telling me about word press. I have not tried it but I also hear about it. The content on most pages will not change maybe a video or 2 press photos and such will work from a flash player. I'm a little old school and will play around with word press so many people have said that. You are correct about the audio on the first page. I have removed the code on that as well. I could use some help with c.g.i forms.

The music is rather easy to add with a generator I made its admin is on a seperat url within the hosted site.

I'd like to replace the guestbook php with a fanclub c.g.i form that gets mailed to a account on website mail.

I'm doing this free to help a good friend!

I'm very intrested in hearing more about word press I think your the 4th person who said somthing about it. I truly don't like extra tags in the code thou
 

essellar

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For the sizing, I'm going to point you to a very interesting article over at A List Apart. In particular, experiment a bit with the vh and vw measurement units (they're percentages of the viewport height and width, respectively), so you can create something that's "pixel perfect" if you want, and still have it scale to different browser sizes. Alternatively, you can use a max-width setting, which will let narrow browsers wrap text and so forth naturally, while preventing the page from getting uncontrollably wide on very large screens. (Taking a little tour around A List Apart and Smashing Magazine ought to give you a lot of information and ideas.)

I'm not sure why there's such a drive to WordPress (or Drupal or Joomla) around these parts. For most sites, they're overkill in a big way. WordPress started out as a simple blogging platform, but it has grown (like the others) into a full-blown Content Management System — and that's great if you have (or plan to have) enough content to warrant "management". There is nothing wrong with static HTML sites, nor with much simpler programmatic content sites (lightweight blogging platforms, etc.). In fact, you can do more with less if you avoid using a CMS (and you almost always get better HTML out of the deal). Honestly, I think a lot of the attitude comes from never having maintained a high-traffic site. A CMS is great if you have a lot of contributors and a publishing workflow (edits, approvals, etc.). A blog is great if you have frequent updates you want to display in reverse chronological order and want a lot of feedback (and spam). If your content is mostly static (few, irregular updates), then a static site (or a program that generates static pages) more than fills the bill.

Let's say, for a moment, that you "hit the big time". Well, that usually involves a boatload of fame and interest right off the bat, but your real income doesn't get a whole lot bigger for quite a while. You can easily sustain a whole big boatload of web traffic on free or low-cost* paid shared hosting using static files (or small, fast scripts). With something like WordPress (or another CMS), each page view requires loading an eye-watering number of script files on the server, then making a boatload of database queries to get the content for the page. It doesn't take too very many visitors before you really need to step up to a much more powerful server (or servers, often numbered in the dozens), and that can mean a whole lot of money gambled on the temporary buzz made by a single that hasn't actually paid you a dime yet. You'd need to go from zero to Justin Beiber-level popularity in a day before you get into trouble with static files (especially if the media stuff is on-demand). The server does next to no work for each request, so it can very quickly handle one and move on to the next.

As for the contact form, it's very easy to put one together using PHP (a scripting language that's available on almost every host, especially the low-cost and free ones like x10Hosting). You may want to rethink the email part, though. It's easy enough to do the email, and it may make some sort of sense when you're a "local artist", but if/when you become anything more, that can mean that your real email gets completely drowned out by fans (and the inevitable haters). For almost all purposes, sending the contact form information to a database is a better idea. You can read and reply to the messages from a private area of your web site and, if necessary, allow "your people" to help you handle a flood of messages without having to give anybody access to your email. (It doesn't matter how fan-centric and idealistic you may be, if it should ever happen that you get thousands of messages in a day because something you recorded touched a lot of hearts, you're going to have an awful lot of trouble responding to them all, even with help.) You can always have a scheduled script (a "cron job") send you an email every day (or what have you) if there are new messages to read/respond to, and meanwhile your email will still be useful for your actual friends and associates to use. There are a boatload of PHP scripts out there for email contact forms (several of them in the "Programming" subforum here), and if you want help with the database version, you can always PM me (it's a very simple thing if you've done any programming before).

