Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

To Frame, or not to Frame: I have a three choices here. I can either set up a three (maybe even 4 or 5) frame panel for the forum and make the forum look very much like Outlook Express, or I can emulate the whole thing with tables, or I can stick to the single pages for each part of the forum as it is now.

Frames will allow me to stuff just about everything on one convenient page and allow the setup of the forum to have a familiar e-mail-program type of appearance. I currently don’t have any frames anywhere on my site. When I first put up my site in 1997, frames were out of the question as many browsers back then didn’t handle them properly. But here it is 7 years later, and few browsers today have a problem with them.

Tables can be made to look almost the same as frames. But they are more complicated to implement and don’t change over as nicely since the whole page must be refreshed for any little change. XHTML can be used instead of tables (I still use a bit of it in my Blog) but it has the same many of the same problems as tables.

The single pages might still be the answer, since it would be the format that is more familiar to most online Forum users. In order to allow the Forum to be used by myself or those wanting an e-mail-like interface, I will be setting up RSS feeds for the Forum and each main category in the Forum. Then any News Aggregator can keep up to new posts in the Forum. Unlike this Blog, for which I have to manually run a program to update the feed, I am sure I can get the Forum to update the feed automatically whenever a message is posted. This would be possible because the pages of the Forum are generated at runtime using ASP on the server.

This morning, I took the car in for a checkup. During the 20 minute walk back from the shop, I had the luxury of time to think about the Forum improvements I want to make. (Other good times for thinking about Behold include: in the shower in the morning, when waiting in line anywhere, and at 4 in the morning if I can’t sleep.)

It’s really funny how remarkable ideas just pop into your mind unexpectedly. I had been working on the main Forum page, flattening it out to get rid of the threads. I had got to a point, but there were still many loose ends, e.g. producing multiple pages and the ability to navigate between them. Then I realized that the Search Results page in BroadBoard probably is flat and can be used as a model. In fact, maybe I can generalize the Search Results page and use it as a model, incorporating the style changes I developed in the Main form.

When I got home, I verified that I was correct in my thoughts (which is definitely not always the case) and I printed out the search.asp and main.asp page, as well as screenshots of the Search Results and Main pages in order to compare them. I find this sort of work is best done on hardcopy away from the computer.

Before I get back to working on Behold again, I really feel I’ve got to make those improvements to my Forum like I mentioned on June 24. As I said, I was partially through this. If I can bear down on it, I should be able to get what I want done to it in a couple of weeks.

I have several times in the past researched the various forum software that is out there. There are a lot of different packages, many that are freeware. But, like genealogy programs, they all very much the same with a main view that shows only the topics of each thread. I don’t like this and have never liked this. All the individual messages on that topic are hidden one level deep. It is a lot of work to try to scan through topic by topic to see what the latest messages are. I’m surprised this format has dominated.

Instead, I like the sequential date and time ordered e-mail-like or newsreader-like layout. Everyone is familiar with it. And news aggregators are using it too.

That is one thing I like about BroadBoard. It has all the basic features I want in a forum without fluffy features like smilies/icons/ratings of users. It is written in ASP (Active Server Pages), and I can customize it myself. ASP is a scripting language that runs on Microsoft Internet Servers and is what my host allows. ASP uses Visual-Basic-like commands and SQL (Structured Query Language) to interact with a database (BroadBoard uses Microsoft Access) and outputs HTML (web pages). To develop it on my own machine, I had to install Personal Web Server, so that the ASP scripts could be executed. All of this is quite an infrastucture unto itself and I often shake my head at the complexity Microsoft has made for programmers. And this is being extended to an even greater level of complexity (albeit more powerful) with all the .NET stuff, including ASP.NET. But .NET isn’t quite ready for prime time, and won’t be until the next Microsoft Operating System (after Windows XP) is in use, as then .NET will be supported natively in the OS. How about 2007 as a guess?