Knox is celebrating a birthday and the Punk Concert Database is turning three. Just in time for the jubilee of the hardest-working event collector under riveted melting sun, the only event database a real punk will ever need reaches its third version. There have been quite a few changes on the surface, as the entire design has been revamped. Even under the hood, some updates have been made, although the average surfer will hardly notice. This is intentional; the Punk Concert Database should not be overwhelmed with thousands of unnecessary features. What matters is finding the right place for the party in the evening, nothing more, nothing less.
Nevertheless, there are more options than one might initially suspect. For instance, since V2, users can rate and comment on concert venues to highlight the advantages or disadvantages of individual organizers. The most visible improvement in the latest version is the preview feature. In the brief overview of search results, there is now a magnifying glass that allows a preview of the entry to be displayed. This means you don’t have to painstakingly open a new page just to take a quick look.
A not entirely complete list of changes:
- The entire design has been redesigned.
- The code set has been switched to UTF-8.
- All design tables have been replaced with layers.
- All input fields have been enlarged, as they were often relatively narrow in the forms.
- A larger, more readable font is now used.
- A stylish favicon has been added.
- The search mask has been equipped with a dropdown box for advanced search to make the search clearer.
- Comments on the organizers are now hidden behind a collapsible box.
- Ajax preview for events / organizers. This means that the entire search result does not have to be reloaded every time when you "just need" more information about a result.
- The browser title now always shows where you are (maximum width of 80 characters)
- In the "group" section, words longer than 30 characters are separated by a space, as Knox has often entered eternally long lists without spaces, which broke the display.
- All email addresses have been reworked to be spam-safe. However, this means they can no longer be clicked directly. This should be acceptable for the protection of the address holders.
- Javascript codes have been compressed by about 50%, which should result in significantly faster loading times.
- A few smaller bug fixes
FAQ
In the results overview, sorting by group does not seem to be sorted correctly.
This is because sometimes a BBCode tag is used as the first character, which is not displayed as a formatting character. Avoiding this would be very resource- and memory-intensive, as all data would have to be read first (I have not found a way to perform a Regex Replace in a MySQL Select), which I believe is not really worth it for this purpose. Therefore, this bug remains intentionally in place.
The location is not sorted correctly.
Yes, the location is sorted correctly, but by the place name and not the postal code. It is still not always the case that the postal code is provided, as this is not a mandatory field. Perhaps in the future, the postal code could be defined as a mandatory field, which would then allow sorting by postal code.
The magnifying glass does not appear in the search results for a long time.
This is an intentionally built feature. Due to the amount of data, the search results sometimes take a long time to load. The preview with the magnifying glass loads new data into the page, which of course is not possible as long as the actual page has not yet been unloaded. Therefore, the magnifying glass only appears when the results page is fully loaded.
I have integrated the Punk Concert Database into my homepage, but now it doesn't match the design at all.
Basically, I can't imagine that the old design really fit into any homepage. For this reason, there has been the option to pull all data for your own homepage via feed for quite some time. How this works is explained in detail in the help. For questions or problems, the Punk Concert Forum is available.
I have a completely different question.
Please click here.
Nevertheless, there are more options than one might initially suspect. For instance, since V2, users can rate and comment on concert venues to highlight the advantages or disadvantages of individual organizers. The most visible improvement in the latest version is the preview feature. In the brief overview of search results, there is now a magnifying glass that allows a preview of the entry to be displayed. This means you don’t have to painstakingly open a new page just to take a quick look.
A not entirely complete list of changes:
- The entire design has been redesigned.
- The code set has been switched to UTF-8.
- All design tables have been replaced with layers.
- All input fields have been enlarged, as they were often relatively narrow in the forms.
- A larger, more readable font is now used.
- A stylish favicon has been added.
- The search mask has been equipped with a dropdown box for advanced search to make the search clearer.
- Comments on the organizers are now hidden behind a collapsible box.
- Ajax preview for events / organizers. This means that the entire search result does not have to be reloaded every time when you "just need" more information about a result.
- The browser title now always shows where you are (maximum width of 80 characters)
- In the "group" section, words longer than 30 characters are separated by a space, as Knox has often entered eternally long lists without spaces, which broke the display.
- All email addresses have been reworked to be spam-safe. However, this means they can no longer be clicked directly. This should be acceptable for the protection of the address holders.
- Javascript codes have been compressed by about 50%, which should result in significantly faster loading times.
- A few smaller bug fixes
FAQ
In the results overview, sorting by group does not seem to be sorted correctly.
This is because sometimes a BBCode tag is used as the first character, which is not displayed as a formatting character. Avoiding this would be very resource- and memory-intensive, as all data would have to be read first (I have not found a way to perform a Regex Replace in a MySQL Select), which I believe is not really worth it for this purpose. Therefore, this bug remains intentionally in place.
The location is not sorted correctly.
Yes, the location is sorted correctly, but by the place name and not the postal code. It is still not always the case that the postal code is provided, as this is not a mandatory field. Perhaps in the future, the postal code could be defined as a mandatory field, which would then allow sorting by postal code.
The magnifying glass does not appear in the search results for a long time.
This is an intentionally built feature. Due to the amount of data, the search results sometimes take a long time to load. The preview with the magnifying glass loads new data into the page, which of course is not possible as long as the actual page has not yet been unloaded. Therefore, the magnifying glass only appears when the results page is fully loaded.
I have integrated the Punk Concert Database into my homepage, but now it doesn't match the design at all.
Basically, I can't imagine that the old design really fit into any homepage. For this reason, there has been the option to pull all data for your own homepage via feed for quite some time. How this works is explained in detail in the help. For questions or problems, the Punk Concert Forum is available.
I have a completely different question.
Please click here.
