Site upgrade v2021 early plans

[iKarith]

They probably reason that if you are needing to look at the digital version, you're either printing out a replacement for the physical copy, or you're just going to use the companion App and have that reveal the quest bit by bit for you.

That's reasonable reasoning for most people, but it doesn't account for a low vision Zargon. (Hi!) Which is what I explained in my message.

I agree that both formats have their uses. I printed out my own booklets long ago (except the Japanese set, never quite got around to doing that, and I was using the one bastianbux had done at the time, my own is tweaked based on HisapZargon's preservation of the original copies and someday I may print the booklet instead of the spiral bound full page version I used in my read through video).

I like the ability to do word searching when there's a quick reference needed on the pdfs.

Ideally the PDFs would all be vector format like the 2021 Game System PDF. That's going to require more effort though. And that's the kind of thing I want to have permission to do so that I can properly make it available to others.

I once floated a perhaps not-so-guerilla mega-torrent if Hasbro went on a takedown rampage during the Pulse campaign because I'm pretty much untouchable if I did that sort of thing, but … nah, Avalon Hill/Hasbro have actually been pretty decent about the whole thing and … I learned recently that Hasbro always owned HQ. They bought Milton Bradley in 1984! It's their game and it always was.

I'd like to do cool stuff to make their game more available to folks who might otherwise not play it if they're cool with that … but that's for them to decide.

If it ever really came down to it and we weren't really allowed to keep the stuff in the downloads section or custom stuff absolutely derived from it (custom cards and whatnot would count), I'd just go spend some time on those OpenQuest rules I've been noodling with for over a decade now. But I'd rather work with them because HQ is a lot more polished (incoming Frozen Horror perhaps notwithstanding!) and a lot more people are ready to play it.

I'll do what I can. It's kinda up to them, really.

[iKarith]

An update, if a somewhat frustrating one. It feels like every time I get anywhere significant it feels like I hit a brick wall and end up starting over. That's happened half a dozen times now. I guess it's bound to when you've got really 18 or 19 websites you're looking at and massive amounts of sort of duplicated (but not quite really) content, etc. Plus the fact that there's five or so editions of HeroQuest now, depending on what you want to do with Japanese HQ and the multiple UK-rules releases. *shrug*

Before I get started over yet again, I decided this time it all goes in git from the start, out in the open, and y'all can help if you want. No more restarts, WE'LL DO IT LIVE! (Uh oh. ) There's some benefits to doing it that way.

First, it means everything is backed up. Any change made to it will exist [creepy child]forever and ever and ever and ever…[/creepy child]. Second putting it on github allows me to segment out the two sites that need to remain separate sites (agins-archive and phoenix) as their own repos. That means I can fix some particularly irritating bugs that break some modern browsers, particularly with the Agin's Inn archive. Third, having things in manageable chunks with development/planning wiki and issue tracker means that other people can help… Fourth, having access to the wiki and issues for planning and development, as well as others being able to contribute here and there will be really nice.

And the finaly benefit which kinda relates specifically to Agin's Inn which is where I'm (re)starting… At some point, I've got to deploy new stuff. That means take old stuff out and put new stuff in, right? And I'm gonna be doing this from git. This is both fairly simple and fairly complex because there's a remote possibility I might screw it up. We've got backups—drathe downloads one every day, and I make them now and then. But it's a lot easier to "oh lemony goodness!" when the site you're working on is < 300 MB than it is when it's > 16 GB. I can make sure the whole "deploy from git" thing works on Dewayne Agin's relatively small site when it'd take me just a few minutes to fix anything I break.

And since Agin's stuff uses no PHP and no "backend", I can actually do a fair bit of the testing using Github Pages as a staging area. In fact, I've already started doing that to fix some of the tag soup errors that break some modern browsers. I've uploaded the html files from the root of agins-archive for the purposes of testing. In the process I've converted them all to UTF-8 (fixing some mismatched character sets along the way) and fixed the most egregious tag soup bugs related to meta tags. Long way to go on it still (subdirs, images, art and other assets, etc.) but I don't actually intend to make significant changes to the Agin's Inn content—it's a historical archive, after all. But I can make it shine in all its 1998 GeoCities-era glory! There's stuff we could do with that, sure, but it's lower priority.

