Rescuing AC's official website - saved by BUncle

[ete]

I could probably add everything from the official pages to the wiki? What is wanted what the wiki's missing?

[Buster's Uncle]

By all means do what you will with the material.  It's complete save the Links page, which is hopelessly out of date and must be rewritten with live links, but a small job if someone will compile me a list - and the tech mini pages, which were only half (ineptly) done when Kil offered to take over, and the Basic and Advanced Concepts mini pages do not seem to exist anywhere and will have to be reconstructed.

Naturally, I need sisko to troubleshoot my server access before I can do anything.  Kil?  Would you be so kind as to see if you can get on?

[Buster's Uncle]

Kil and I are talking about getting back to work on this soon.

When events have caused you to put something off for so long, it's tough to get restarted, for some reason - but trying to work up the will...

[Buster's Uncle]

Well.

I've recently learned my way around button rollovers, after a fashion, and am in progress installing the code to light up the buttons on the homepage, as it was in the original.

http://alphacentauri2.info/official/

-I think I can work out the tech mini popup pages now.  We'll see...

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, the basic upgrade is done.

-At least I think so; there's 14 sub-pages under Factions, alone, that had the standard link sidebar on the left and the Unity at the top.  -Two Downloads sub-pages.  All the Downloads links to items in our forum Downloads section needed updating; I assume something was changed about the addressing since 2012.  All the 'hosted by' linkbacks to this forum went to the front page, not the root, which was less than ideal, and made for some time-consuming copy/paste on every single page.

Having worked out the trick of copy/pasting .html code from the first page I fixed over the equivalent code on the other pages added about a week to my life getting it done.  Sloppy bottom-spacing has been improved on a great many pages.

Now it's down to finishing the tech mini-pages.  I don't see a way around having to grind through about 100 -literally- small .html page files to correct the links and pics to work - but I'm taking a run at figuring out how to adapt the original code to get the little pop-up windows, not the full pages in a new tab you get now for the pages I've fixed up and saved...

[DrazharLn]

If the changes are simple you can use a tool to do them:

e.g. find and replace across many files (I use sed or awk for this, there are probably windows interfaces).

I think you have shell access to the server. If you say what you want done I can do it for you or tell you how to do it. These tools are quite nice and kind of satisfying to use -- like puzzles so long as the task isn't too complicated.

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, A.) I think I've completed the pages with that kind of work.  B.) The last offer I got like that on this project broke my momentum and shut down progress for seven years.

Have cracked the Technology mini-sub-page pop-up problem today -seven years after this project commenced- and the sets under Armor, Societal Models, and Terrain and Terraforming are done and working. Very motivating. Will be all week grinding through an obscene number of tiny .html pages, probably.
http://alphacentauri2.info/official/Sid%20Meier's%20Alpha%20Centauri%20Technology.htm

The other thing left to do is the Links page - it's all dead 90s links except the 'poly MACX section, if you call that alive.  We exist.  CFC is still there.  Dreifles page is still kickin' last I knew.  All else I can think of is in our Resource Center...

[Buster's Uncle]

Ah.  The Concepts pages DO still exist - I found a way in through one of the crosslinks I despaired of ever being able to fix.  Must be a problem with the Tech page link.  Saving a LOT of little pages...

[Buster's Uncle]

My .html tech paygrade has gone up a bit in the last seven years; I understand what I'm altering a lot better than I did in 2012, and that not only makes putting back some features of the original possible, I believe the work's going more smoothly/faster, too. Now that I have the Concepts pages -if updating them to work is still in progress- I've caught all the crosslinks in the previously fixed mini pages, and am now getting them in those same Concept pages as I work through them.  I think I have all the Tech pages, but not all of them updated when I stopped seven years ago - I have to go through ALL of them before I'm done, because I don't remember, and to get THOSE crosslinks, etc.

Following their numbered file addressing conventions in naming files as I save saves me work editing; I don't have to FIND the file, just shave the address down and add a ".html" on the end.  Saves a lot of time compared to links to tech pages, which I named as the tech; hundreds of .html and .htm files, and .gifs and .pngs and .jpgs, to search through each time I need Social Psych.

-The average mini page file is 2K and change when I've finished; the average before is 14K and change.  That Wayback Machine code is a real fast pig on these little pages...  Just shaving the addresses in links and pics down to local takes off a few hundred bytes...

[Buster's Uncle]

I'll probably get the concepts pages wrapped up today; only 20 to go.

Funny; all these years I assumed it was one of those 'missing from Wayback' deals, when it now appears that those sections were always misaddressed in the original and stayed unfixed for 11 years straight.  I was only interested in the faction pages when the site was up, so I wouldn't know about the tech mini pages from that.

[Buster's Uncle]

Nine to go.

-It'd probably be real helpful soon if someone went and "playtested" the Technologies page and let me know which links don't work.  Societal Models and Terrain and Terraforming should be ready for that now, and more sections soon.

[Buster's Uncle]

Concepts should be ready now.  -Note that I think all the pages are on the server for all sections, but many have not been fixed and updated; I still want to know if nothing loads, but not that I haven't processed all of the techs pages -yet- none of the facilities, and nothing in the third column but Armor.

[Buster's Uncle]

The tech tree was where I was working when I knocked off seven years ago - and it turns out that it's pretty irritating, what with the bad way I set up those filenames.  Folks, BTW, always leave off spaces in your filenames; if I never see a "&20" between words again, it's not nearly soon enough.

I'm gonna skip to working through Base Facilities; the numbered pages go a lot quicker - and less prone to error, provided the originals were addressed right.

[Buster's Uncle]

I've worked up a rhythm with this set, where processing a page goes pretty smoothly.  It calls on the pedantic side of my nature, that I naturally like things arranged just so, and code doesn't play well with any other way.  I certainly encounter less surprises as I go, doing everything in the same order, and miss less on the page.

I'm most assuredly saving a lot of time doing much of the fixing directly in the code, and not depending almost entirely on the limitations of the tools in KompaoZer, like I did in 2012...

[Buster's Uncle]

Fun.  Something's broken my rhythm.  There is a non-trivial number of facility images missing from the Wayback, and I spent a couple hours yesterday going through the facs folder in my AC folder, saving .pcxs from there converted to two-color .gifs to fill in the gaps as best I am able.  -I think I got it, but I have to be aware and check that everything's got the right picture for the base facility...

-Alas, today I realize that the website did not always use the same naming scheme as the Crossfire installation when Subsea Trunkline came up with the symbol for the Orbital Defense System.

-BTW, I think I've discovered a display bug in the game - many of those yellow facility symbols  in the base build screen are other colors in the fac-folder files; probably a palette issue...