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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Tutorials => Topic started by: TheMud on May 29, 2012, 12:03:52 AM

Title: Building A Website
Post by: TheMud on May 29, 2012, 12:03:52 AM
Ok. Maybe this is a stupod question. But if you dont ask you'll never know :-)

Is it possible to build complete websites with the Amiga ? My A-4000 is bored and I want to let it work a little again. Could I make a site like this I have made a complete game site before. But on my make with Dreamweaver - Thats easy... :-/ But want to program a complete site now.

Is there flash support for Amiga ? Or something that lets flash work ?
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: Piru on May 29, 2012, 12:24:23 AM
You can create websites with pen and paper, or any text editor.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: CritAnime on May 29, 2012, 12:34:45 AM
You can create a site using just a basic text editor and some knowledge of html and such. Many people ditch dreamweaver in favour of this method. Simply save any fine as .html .php or what ever you want.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: Kesa on May 29, 2012, 12:55:14 AM
Quote from: Piru;694500
You can create websites with pen and paper, or any text editor.

(http://comps.canstockphoto.com/can-stock-photo_csp8956802.jpg)
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: nyteschayde on May 29, 2012, 12:55:17 AM
Creating the site with the Amiga is not a problem. Viewing it, however, may be. It is possible to make a site that looks fairly decent that is viewable on the Amiga as well as other places but it must be done using older website building techniques (ala without much or any JavaScript and little to no CSS).

That, of course, really limits modern web design in a big way. I just say this because it's what I do for a living. If you have a powerful enough Amiga, you can run things like NetSurf which will get you half way there with CSS support, but that browser has some serious issues in and of itself.

So short answer is yes. Long answer is above.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: Kesa on May 29, 2012, 12:57:57 AM
Good point. Maybe you should consult with Karlos. I think he did a version of this website designed to be used by classic miggies.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: commodorejohn on May 29, 2012, 01:01:27 AM
As they say, testing's going to be a bigger problem than development. (You shouldn't do web development with layout tools anyway, it encourages bloat and layout-centric design. But then, I'm kind of a cranky old man when it comes to web design anyway.) A solid programmer's text editor and FTP client will do perfectly fine for authoring and uploading.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: TheMud on May 29, 2012, 01:21:23 AM
Quote from: Kesa;694503
(http://comps.canstockphoto.com/can-stock-photo_csp8956802.jpg)


That site you just posted there... Well - gave me the best idea ever.

Thanx a lot sir :-D
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: Kesa on May 29, 2012, 01:59:18 AM
My intention was to mock Piru but i'm glad to have helped you out.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: wiser3 on May 29, 2012, 04:19:59 AM
I'm a professional web master. Here's a site i did that works on Amiga's and was done on an Amiga 1200. It was quite a few years ago. http://www.trep4.com/amicheats/

It was done entirely in html using Ced. The ability to do search and replace across all the files at once was a major sanity saver in updating the site.

There's no reason it couldn't be done again on an A1200 with Ced. However, i'd do it with php pulling the content from a mySQL database.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: orb85750 on May 29, 2012, 05:02:00 AM
Quote from: CritAnime;694501
You can create a site using just a basic text editor and some knowledge of html and such. Many people ditch dreamweaver in favour of this method. Simply save any fine as .html .php or what ever you want.


C'mon.  Nobody in their right mind is going to ditch Dreamweaver to create websites strictly with a text editor, unless they have masochistic tendencies *and* far too much free time on their hands.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: commodorejohn on May 29, 2012, 05:24:02 AM
Quote from: orb85750;694525
C'mon.  Nobody in their right mind is going to ditch Dreamweaver to create websites strictly with a text editor, unless they have masochistic tendencies *and* far too much free time on their hands.
My site (http://www.commodorejohn.com) was made in probably 40 hours in Programmer's Notepad with QuickPHP for script testing and different versions of Firefox for CSS testing, and that's counting the time I spent on W3Schools learning CSS. I'll lay a six-pack on the line that says that it comes in lighter than an equivalent site built in any layout tool you care to name, and another if it should, as I suspect, also be more broadly compatible.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: saimon69 on May 29, 2012, 05:57:44 AM
Quote from: orb85750;694525
C'mon.  Nobody in their right mind is going to ditch Dreamweaver to create websites strictly with a text editor, unless they have masochistic tendencies *and* far too much free time on their hands.

