We have finally relaunched!

Mon 24 May 2010 | 21h10 GMT+1
Info: TF News search

Jippie!!! After almost a year of inactivity, TerminatorFiles is totally renewed and ready for lots more Terminator action! Welcome to our total new fan site. Its been a while since you heard from us, even if you might have kept up with the posts on our forums. Well... here it is... our full launch article, explaining what been happening and why its taken so long.

Bear with us, this is our first article in a long time, and we might feel the urge to vent our feelings, but its all fun and games over at TerminatorFiles, even more so with our total new website. So... without further a due, here are some subjects that you might find interesting.

It was July 2009 (or was it September) and we had this little idea

Having worked in the internet business for over a decade, building hundreds of websites, and now working for a well respected company that makes high-end user products for the internet, STAFFmaster Vic thought it was time to rebuild the entire TerminatorFiles.com fan site, into brand new XHTML Strict coding.

If the term XHTML Strict does not ring any bells... its a type of coding for programmers of websites, which is very strict (hence the name) when it comes to coding for any and all browsers. The old TerminatorFiles.com website was designed for Internet Explorer 5 and above... and did not even take note of other popular browsers out there (for instance FireFox, Opera, and now Google Chrome). Its based in HTML4 coding which wasn't that bad either but it did mean the contents of the fan site looked different in different browsers (or did not work at all).

Given the fact that a lot of people out there switch browsers, its in your best interest to program for all of them. We set ourselves a goal to reprogram the entire fan site into XHTML Strict, since that's the most strict coding which makes it possible for a website to be viewable in almost 99% of all browser (of course Internet Explorer, still fucks some things up, since its still not a 'standards compliant' browser).

Eight to ten months of redesigning?

The old site was build in 2003... and 6 years later, in 2009, we decided to redo it. Thats six years of very old coding, which could have been redone within the site itself... but it would be more fun to create something totally new and awesome. Which we think it is... the thing you see before you.

Of course, any web-team could have rebuild a site within one week... was it not that this is not our day-job, and we are also still with only two nutty fans. So... we were left with just a few hours at weekdays and several more hours at weekends, to redesign, reprogram, redo all the 14+ gig of data. As you can imagine... that's a lot!

Next to a total XHTML Strict renewed version, we also researched lots of tools and applications, including but not limited to: Google Custom Search, Twitter, Facebook, Ping, Feedburner, jQuery (and MooTools), JavaScript, PHP, XHTML entities... and everything had the be learned anew. It was a big learning curve, and even if people think that the new site is not that special, it IS to us, since we learned a lot of stuff which we can use in our jobs, and being ready for future developments in the internet community, like CSS3 and HTML5 (which goes back to some basics, but hell, XHTML Strict should work everywhere ;).

So... what's all new about this fan site?

It ALL looks new! We have rescaled all sections and redone the entire interface and site-structure. But if you look closer and deeper into the contents of the site, we are sorry to report that there isn't much new content to look at. But its been prepped for later inclusion.

The main update of the new site is the architecture. Its total awesome new coding, which makes it possible for us to pre-build content that can be included in all individual optimised pages. Separate page? Yup! Contrary to popular belief, this is NOT a template that has included components, but each and every page is a page on itself. That's 11.000 individual pages and NO databases. Some call us nuts (even to our faces) but we think this is the power of our website and its ranking on the internet.

What is that 'architecture' then? Well... its a way of programming a site that is pre-parced, which in lay terms means; 10 predefined blocks of content are combined and shown as one page. And i.e. 5 of those are dynamic and stretched around the entire site, which makes its updating process significantly easier, then previous version. As example, a small list of old sites, vs. the new site you are now viewing.

The example page of the (pre-)parced lines of code are from the 'News archives for the year 2000'.

	v1	v2 and v2.5	v3 (current)
Size	10 MB	80 MB	14 GB
Blocks	n.a.	8	13
Lines pre-parced	n.a.	184	104
Editable lines	n.a.	120	25
Lines parced	n.a.	782	438

Extrapolations

'Lines pre-parced' are the total lines of code that are pre-set before a page is combined into a fully parced page. As a side note, most of the pre-parced content in the old site was already related to parced content, which means i.e. a menu was already fully loaded. In each file! If a menu needed to be updated, we needed to update it in 11.000 files. In the new content, pre-parced content, now really means it IS pre-parced.
'Editable lines' are the total lines of code that had to be re-edited before a new page could be launched. In the new site this are reduced to approx. 1/5 the size.
'Lines parced' is the page you see when all blocks of content have been combined. Even with as few as 8 blocks of content to be parced... the old site final page was 782 lines of code. In the new site, we have more blocks to combine, yet the final code is only 438 lines of code. That is a reduction to almost half the size.
This is just one of the many pages within the site, of which some have been optimised with other tidbits of coding to make them even smaller. Some of our pages are almost 15% of the original size that it was on the old site.
Which means our site should be 2 to 6 times faster, which with the speed visitors want these days (let alone the search-engines parcing your site), is a biggie!

As you can imagine by now... we love to talk about our knowledge of the internet. Good for you folks that this fan-site has the perfect combination of both worlds: tech-savvy Terminator fan-boys! But we will not bore you to much with all that.

What IS new to the site?

Well... you'll have to find out for yourself ;). Just stroll along around the site to see what's new. What we CAN tell you is the fact that a lot of content is to be introduced. Some parts of the site are already prepped, like for instance a new Universe section, as well as a Collect section, which should feature Saga information and collectible reviews respectfully. More to come, which will be announced when launched.

Wow! You scrolled this far... why not check out some more!

We got this real BIG fansite and we love it to bits (and bytes). But this could never be as big as it is today, if it wasn't for all you fans that got social and follow us.

Help spread the word and build a community! Join in below, or..

“ 8-10 months of reprogramming and this is what you have to show?! This is the same content?! Where is all the new stuff? ”