Just as an aside, disabling right-clicks (and selection/drag) doesn't really work — it's just annoying to have to disable the oncontextmenu handler to view the page source outside of the debugger/developer tools (and some browsers allow it to be disabled by default). It's healthier to simply assume that if it's on my screen, I can have it. Or, rather, that I've already got it. (I've seen people do some pretty clever and complicated things over they years to try to get around that simple fact, including translating images pixel by pixel into background colours for table cells and setting the cells to 1 pixel high and wide with no borders, spacing or padding. ALT + PRT SCR gets right around that. And the text tricks some people use — images, using monospaced fonts and putting every other letter of a different layer, etc. — can all be gotten around using OCR.) In other words, the best you can hope for is to keep honest people honest while making things a little more difficult than they have to be for people who might be trying to help. I don't know whether you added the oncontextmenu="return false" onselectstart="return false" ondragstart="return false" yourself or whether it came from your editor's default settings, but it's nothing more than "security theatre". Oh, and it means that opening links in new tabs/windows can be difficult (not everybody has a middle mouse button handy).

There's only one remaining niggle, and that's in the stylesheet: are you sure that "cursive" is a good fallback font for Tahoma? I'd go with sans-serif, myself.

All in all, it's not bad. There are things I'd do differently, but then I'm more hard bop jazz than country/rock, so what do I know?
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* The basic Premium plan here is $3.95/month if you pay for three years up front ($142.20) and includes a domain name, and you can transfer your free account by checking a box on the form. It's pretty easy to come up with that kind of money when you have to. To get the same level of performance using a CMS instead of static files, you'd probably need to step up to the higher tiers of Infinity+ service.
 

jensen

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I did code paged with notepad in the early days. Then the sites got a bit larger and more code to edit every time changes are made.

"Why not use WordPress?" I asked myself. So I tried and was happy with the outcome - get to focus on the content rather than the code :)

esseller has a good point on not using WordPress. Static pages would mostly do the job (if your site is all static - think about getting hosting at Amazon's S3 :) but since you asked about forms and were already adding bits of code here and there anyway. Give WordPress a try. have used Drupal and Joomla but nothing as simple as WordPress.
 

essellar

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Nothing is as simple... but many, many things are less "expensive". Really. Give it a break, CMS people; you're mostly wrong. Scalability counts, and unless you have plans to remain small or go all-out Enterprise™ (clustered servers or multiple cloud instances), scalability of CMSs, WP included, sucks.
 

amandaph

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Essellar!!
Thank you so much for the information. Yes the site is still under much work im doing it free. Once done We do plane on moving it to a domain maybee service provided from here or others that can handle trafic when needed.. The idea I had in mind was making it simple and easy for users to view the content as more will start to come in. The size thing yes I need Help with. The Contact page will be changed to a text version with email and mail address to the correct Manager and possable to the label company. Its been a long time since I have done a webpage so updating content will be easy and adding events and music / videos will be My Ediby a remote custom built GUI Ftp program built espcially for the website information changing needs only Tablet/Mac/Windows. More Flash Ideas.. Calendar and Guestbook/ To be Fanclub. The Fanclub information will be sent to a exterinal privet server. I've noticed that the new Firefox is not happy with the Php.

Basic its just getting my self back in the grove and how much things have changed over the years. I truly look forward to talking to you more.. Thank you so much for the information... If there is any thing else you can think of it would be great!! I sure can use the help espically with the size...

I really want to try n stay away from word press if possable. Just wanting to be diferant.
For the sizing, I'm going to point you to a very interesting article over at A List Apart. In particular, experiment a bit with the vh and vw measurement units (they're percentages of the viewport height and width, respectively), so you can create something that's "pixel perfect" if you want, and still have it scale to different browser sizes. Alternatively, you can use a max-width setting, which will let narrow browsers wrap text and so forth naturally, while preventing the page from getting uncontrollably wide on very large screens. (Taking a little tour around A List Apart and Smashing Magazine ought to give you a lot of information and ideas.)

I'm not sure why there's such a drive to WordPress (or Drupal or Joomla) around these parts. For most sites, they're overkill in a big way. WordPress started out as a simple blogging platform, but it has grown (like the others) into a full-blown Content Management System — and that's great if you have (or plan to have) enough content to warrant "management". There is nothing wrong with static HTML sites, nor with much simpler programmatic content sites (lightweight blogging platforms, etc.). In fact, you can do more with less if you avoid using a CMS (and you almost always get better HTML out of the deal). Honestly, I think a lot of the attitude comes from never having maintained a high-traffic site. A CMS is great if you have a lot of contributors and a publishing workflow (edits, approvals, etc.). A blog is great if you have frequent updates you want to display in reverse chronological order and want a lot of feedback (and spam). If your content is mostly static (few, irregular updates), then a static site (or a program that generates static pages) more than fills the bill.