Well, i am almost exclusively using notepad++ and filezilla (with an help from phtoshop/fireworks for image slicing) with check/retouch in firefox/firebug since am doing PHP development, and follow a table-less approach...

Saimon69
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: nyteschayde on May 29, 2012, 07:02:17 AM
I work with a team of UI Engineers for Netflix and not one of us would be caught dead using a tool like Dreamweaver. Lol, WYSIWYG editors are really for those people who are at the beginning to low intermediate level of web development experience.

I usually use something like Intype or TextMate or IntelliJ if I have to integrate with Java. But the CSS, HTML and JavaScript needs no command line completion by any UX engineer I've met in my career path in the last 3-5 years or so.

Quote from: orb85750;694525
C'mon.  Nobody in their right mind is going to ditch Dreamweaver to create websites strictly with a text editor, unless they have masochistic tendencies *and* far too much free time on their hands.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: nyteschayde on May 29, 2012, 07:07:41 AM
Yeah, nobody really uses tables if they can help it these days. Thats the main reason I have so much trouble even contemplating writing a site that's Amiga-pretty. That and not being able to use CSS.

Quote from: saimon69;694528
Well, i am almost exclusively using notepad++ and filezilla (with an help from phtoshop/fireworks for image slicing) with check/retouch in firefox/firebug since am doing PHP development, and follow a table-less approach...

Saimon69
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: Gulliver on May 29, 2012, 07:16:09 AM
Well, if you want to use an Amiga you could also use some of the Amiga web page creation programs such as Webplug, Pagemonster, Metalweb, etc

On the other hand, I remember back in 1995 we had a client that wanted to build his big company website. At that point in time, web designers were non existant marketwise in my country. So we hired a graphic designer who created the website just as a set of images. I remember spending lot of time reducing their colors just to cope with the low bandwith Internet had those days, and adding the basic html tags with a text editor to build the actual GIF based website :D
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: nyteschayde on May 29, 2012, 07:22:15 AM
Heavy use of tables and imagery are how old sites were made pretty. I remember doing them well.

Quote from: Gulliver;694535
Well, if you want to use an Amiga you could also use some of the Amiga web page creation programs such as Webplug, Pagemonster, Metalweb, etc

On the other hand, I remember back in 1995 we had a client that wanted to build his big company website. At that point in time, web designers were non existant marketwise in my country. So we hired a graphic designer who created the website just as a set of images. I remember spending lot of time reducing their colors just to cope with the low bandwith Internet had those days, and adding the basic html tags with a text editor to build the actual GIF based website :D
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: Amiten on May 29, 2012, 01:37:11 PM
Hi,

Maybe you found this usefull.

http://de4.aminet.net/comm/www/MetalWEB401.readme

http://www.digitalproducer.com/pages/pagemonster_review.htm

http://encanta.avalonsoftware.org/ainfo/18/enlared1.php

http://aminet.net/package/comm/www/webPlugv145

I working on a compatible 3.X site at the moment i use frontpage to do.

cheers.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: persia on May 29, 2012, 02:06:59 PM
But the website would be far more useful if you used html and put it on the net.

Quote from: Piru;694500
You can create websites with pen and paper, or any text editor.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: persia on May 29, 2012, 02:11:49 PM
I had to put something up on a site quickly the other day and used a table, made me cringe.  If anyone asks me, it's one of my student assistants who did it. ;)

Quote from: nyteschayde;694533
Yeah, nobody really uses tables if they can help it these days. Thats the main reason I have so much trouble even contemplating writing a site that's Amiga-pretty. That and not being able to use CSS.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: commodorejohn on May 29, 2012, 03:59:12 PM
It amuses me how modern web designers react to tables like vampires to crucifixes :D
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: vox on May 31, 2012, 01:18:32 AM
Quote from: TheMud;694499
Ok. Maybe this is a stupod question. But if you dont ask you'll never know :-)

Is it possible to build complete websites with the Amiga ? My A-4000 is bored and I want to let it work a little again. Could I make a site like this I have made a complete game site before. But on my make with Dreamweaver - Thats easy... :-/ But want to program a complete site now.

Is there flash support for Amiga ? Or something that lets flash work ?


