Club Log design changes

Hi all,

You may notice some changes to Club Log today (a few obvious, many not so obvious). If you experience any problems, I apologise in advance – please do tell me so I can fix them for you and everyone else as quickly as possible.

Design changes:

  1. By popular request the menus are on the left (and slightly thinner).
  2. The total page width is bigger by about +10%, so that the DXCC tables can use a bigger font, making them easier to read.
  3. If you are using a recent browser you will see more special effects liked rounded corners, shadows etc. while on older browsers (notably IE7 and even IE8) the design is simpler, but will load faster than previously. This is because the page is no longer loading numerous images to make it look three dimensional.
  4. I have put in some new “spinners”, particularly on the Timelines page, so that if a graph needs extra time to load, the rest of the page is displayed promptly and the graphs follow later.
  5. The QSO wizard popup (used when you click a slot) previously offered a list of suggested callsigns on that slot. The suggestions take extra time to calculate, so this step is now manually triggered only when requested. There is a link to do this.
  6. The documentation pages have been updated to refer to the new secure domain name (https://secure.clublog.org) for the benefit of developers who are using the API for realtime logging and so on. The old insecure code is still supported and will continue to be supported indefinitely.

Technical changes:

  • I’ve bumped the design of Club Log’s main template up to HTML5, based on the near-death of IE6 and the good news that more and more people are on Google Chrome, IE9 etc. From a code point of view I can get the job done more easily and get more consistent results with HTML5, although not every page validates as pure HTML5 yet.
  • I will add an HTML5 file uploader in the near future to avoid Flash, although as a fallback the existing uploader will remain available.
  • Stylesheet size is reduced by 80% (!) and no longer features IE6 hacks for PNG transparency. I don’t know what Club Log looks like in IE6 anymore, but it’s probably still usable.
  • There is now a content cache in front of Club Log. This off loads delivery of commonly-accessed files like images, javascript and stylesheets to a fast RAM-based cache. The lighttpd web server only deals with PHP most of the time, now. This also gives me the technical means to load balance Club Log across two web servers if required in future.
  • ETag content cache tags are now set on pages like DXCC charts, to increase the chance that your browser will immediately load pre-existing copies of Club Log pages from its own local cache. Some notable gains from this include the calculation of your position in the league tables, which now appears almost at the same time as the page reloads instead of a second or two later.
  • Lastly, as many of you have noticed, the upload queue is now running every minute. I will spare you the details of my adventures in streamlining this little imp!

73
Michael G7VJR

One thought on “Club Log design changes

  1. I have also added a print media stylesheet to Club Log, so that if you decide to print a page the layout and colour scheme will be printer friendly. TNX SP5APW and G5LP.