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Woohoo… I finally got real internet… I no longer have to steal wireless from a unsuspecting neighbor!

I’ll probably receive the game next week so that won’t be a problem Daan :-).

That’s a good price, too bad I don’t have a credit card. So either I’ll have to steal my moms credit card again or find a cheap retailer in the Netherlands. Anyway, don’t have a lot of time to play it at the moment, so I’ll probably have to wait ‘till next week or something.

I just preordered it for €48,99 at Play.com.

I might be the old dude… I might even play as the girl :-P. I don’t care, as long as I get to shoot a lot of zombies, or “infected”.

I definitely want to play that game, but you’re the old dude :P

X-Cell 02> I wouldn’t say “alive”, it’s more a undead kind of state :-D

Speaking of the undead, Left 4 Dead is coming out soon… I still haven’t got proper internet but at the end of the month I will (unless the provider fucks up). I’m pretty excited about that game and can’t wait to play it over Xbox Live… Daan if you got some money left this month, save it for that wonderful game about killing zombies as a team :-D

Jaap> You’re right about that. Had class about databases today (and yesterday) and was painfully confronted with the fact that I suck at it… at least for now. But looking at the facts in your post, it looks like you’re fucked :D

Holy Shit! Is this monster back alive ;-)

Daan> That’s a nice way of obscuring the dropdown, but in the end it’s the same method. Both ways require some geographical knowledge about the country the event is in. Most timezone names are actually pretty identifiable if you known a bit about the location. Take for example the name of our timezone—Europe/Amsterdam—not that hard to figure out if you know that Amsterdam is located in the Netherlands. Providing a map not only requires geographical knowledge of the user but there’s also the issue of creating these maps and clickable regions :-(

On another note, I actually was wrong about the assumption that US states have a single timezone, there are several states that have multiple timezones. Australia is a bit easier, their state boundaries are also timezone boundaries.

Well, I’ll just keep working on this… sooner or later I’ll get something done.

How about this:

When an event takes place in a multi-timezone country, instead of displaying a pop-down menu, a map appears with an overview of the country, displaying all timezones. This way, given that the user can point out the location on a map, the user can click on the location and the timezone is selected. Of course you could also index all city’s, towns and villages and put those in a pop-down menu :)

A lot of time in development is spent making nearly invisible solutions to complex problems. Take for example the event stuff I’m working on right now (and have worked on most of last week, and even some of the weekend).

Basically an event is just a date with some info attached to it (thanks for that description Joris :-P). But how do I store this date? Events take place all around the globe, so, to accurately store and represent the date of a party I somehow need to know in which timezone it takes place.

Now, I could put a giant dropdown with all available timezones on the form used to submit a event… but I believe that wouldn’t be very user friendly. Is it reasonable to expect that you know the timezone name or GMT offset of a date you are entering? I don’t think so, even more if you take in account you might be submitting an even that doesn’t take place in your region… So I dug a little further into timezones.

Most countries on this planet only have one timezone. So if I provide a country dropdown I can deduce the timezone in a bunch of cases. Also, the country of an event is a much more reasonable thing to ask, unlike the timezone.

We all know the giant “Please select you country” dropdowns found all over the internet. Getting one of those is not that hard, Rails even has/had it built in. But, I don’t just want the countries, I want them grouped by continent making them (theoretically) easier to find in a huge list. Getting a list of countries grouped by continent (trustworthy and in a usable format) is much harder…

So I spent some time Googling and after a while I found the United Nations M.49 standard. Which is a list of countries nicely grouped by continent and subregions. After some copying and pasting, some reformatting (I’m skipping some parts here) I had this list in a database.

Now, to find the timezone of a country I use TZInfo. This library enables me to lookup a country by it’s ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 code and get the associated timezones. The M.49 region list does not include this two letter code. Luckily the list of ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 codes in a usable format is easy to find.