For AmigaOS 3.x only graphic editor is old MetalWeb
http://aminet.net/search?name=MetalWeb
and some small tools
http://magliery.com/HTMLEditors/amigalist.html

If you use OS4 there is Amaya for it
http://os4depot.net/index.php?function=showfile&file=network/misc/amaya.lha

If you really know HTML you can use text editors. See old discussion here
http://www.amiga.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-552.html
http://www.amigans.net/modules/xforum/viewtopic.php?topic_id=5206&forum=3&post_id=69586

Anyway, no Java, no Flash, no fanciness
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: nyteschayde on May 31, 2012, 06:10:08 AM
Quote from: commodorejohn;694605
It amuses me how modern web designers react to tables like vampires to crucifixes :D

Using tables takes extra typing, and provides much less flexibility in CSS; primarily because those elements (THEAD, TBODY, TR, TD) are less susceptible to styling.

The same or a more flexible layout can be had with a couple of DIVs or SPANs in combination with CSS. Even using display: table|table-cell on non table elements can be more flexible and enjoyable than coding up a bunch of behemoth table elements.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: zylesea on May 31, 2012, 11:31:23 AM
Quote from: TheMud;694499
Ok. Maybe this is a stupod question. But if you dont ask you'll never know :-)

Is it possible to build complete websites with the Amiga ? My A-4000 is bored and I want to let it work a little again. Could I make a site like this I have made a complete game site before. But on my make with Dreamweaver - Thats easy... :-/ But want to program a complete site now.

Is there flash support for Amiga ? Or something that lets flash work ?


You can do much web stuff on Amiga. A few things don't work (flash, java applets) and there are no up to date WYSIWYG editors, but other fine tools. I actually like CubicIDE/webworld. I do all my stuff with that. It's enough for my needs (see e. g. http://www.via-altera.de).
I don't do complex things though, just plain html/css (plus a very little php).
I like creating pages with an editor but I also tested big frameworks like Joomla (backend is nicely usable with OWB). Eventually I found them too heavy and complex for my basic needs, hence I stick with rather easy and hand coded html/css as long as I don't need a big site.
Without a browser that is CSS capable it is rather a PITA today. A few years ago (before Sputnik and OWB) I did all my things table based - works, but is nowhere flexible and reproducible as CSS is.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: takemehomegrandma on May 31, 2012, 11:49:47 AM
Quote from: commodorejohn;694605
It amuses me how modern web designers react to tables like vampires to crucifixes :D


For *very* good reasons...
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: commodorejohn on May 31, 2012, 03:30:05 PM
Quote from: nyteschayde;694756
Using tables takes extra typing, and provides much less flexibility in CSS; primarily because those elements (THEAD, TBODY, TR, TD) are less susceptible to styling.

The same or a more flexible layout can be had with a couple of DIVs or SPANs in combination with CSS. Even using display: table|table-cell on non table elements can be more flexible and enjoyable than coding up a bunch of behemoth table elements.
That's a fair point from a "how to approach a new design" perspective, but I still don't quite get the horror with which tables in existing sites are reacted to...
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: Karlos on May 31, 2012, 09:43:21 PM
Quote from: commodorejohn;694780
That's a fair point from a "how to approach a new design" perspective, but I still don't quite get the horror with which tables in existing sites are reacted to...

That's perhaps because you aren't visually impaired. Proper site design, in which the logical structure of the document comes first and layout is achieved purely via CSS produces pages that are far more accessible to Braille output devices and other non-visual browsers.

I've made use of tables for layout in the past for personal projects, but never for any sort of public facing site, except when rendering data which are by their very nature, tabular.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: commodorejohn on May 31, 2012, 09:52:09 PM
Quote from: Karlos;694812
That's perhaps because you aren't visually impaired. Proper site design, in which the logical structure of the document comes first and layout is achieved purely via CSS produces pages that are far more accessible to Braille output devices and other non-visual browsers.
Really? I'd have thought that tables, properly applied (and by "properly applied" I mean "used to organize tables of information, and not as a poor man's layout tool,") would if anything be an aid to specialty readers...
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: Karlos on May 31, 2012, 09:57:09 PM
Quote from: commodorejohn;694814
Really? I'd have thought that tables, properly applied, would if anything be an aid to specialty readers...