Let's say, for a moment, that you "hit the big time". Well, that usually involves a boatload of fame and interest right off the bat, but your real income doesn't get a whole lot bigger for quite a while. You can easily sustain a whole big boatload of web traffic on free or low-cost* paid shared hosting using static files (or small, fast scripts). With something like WordPress (or another CMS), each page view requires loading an eye-watering number of script files on the server, then making a boatload of database queries to get the content for the page. It doesn't take too very many visitors before you really need to step up to a much more powerful server (or servers, often numbered in the dozens), and that can mean a whole lot of money gambled on the temporary buzz made by a single that hasn't actually paid you a dime yet. You'd need to go from zero to Justin Beiber-level popularity in a day before you get into trouble with static files (especially if the media stuff is on-demand). The server does next to no work for each request, so it can very quickly handle one and move on to the next.

As for the contact form, it's very easy to put one together using PHP (a scripting language that's available on almost every host, especially the low-cost and free ones like x10Hosting). You may want to rethink the email part, though. It's easy enough to do the email, and it may make some sort of sense when you're a "local artist", but if/when you become anything more, that can mean that your real email gets completely drowned out by fans (and the inevitable haters). For almost all purposes, sending the contact form information to a database is a better idea. You can read and reply to the messages from a private area of your web site and, if necessary, allow "your people" to help you handle a flood of messages without having to give anybody access to your email. (It doesn't matter how fan-centric and idealistic you may be, if it should ever happen that you get thousands of messages in a day because something you recorded touched a lot of hearts, you're going to have an awful lot of trouble responding to them all, even with help.) You can always have a scheduled script (a "cron job") send you an email every day (or what have you) if there are new messages to read/respond to, and meanwhile your email will still be useful for your actual friends and associates to use. There are a boatload of PHP scripts out there for email contact forms (several of them in the "Programming" subforum here), and if you want help with the database version, you can always PM me (it's a very simple thing if you've done any programming before).

Just as an aside, disabling right-clicks (and selection/drag) doesn't really work — it's just annoying to have to disable the oncontextmenu handler to view the page source outside of the debugger/developer tools (and some browsers allow it to be disabled by default). It's healthier to simply assume that if it's on my screen, I can have it. Or, rather, that I've already got it. (I've seen people do some pretty clever and complicated things over they years to try to get around that simple fact, including translating images pixel by pixel into background colours for table cells and setting the cells to 1 pixel high and wide with no borders, spacing or padding. ALT + PRT SCR gets right around that. And the text tricks some people use — images, using monospaced fonts and putting every other letter of a different layer, etc. — can all be gotten around using OCR.) In other words, the best you can hope for is to keep honest people honest while making things a little more difficult than they have to be for people who might be trying to help. I don't know whether you added the oncontextmenu="return false" onselectstart="return false" ondragstart="return false" yourself or whether it came from your editor's default settings, but it's nothing more than "security theatre". Oh, and it means that opening links in new tabs/windows can be difficult (not everybody has a middle mouse button handy).

There's only one remaining niggle, and that's in the stylesheet: are you sure that "cursive" is a good fallback font for Tahoma? I'd go with sans-serif, myself.

All in all, it's not bad. There are things I'd do differently, but then I'm more hard bop jazz than country/rock, so what do I know?
_________________
* The basic Premium plan here is $3.95/month if you pay for three years up front ($142.20) and includes a domain name, and you can transfer your free account by checking a box on the form. It's pretty easy to come up with that kind of money when you have to. To get the same level of performance using a CMS instead of static files, you'd probably need to step up to the higher tiers of Infinity+ service.
 

essellar

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Feel free to PM me. There are, as I said, a couple-three ways of getting the sizing right across devices, and it may take a bit of back-and-forthing to come up with a solution that fits what you have in mind. The dynamic parts of the site, as you've described them, are pretty simple as well, and should be easily portable when/if you decide to move the site. A little bit of lightweight code that does what you want it to do doesn't cost much in terms of server performance, and it won't have the draggy effect on your main pages that a CMS or WordPress would have. (Even if you decide to add a blog at some point, there are a lot better-performing blogs than WP, but they don't come with the ability to add multiplayer games in Turkish and Estonian with live chat and automatic translation. I hope that won't be a problem.)
 

jensen

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Aha a hand coded site. Certainly different.
Waiting to see the completed website.
 

amandaph

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Aha a hand coded site. Certainly different.
Waiting to see the completed website.


