Team 1255 Site

[ThomasP]

Our site got a little face lift and engine upgrade this year. Our new site is up at the old address http://www.blarglefish.com. I've got a weird obsession with Java so the new website is done in JSP and was a lot of fun to create.

Just a few things new in this years site:

Organized picture gallery - Last year the picture gallery was an insane jumble of HTML but it's now just 60 lines of JSP and a MySQL database... makes life so much easier.

Calendar - Fairly simple calendar just drawn out with some a couple of for loops and using MySQL database to store events.

Guestbook - Yet another simple thing using JSP and MySQL... please sign it!

Files archive - Nifty thing I wrote that dynamically creates a file archive based on the contents of the /archives folder on the server so whenever a new file is uploaded it automatically gets a link in the file archives. Can be divided into subfolders and each folder can have a comments file that allows a little note to be made about files and displayed in the archives.

Hit counter - Nothing really fancy here.. just threw this together the other night because I was bored. Like the countdown clock above it, it displays in binary so we really haven't had 101011 visits, it's more like 43.


Hope you guys like the site

[Greg Marra]

Two quick comments:

In the image galleries, the "thumbnails" you are displaying are actually the full size images, just squished to fit into the 60x80px you've given them. This means they take longer to load (since the browser has to get the whole full size image), and they don't look as nice. Consider using some other software package to create smaller, seperate thumbnails (or check out Picasa and it's nice web export (you can even write your own templates)).

Also, in your sidebar, the rollover images are not preloaded. For the red-glowy image to appear for each item, I have to wait a sec for my browser to request it. You can use javascript to preload these images and remove that delay.

Other than that, you have a lot of great content and the site is very easy to navigate. Nice work!

[ThomasP]

Ah, thanks, I'll go do that because I don't really feel like reading my book for English.