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  • ImperialBB Feature Spotlight: The Portal

    2010 - 02.26

    Ok, anyone who knows me well, knows that there is one feature in ImperialBB that I’m particularly proud of. The Portal.

    I programmed the Portal shortly after I joined the team in 2007. When I joined, the Portal already had a file and a template in SVN, but it had zero functionality. It just displayed the template, which was the base for what the Portal was supposed to look like.

    So, I decided to go ahead and build it based on the specs given to me by others, as well as some of my own ideas. And I’m not afraid to say that, it’s by far one of my top 3 favorite features in ImperialBB. Big thanks to Mike, Christian, and James for letting me go completely apeshit with it. :D

    Anyway, this blog post is going to explain the in and outs of the Portal. How it works, and what you can do with it if you have the knowledge.

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    ImperialBB Feature Spotlight: The Portal

    Skinning for ImperialBB

    2010 - 02.02

    As promised, here is a post about skinning for ImperialBB.

    Since I assumed the position of ImperialBB Designer several months ago, I’ve been neck deep in more CSS and HTML than I’ve ever been in my entire online career. This was a completely new experience for me. The only thing I’ve ever done in the past 6 years, as far as skinning is concerned, is color changes, HTML changes, and very few graphics here and there to things that were already pre-existing.

    I was never extremely good at the graphic aspect, and I still don’t think I am. The postbit buttons in ImperialBB v1 are of my design, and I’m very critical of them. The rest of the team enjoy them, but every time I look at them, I find some other small flaw that just irritates the hell out of me. Those are going to be revisited today, because I have this little problem where I can’t stand to have something I’ve done be less than perfect.

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    Skinning for ImperialBB

    Huge ImperialBB Update!

    2010 - 01.29

    I just posted the largest ImperialBB Development Update to date. It includes an outline of IBB Development, it’s Team, and Screenshot of a live install!

    You can view it here: http://www.imperialbb.com/forums/view_topic.php?tid=498

    Huge ImperialBB Update!

    Maintaining vBulletin 3.8.4

    2010 - 01.20

    I’ve been hesitant on posting this… because once I do, that makes it “final” and I’ve been secretly hoping that something would change, but it hasn’t…

    If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll probably have seen my recent tweet about FFCC’s vBulletin License expiring.

    This post is going to expand on that.

    I’ll not be renewing or upgrading to vBulletin 4 on this particular license. I have no reason too. The vBulletin 4 product is not up to par with the standards I’m requiring to be run on that site, and I simply do not have the time to learn everything about it. Therefore, I had to sit and make a decision on what I’m going to do about FFCC’s Forum.

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    Maintaining vBulletin 3.8.4

    Memory Leak Issues

    2010 - 01.17

    So, for the past couple weeks I noticed that after about 3 or 4 hours of usage, one of the programs I use on a regular basis was having Memory Leak issues. Normally I just shrug it off and continue about my merry way, because I have better things to do than to find the source of the issue.

    Well, it started happening today. I could feel the usual slowness coming on so this time, I decided to see which one was having the issues.

    Lo and behold, the culprit was none other than Firefox. Now, I’m not saying that this is a new issue but, didn’t they claim this as fixed in 3.0? Guess not…

    With 6 tabs open, Firefox was using a good 350 Megabytes of RAM. … say what?

    So, of course, to debug the issue, I killed a couple tabs in Firefox. And, of course, the RAM usage stayed the same.

    So, I told Mike about it and that when Opera implements CSS3, I’ll be permenantly switching to that.

    He suggested I try out Flock again, which is a browser I used a lot a year or two ago. I was hesitant because it’s base is Firefox 3.0, not 3.5. I tried it anyway, and to my amusement when I signed into Facebook. A bar on the side popped with my Account info and the Live Feed.

    So, I thought, that’s pretty awesome! And then Mike suggested I try Twitter as well, and sure enough, I logged into Twitter and boom, another Tab in the sidebar with my Twitter info as well as my Twitter feed.

    Then, I did the scalability test in Flock. I opened my same six tabs that I had in Firefox, and looked at the Task Manager.

    With Facebook and Twitter open in the sidebar, as well as FFCC, my blog, my blog control panel, my private IBB Alpha board, vBulletin.com, and AdminAddict.net open in browser tabs, Flock used a grand total of 110 Megabytes of RAM. Less than 3x that of Firefox, and Firefox didn’t even have the Facebook and Twitter stuff.

    Even now, I’ve closed all tabs except for my blog and blog control panel. And Flock is now using 95 MB to 100 MB of RAM.

    So, yeah, I’ve switched to Flock. :D

    Memory Leak Issues