Historically, the complete opposite tends to be the case, though newer screen readers have gotten rather better at parsing badly-formatted stuff. Regardless of which, a clean, well structured HTML document is always going to be far more accessible than a soup of nested tables.

Other reasons for avoiding table based layouts, especially nested tables, are the impact they have on page render speed. More often than not, they tend to require repeated recalculation of the page or complete retrieval of the page markup before the page can be laid out.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: djrikki on May 31, 2012, 11:03:34 PM
If I wanted to develop a website using Amiga, and particularly AmigaOS4+ I'd use AAMP with PhpMyAdmin installed, Codebench (looking forward to the HTML/CSS/PHP/FTP functionality!) and AmiFTP.

Suppose MorphOS users can use Scribble and an FTP client, not sure an AMP stack is available yet for MorphOS - feel free to correct me as my knowledge of MorphOS is next to non-existent.

Ofc lets not forget you could use a CMS-instead e.g. Drupal, WordPress and Joomla to name, but a few.  Drupal and WordPress are great in both a local install (yes I've tried them) and remote side - just a little on the slow side- especially WordPress.

Personally, I must admit I do use Dreamweaver, however I completely ignore the WYSIWYG side of it - I use a separate commercial product instead for building CSS.  Dreamweaver is useful for a) syntax highlighting and b) the help-as-you-type functionality.  From time-to-time I like to fallback to TextWrangler and Cyberduck as they are no-where near as resource-heavy.

RE: Table usage.  Another reason to avoid tables is for SEO reasons, Google in particular.

http://www.lakemarketingandevents.co.uk
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: Karlos on May 31, 2012, 11:44:43 PM
Quote from: Kesa;694505
Good point. Maybe you should consult with Karlos. I think he did a version of this website designed to be used by classic miggies.

Well, I'm more of a web application developer and server-side / backend at that. The "site" you are referring to is a proxy application that simply sits between your oldschool amiga browser and this site. There's very little HTML involved, 99% of what it does is regular expression text processing...

Anyway, to reiterate, a text editor and some basic grasp of HTML is all you need to get started making web pages.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: scuzzb494 on May 31, 2012, 11:45:11 PM
This page from my website was created totally on the Amiga...

http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/a_moa_01.htm

The image was captured on the Amiga using a screen grabber application, from DPaint V. And then converted from IFF to PNG using PPaint 6.4 The page edited using CED and uploaded using mFTP
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: _ThEcRoW on June 01, 2012, 12:29:05 AM
The thing i hate the most on webpages are the abuse of javascript, that is the tendency from years till now. I have seen pages that had an insanely amount of library and script calls, only to show an image or piece of text. Javascript is one thing that is needed too drop, for better browsing and security.

@commodorejohn

Checked your page and liked the simple, but completely functional layout. I liked it!
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: commodorejohn on June 01, 2012, 12:50:58 AM
Quote from: _ThEcRoW;694834
The thing i hate the most on webpages are the abuse of javascript, that is the tendency from years till now. I have seen pages that had an insanely amount of library and script calls, only to show an image or piece of text. Javascript is one thing that is needed too drop, for better browsing and security.
Ugh, yes. Unfortunately I don't think it's possible to drop it completely, as there are some legitimate uses for in-browser scripting, but it's so widely and horribly abused that the only way I can browse the web without wanting to pull my hair out is to use NoScript and unblock only the sites where I have no choice but to allow it...

Quote
@commodorejohn

Checked your page and liked the simple, but completely functional layout. I liked it!
Thanks :) I tried to come up with something minimalist, my previous attempt was a bit of a mess. I figured, if it renders usably in Links, it's probably a passable design...
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: takemehomegrandma on June 01, 2012, 06:48:44 AM
Quote from: commodorejohn;694814
Really? I'd have thought that tables, properly applied (and by "properly applied" I mean "used to organize tables of information, and not as a poor man's layout tool,") would if anything be an aid to specialty readers...


Listen to Karlos. There are so many benefits from keeping the content separated from the layout/graphical design, you do that in CSS. Tables are not evil per se, they are great at what they are meant for — presenting a set of data in the shape of a table with columns and rows. But using tables for layout and graphical design in a web page is as kosher as using rolled up tin-foil as electric cabling when building a new house, or using glued together straws from McDonalds as your plumbing. Even if it might work, you simply don't do that, even the thought is insane, and has been so for a *veeery* long time now...
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: takemehomegrandma on June 01, 2012, 07:49:14 AM
Quote from: Karlos;694830
Anyway, to reiterate, a text editor and some basic grasp of HTML is all you need to get started making web pages.


