[Abraham Chaffin]

[Abraham Chaffin]

[Abraham Chaffin]

[Abraham Chaffin]

They’re using a Javascript called Lightbox which can be found here:

https://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/

Follow the instructions on that site and you can have the same effect.

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

Right now we actually have 3 search engines that search the forums. More actually but these are the ones that users can use to search:

https://forums.creativecow.net/search.php
This one searches the forums and the library and is used just from the Google Toolbar / Browser Toolbar.
See info on it here:
https://newsletters.creativecow.net/newsletters/2007/09-05/index.html#tip
It supports boolean and searches – This was designed for newer users to find articles as well since many of the answers people are looking for are in the library.

https://forums.creativecow.net/forums_search.php
This one just searches the forums and uses MySQL’s fulltext boolean search function. It filters of course before the search but is full boolean support. You can use quotes + and –
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-boolean.html

https://forums.creativecow.net/forums_search_old.php
This one is a deeper search but is rather slow and sometimes even times out. If forums_search.php doesn’t get results it automatically bounces you to this one now and uses that mechanism. Quotes is supported but not plus or minus at this time.

Tips for better search results – Use the drop downs. Sort by is a key drop down to use. I personally believe in relevance searches but whatever sort will help you find what you’re looking for is up to you.

The forums_search_old.php mechanism was built when our database and searches were being run off of the same server that runs the forums and was causing some slowdowns. Now we have a dedicated MySQL server and are planning on adding another so they are load balanced. While this won’t be up to the level of Google’s ability yet =o , as was mentioned earlier, it should give us the ability to create a more sophisticated algorithm and throw more processes at the databases.

Google does love to crawl our site and it’s setup to give the crawler as much access as possible. So while I do believe the COW search engines will probably find what you’re looking for better than Google =) Feel free to Google a search like
“site:creativecow.net Final Cut Pro”

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

Great stuff –

I like the feedback and to hear from anyone who has ways to improve the mechanisms here. Many of the things that have been presented have been added from all your feedback. Like the little search field that shows on every page in the forums now was contributions of Jeremy G
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/1/855585#855585

Many things have been added to help users find relevant content to what they’re looking for. For instance the related threads on each post such as

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/988943
or
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/988898

Which under the post has related threads that are relevant to the subject. This of course is hit and miss. The mechanism simply takes the subject and tries to find other subjects that are similar but it’s a good place to check.

The COW Wiki is something we’ve had on the back burner for well over a year. It came to the front and we worked on it for awhile but many questions arose as to what direction to take it and how to get the ball rolling in the right direction.

The search mechanisms are continuously evolving and being developed to maintain speed, relevance and usability. Recently two upgrades were made to the search engine to increase performance and depth. For some people these upgrades may seem like down grades unfortunately, just like any search engine. When Google changes it’s algorithm some people pay hard while others win big. Just recently Alexa updated their functions and the COW jumped up about 3,000 positions.

The sticky posts are easily added and I’m sure will be part of this forum and maybe others very soon. It just takes someone to build the post. When it is built I’m sure it will grow with more contributions from all of you.

Contributions are greatly appreciated as more heads on a problem are always better. Feel free to contact one of us and let us know in the Feedback Forum or directly.
https://www.creativecow.net/contact_us.html

Lately we’ve been trying to maintain the sites ability to support its traffic. Our traffic continues to grow which requires more servers and upgrading our existing servers. This has been the biggest project and most time consumption has been there in the last few months. We brought in 4 new servers and a load balancer and have been working on getting the kinks worked out of them while keeping the site online. In the next couple weeks we’ll be upgrading a few other machines as well as our UPSs.

Thanks for this discussion and the part you play in making the COW a better place!

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

I like to use Dreamweaver’s swap image function executed with the javascript timeout function and an array of images. Here’s an example of that idea in a tutorial:

https://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=651FF

I’ve hacked up a version of that and placed the code below – should work –

Have fun!

<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
  <!--
  // Comma separated list of images to rotate
  var imgs = new Array('images/1.jpg','images/2.jpg','images/3.jpg','images/4.jpg','images/5.jpg');
  // delay in milliseconds between image swaps 1000 = 1 second
  var delay = 5000;
  var counter = 0;
function rotateimages(){
  if(counter == (imgs.length)){
  counter = 0;
  }
  MM_swapImage('Image1', '', imgs[counter++]);
  setTimeout('rotateimages()', delay);
  }
function preloadImgs(){
  for(var i=0;i<imgs.length;i++){
  MM_preloadImages(imgs[i]);
  }
  }
function MM_swapImgRestore() { //v3.0
  var i,x,a=document.MM_sr; for(i=0;a&&i<a.length&&(x=a[i])&&x.oSrc;i++) x.src=x.oSrc;
  }
function MM_preloadImages() { //v3.0
  var d=document; if(d.images){ if(!d.MM_p) d.MM_p=new Array();
  var i,j=d.MM_p.length,a=MM_preloadImages.arguments; for(i=0; i<a.length; i++)
  if (a[i].indexOf("#")!=0){ d.MM_p[j]=new Image; d.MM_p[j++].src=a[i];}}
  }
function MM_findObj(n, d) { //v4.01
  var p,i,x;  if(!d) d=document; if((p=n.indexOf("?"))>0&&parent.frames.length) {
  d=parent.frames[n.substring(p+1)].document; n=n.substring(0,p);}
  if(!(x=d[n])&&d.all) x=d.all[n]; for (i=0;!x&&i<d.forms.length;i++) x=d.forms[i][n];
  for(i=0;!x&&d.layers&&i<d.layers.length;i++) x=MM_findObj(n,d.layers[i].document);
  if(!x && d.getElementById) x=d.getElementById(n); return x;
  }
function MM_swapImage() { //v3.0
  var i,j=0,x,a=MM_swapImage.arguments; document.MM_sr=new Array; for(i=0;i<(a.length-2);i+=3)
  if ((x=MM_findObj(a[i]))!=null){document.MM_sr[j++]=x; if(!x.oSrc) x.oSrc=x.src; x.src=a[i+2];}
  }
//-->
  </script>
</head>
<body onload="preloadImgs();rotateimages();">
<img src="images/initialimage.jpg" name="Image1" width="125" height="125" border="0" id="Image1" />
</body>

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

You should be able to order by host name-
All Cookies from host .creativecow.net are from us.

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

Kurt Murphy has some a great multi-part tutorial series on creating a news open, maybe that will be part of what you’re looking for. Check them out here:

https://library.creativecow.net/tutorials/broadcastdesign#murphy_kurt

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

Looks very nice – clean, simple, stylish.

Just double check it with javascript / flash turned off for that last 1%.

Abraham