About the EVE-Central.com Interface
I get the occasional question about someone’s browser being seemingly stuck in “IGB” mode. Usually, its not actually stuck, the user was simply expecting some more graphical pizzaz out of EVE-Central.com.
So, why is the interface so bland? Maintainability is the primary reason. The EVE-Online in game browser is a rather buggy, slow, and temperamental beast. CSS support is worse than Netscape 4, and performance is akin to a Pentium 66 rendering a huge table - it just can’t do it without a week long crunch. Hence all of the market information is limited (only 10 entries or so per table, etc) and no stylesheets or other fun stuff is used.
So why is the main, non-IGB interface so bland too? Primarily for not having to maintain two sets of templates and remembering to update both to fix something or enhance something.
Is it me being somewhat lazy? Yes, of course :). I’ve had some contributions for new designs, which come in all sorts of nice colors and DIVs and Javascript - but didn’t really enhance the datamining aspects of EVEC.
We’ll just call the look the Google 1.0 look and work on adding newer features.
Seeing that this is probably as good a spot as any to ask
The EVE-Central site talks about database dumps, which are wonderful in their own way. But!
Have you considered making it possible to query the DB for a specific item, and get back the answers in a very abbreviated form? I’m thinking of ways to keep a killboard accurate with respect pricing, and doing it all by hand isn’t something I envision enjoying.
To stop server abuse, you could even require a token on the query side, and ban tokens that query too often. Thinking something like:
Query: mytoken=AB423D&itemid=8089&data=averagebuy
Answer: 129217
An extended full dump might just say mytoken & itemid=0.
How badly would something like this hurt your bandwidth?
Comment by Duncan — May 9, 2007 @ 2:49 am
If this is for EVE-Central where info about the market is given for the game EVE Online, then I have a question, if not, please disreguard this.
My Question is this. When goto search the regions for particular market goods, it doesnt select. I highlight the regions but it says that no regions are selected. I have tried searching, but the only ways that insure a result, are if I selct Empire regions or all regions. Please help. I would appreciate an e-mail but will try to come back to the site. Thanks for the time invested.
Take Care and God Bless,
Ian
Comment by Ian — August 11, 2007 @ 4:22 pm