If you know some HTML/CSS, or even if you know just a little Markdown from Reddit and the like, you can help. Once I'm done getting agins-archive live here on the Inn, I'll jump into writing HTML content. Just plain HTML, no CSS or art or anything yet. Let's get what we want into the repo and make sure it's _where_ we want it. Once we have that, we can start figuring out how we want it to look and making pretty templates and all. I can help some folks who want to help learn a few of the tools if you'd like. Git is a little strange at first but it's not difficult to learn for those who have some skills with HTML. And it's not strictly needed for others.

URLs…

https://github.com/YeOldeInn - the umbrella "org" for all of this.
https://github.com/YeOldeInn/website/ - where the main Inn website will eventually live. The wiki and issues are sections are there now, but there's no actual code here yet, just a README.
https://github.com/YeOldeInn/agins-archive/ - where I'm working at the moment. A lot of files without a lot of organization and I haven't even finished the top layer directory. I've got kind of a rough todo list in the Issues section.
https://yeoldeinn.github.io/agins-archive/ - this is the staging area for the agins-archive repo. When this works and everything is where it's supposed to be in the repo, I can deploy it.

I won't be able to do the same with either phoenix's site or the Inn site since both use PHP. Not unless I convert them to static files or to Jekyll. Which wouldn't be a bad idea necessarily, I just don't want to spring any surprises on drathe.

Throw a PM at me here or on Discord if you wanna help. I'm also hoping we can get someone to draw us a cool avatar that might become the new logo for the Inn if people like it. Basically, and are pretty much synonymous with the Inn … I just love that the classic HQ oldhammer orc just looks so happy just to be here. To smash things/people sure, but a man—a fungus?—has got to make a living, right?

[iKarith]

Here's an example of the kind of thing y'all can help with pretty easily. Looking through the files in agins-archive I hadn't added yet (though it may apply to some that I already have), I came across a file called weaponspix.htm. There were already weaponpix.html and weaponpix2.html. I checked and only weaponpix.html got used. All a person would have to do is post a new issue saying hey, there's these three files and they're awfully similar, and it'd cause me to have a look.

And hmm, yes, yes they are! That's about the time I'd break out a tool we devs use called diff. Well crap, they're basically identical. One of them is clearly better than the other two, but it's not even the version that's "live". That's an easy fix! And I will fix it tomorrow. Give anyone who cares a chance to have a look at the issue I filed. Then I'll resolve it and you can see what that looks like.

The issue is here: https://github.com/YeOldeInn/agins-archive/issues/2

[iKarith]

I'm gonna go ahead and upload this here because it's a temporary condition and I don't care if the forum deletes it in a few weeks:

agins-looks-like-crap.png

There's two GIF files missing for buttons that somehow didn't show up as HTML 404 in my console. They're added, I just didn't wait for Github to deploy them. Thing is … this looks like crap! Of course, it looks exactly like the crap it should look like given that I've got a monitor with a width of 3840 now. If I magnify the page to my usual 150% even with my font DPI set to 213 (did I mention I'm legally blind? I'm legally blind), it looks fine. But I wanted to point out this picture explicitly because it's broken.

We can fix this. There's a couple ways websites fix this, actually. One is to make the website just center the content and not let it get any bigger no matter how freakishly wide your browser window is. This looks crappy, but … not that crappy, and frankly the website's already kind of doing that, isn't it? The other thing we can do is scale the website to fit your viewport's width, assuming your viewport is a certain minimum width.

Everyone remember those "Best viewed with 800x600" things? That, basically. We'd insist on a minimum size, and if your phone or whatever wanted to draw it smaller than that … well, you can't. But this site was never made for smaller than that.

Option number the third is just leave it, because it has been broken historically.

If all I gotta do is just make the background not be shunted off to one side and not repeat endlessly, my sense is that I should do that. But I figure I should ask for opinions. Clicking through the gh-pages deployed site will yield a lot of missing content, and there's some "orphaned" content you can't get to by clicking links mentioned in Issue #3. Help with that is welcome—most of it is either content that is old and appears elsewhere or stuff that was started and never finished.

I'll start going through the stuff you CAN get to by clicking around tomorrow and start adding missing content.