Navigation improvements

[mos6507]

I was thinking that there should be a better way to dig down through the game database than the left menu.

 

For instance, a searchbox with a dropdown so you can directly search for games or programmers off the homepage, and a second drop-down to constrain by platform?

 

Right now there is no actual database "homepage". You have to commit to a full listing of screenshots, etc....

 

Unfortunately the default number in the lister is 100. It should really be 25 by default (for slow connections) and then cookied. Also, because each section has a header portion at the top, as you page forward on the lister, you have to keep scrolling down to the list. The header should only be when you first click the left menu item, with no initial lister, IMHO.

 

I think the database is the best part of Atari Age. I'd just like to see some of these navigational tools added to make it faster to dig through the archives.

[Albert]

Hi Guys,

 

We do have plans to improve navigation and searching in the database. All of the points you made are valid and I can tell you we have plans to greatly expand on the search capabilities, as well as allowing searching from the main page. Ultimately we will allow people to store preferences for the site so if you only want to see 25 results per page that will be remembered. These improvements probably won't happen for a few months, but they sure will happen.

 

..Al

[Alex]

Yes, thanks for the suggestions. Hopefully we will be able to integrate the UBB profile with sitewide preferences so that everyone doesn't have to reregister. We will also be changing the main system link so that it goes directly into the system database instead of the system intro page. Then there will be a "History" link that goes to what is now the intro page. I don't think most people return to the history page much after reading it once, so it doesn't make sense to force people through it.

 

We have wanted to implement searching from the start, but it's tricky to create a real search engine on our site that includes the database, so we postponed it. One way is to create an index, but that requires significant server storage which we do not have right now.

 

So the question is do we set up a limited search feature on the home page, such as you find on the database page? Or do we wait until we have a serious search engine that is capable of searching everything on the site? Obviously this can be done, we're just not sure of the best way to do it yet, hence the postponement.

[mos6507]

>>

We have wanted to implement searching from the start, but it's tricky to create a real search engine on our site that includes the database<<

 

Searching can be done for individual keywords using simple SQL where clauses.

 

Like if you typed in 'Crane' then you do:

 

Select *

from games

where programmer LIKE '%Crane%'

 

But you wouldn't be able to handle a multi-keyword search like:

 

'Crane or Miller' or 'Star -Voyager' searching for all games with the word Star in the title but not Voyager.

 

If you want full searchbox string parsing, you need some kind of 3rd party product I guess.

 

If your site had been built using Cold Fusion for Wintel, that comes bundles with Verity indexing which works quite nicely for single-server sites. The new CF also has a dedicated verity server for load-balanced situations.

 

I'm not necessarily suggesting you convert to CF, although if you did, I could offer you free hosting.

 

PHP might have something built into it that you could use, assuming this is running over Unix.