Yes it is. I'm working out the size issue right now. Everyones thoughts and knowldge is great. I wish I knew about the size issue before but I'm trying to work it out.. Thank you.. This site will go damain and I will support 10hosting.. I have been pleased with the service and speed for free accounts. When done testing I look forward to see the diferance in paid service. The events will go to flash style for USA other flash one for international.. GuestBook will change to mail in fanclub, Album I'm almost done going to flash. a 3rd party program I'm building with a great gui for on road changing adding Ie Music/ Photos and such...


Thank you everyone your support is great its been a long time since I did a webpages and everyones help has been great. I am greatful that I have the chance do to this for Amanda. My help to her has always been free! So why go outside the norm!

Ess** I will pm you. Truly to spend the amount of time writing like you have tells you do care about peoples sites and the smarts you do have. Thank you again. Thank you Everone!
 
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ellescuba27

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I always hand code my sites. That is because of two things. 1. I used to have Dreamweaver but it was glitchy and added in a lot of unnecessary <div> tags and stuff, and two because I sometimes am making Javascript games which many visual editors don't allow for, or I just can't add in because Javascript is too complicated to do visually.
Can I recommend PHPMailer for a contact us form? I use it and it works like a charm with x10. It also allows for email attachments.
And you may want to consider a domain name if you really are serious about the site. Making text lighter than the background and making it readable is a difficult test, and you pass! Congrats. It's OK to use Flash on the music page, but do provide a workaround, such as with the <audio> tag, for smartphones that don't have it. And if I were you, I would provide nothing more than 30 second previews on that page, it is VERY EASY to download mp3s from Flash. Just use Realplayer Downloader.
 

ellescuba27

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I always hand code my sites. That is because of two things. 1. I used to have Dreamweaver but it was glitchy and added in a lot of unnecessary <div> tags and stuff, and two because I sometimes am making Javascript games which many visual editors don't allow for, or I just can't add in because Javascript is too complicated to do visually.
Can I recommend PHPMailer for a contact us form? I use it and it works like a charm with x10. It also allows for email attachments.
And you may want to consider a domain name if you really are serious about the site. Making text lighter than the background and making it readable is a difficult test, and you pass! Congrats. It's OK to use Flash on the music page, but do provide a workaround, such as with the <audio> tag, for smartphones that don't have it. And if I were you, I would provide nothing more than 30 second previews on that page, it is VERY EASY to download mp3s from Flash. Just use Realplayer Downloader.
 

amandaph

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Thankyou for the informationg. Yes we do plan on going domain. It wouldn't be much work at all with the search engines either! The form I'm using a php form data base now. Seems to be working fine. I am having a lil trouble with the smtp mail out though. I have tried the email client settings for it!

Real Player downloader hmm

I think there is a way to prevent that!

hotlink and folder protect im thinking! Also you can't stop that from happing anyways! Audio out to Mic in cable! Can record whats playing
 

ellescuba27

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I am on Level and PHPMailer is working fine. If it's error 111 that's the problem (I've had it as well) leave that up the the staff, it's a server error and nothing a normal user can solve. As well, remember the rules about mailing here on the x10hosting community:
1. No sending from your personal mail. Use your CPanel email.
2. No more that 100 emails per hour (keep track of this in a database because if you send too many more emails you could get suspended)
As far as I know from experience there are certain sites Realplayer doesn't download from because of copyright issues. I can't remember any examples, however, you might want to try to contact RealNetworks to see if they could put your site on the off limits list.
If you have tried these steps are still not seeing the Download This Video button, or if you can download some videos but not others, there is a chance that the website that you are viewing does not allow video downloads or that specific video has been blocked by the content provider.
 

amandaph

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Thank you very much.. I am not letting the site send mail out. instead. I am using a thank you page and will provide more information on that. We are very against spaming. I also will be upgrading the account also. Thank you very much for the information about mail I did forget that!
 

amandaph

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Thank you so much for the information. We are not sending any email amount. It was agreed to not spam like most fan clubs and other memberships do. THank you for making me aware of that also I had forgot!
 
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