Since the ISO3166 list is based on the M.49 list (the country names are the same) I just have to perform some spreadsheet magic to combine the data. Now I have a list of both country names and the codes needed to get a country’s timezone(s). Providing a nice and clean solution for the timezone problem for most European countries.

Sadly, all of this, still isn’t enough for those pesky multi timezone countries… even worse, these multi timezone countries include the United States, Canada and Australia. Obviously, I cannot ignore these countries as it’s quite probable that some of the event will take place in those regions.

I believe I can solve the US’ timezone ambiguity by asking which state the event takes place in but I’m not sure… I haven’t even got a clue about the other ones.

So I’ll probably spend the next couple of days finding out how to overcome this last hurdle. If I can’t figure it out I’ll have to resort to providing a timezone dropdown if the event takes place in a multi timezone country. At least I can limit the list of options to only those timezones that are available in the selected country.

Yes, sometimes things are (or can be made) a lot more complex than they seem to be.

I can point you in two directions on that, first of all there’s grunge style web design, and then there’s Russian Constructivism and othere same era Avant Garde art.

I’m probably being to vague, but it’s the general worn look of grunge and the more calculated style, or feel of Constructivism and related art styles.

Hope this makes any sense…

P.S. The look of the this is somewhat tweaked in development right now because of the work I’m doing for the events addition to the site. Small tweaks mostly…

Worked a little on the mockup today, spend most time on the header. It’s far from done, but it’s probably going to be in two different color styles: white/black and black/white :)

Anyways, could you tell me more about what you want it to look like? At the moment I’m trying to make something of which I think you’ll like, but I’ve always been bad at placing myself in someone else’s shoes.

Yeah, it’s the first time I’m using this method, but I’m really liking it though, sure helps out aligning everything. I’ve been experimenting with horizontal and vertical rhythm before, but not to this extent. I’m used to implementing other people’s designs, not doing it all myself :-D.

Take your time though, finishing school projects is slightly more important than making mockups for this here.

Ah, now I get it. Nice method though. I was always juggling with numbers and eventually ignored the numbers and just went with ‘what looked good’…

Anyway, I’m a little busy atm. Had to montage a short film and me and my classmate were at about 75%. But today we found out someone deleted our files, so I have to do it again.

Look, here’s a screenshot with the grid as the background. (The hot pink areas are ad positions). Each white block is 60 pixels, each yellow line in between is 20px. (The background repeating is a bit messed up, but it’s supposed to repeat steadily all the way down).

As you can see every element sits inside one or more grid blocks, that’s what I meant… I hope it’s more clear now. If you got the Web Developer plugin for Firefox, you can edit grid.css and uncomment the last two lines. The grid and purple ad areas will then show up.

¿Que?

I have no idea what the fuck you’re saying :P Well, it’s just the part with the grid and the gutter. The second part I do get, so there’s still hope :)

Cool, cool. Daan, do you need any extra stuff from me about the lay-out and all? I can tell you right now that the layout is based on a 60 pixel grid with a 20 pixel gutter which is also the line height.

Furthermore the layout works best on large screens but scales down to 1024x768. The main column is still visible on an 800x600 screen.

Yeah, you were all right… but I had better :P None the less, I’ll try to fix you a few mockups. Will post them here as well so that the other “active members” of this community can execute their judgment upon them.

Obama ‘08!

Slow week… Right after pulling a Obama all-nighter—and taking it slow the next day—the harddisk of my girlfriend’s PC crashed. I let her use this laptop so she could work on her temporary freelance print design gig. But she got her shit together and got her machine working again virtually without any of my help. So I spend today getting at least one thing working… pagination or paging.

Yes, I’ll even announce the most mundane additions as there hasn’t been a lot to discuss as of yet. More messages means more pages, means more links to be able to click through, so that’s at least one thing to strive for :-D.

I’ll guess I need to work on providing more returning value to this site. So I’ll work on providing special support for posting of events and who knowns what… I’m taking suggestions :-).

That message just looks really gay Daan… but I think I was a pleasant guest so please go ahead :-D