...and when your site validates all-green here (preferably as XHTML 1.0 Strict if possible, for best accessibility)...

http://validator.w3.org/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

...you have come from start to finish! :)

A good source for reference info:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/css3/default.asp
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: jsixis on June 01, 2012, 01:59:20 PM
Quote from: Karlos;694815
Historically, the complete opposite tends to be the case, though newer screen readers have gotten rather better at parsing badly-formatted stuff. Regardless of which, a clean, well structured HTML document is always going to be far more accessible than a soup of nested tables.

Other reasons for avoiding table based layouts, especially nested tables, are the impact they have on page render speed. More often than not, they tend to require repeated recalculation of the page or complete retrieval of the page markup before the page can be laid out.



 BS I run a website and after the index page it is all tables and loads faster then most video cards can draw it. http://www.cowtownmusic.com/musicians.html
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: Karlos on June 01, 2012, 02:13:02 PM
Quote from: jsixis;694860
BS I run a website and after the index page it is all tables and loads faster then most video cards can draw it. http://www.cowtownmusic.com/musicians.html


The only reason your page is fast is because you are using tables for what they were intended - displaying tabular data. There's not much "tables for layout" evident in your HTML markup.

Speaking of which, you might want to tidy that up a bit, it's pretty bad.

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cowtownmusic.com%2Fmusicians.html
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: Templario on June 01, 2012, 03:03:51 PM
To handle pictures as change the size, format, visual effects as Grey scale, sharpen, rotate, etc., and runs on Amiga 68k with graphic card is available AHIW 1.02 here:
http://www.morguesoft.eu/Paginas/Downloads.htm

And soon with new features too as watermark or put text in your pictures for example the url of your site.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: Rebel-CD32 on June 02, 2012, 02:04:48 AM
I've made a bunch of web pages on my Amiga over the years, and even now if I were to make a new one I'd still use WebPlug and IBrowse to create and test it because I like my sites to be compatible for other Amiga users too.

I used to own and drive a 1988 Holden Camira and found other guys online who drove them and we started a bit of a club, and from there I made a website with information and support for other owners of these old bombs. I gave up on the site several years ago after I rolled my Camira, so the site was left unmaintained and eventually disappeared. I found one of my backups of the site and uploaded it for you to see. I'll also take a screenshot of the site in IBrowse and Chrome to show how they look beside each other.

http://home.exetel.com.au/amiga/CamiraOrg/

I used tables and frames, and learned everything I know about HTML from CU Amiga magazine tutorials and reading through other sites source code.

Here's the screenshot from my A1200:

(http://www.amiga.org/gallery/images/2061/1_CamiraOrg.png)
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: koaftder on June 03, 2012, 08:00:42 AM
Quote from: takemehomegrandma;694845
Listen to Karlos. There are so many benefits from keeping the content separated from the layout/graphical design, you do that in CSS. Tables are not evil per se, they are great at what they are meant for — presenting a set of data in the shape of a table with columns and rows. But using tables for layout and graphical design in a web page is as kosher as using rolled up tin-foil as electric cabling when building a new house, or using glued together straws from McDonalds as your plumbing. Even if it might work, you simply don't do that, even the thought is insane, and has been so for a *veeery* long time now...


Got to admit that doing effective design with CSS has a higher learning curve than just plain old HTML. It's pretty often that people just getting their feet wet have no idea where to start and when they try to layout elements they wind up with wildly bizarre stuff on the screen. DIVs in weird places, overlapping, bizarre flow problems, etc. Bad CSS layouts have a tendency to work right on one class of browsers and look screwed up on others. Folks run into these frustrations early on and often simply dismiss it all as overly complicated. Then they go back to spending tens of hours creating unmaintainable, rats nest table based abominations that look like something from the late 90's.

Same thing on the Javascript side of the fence. They have no idea where to start so they plod on slogging through tutorials, which are usually written by idiots and morons, trying to do animations, UI stuff and Javascript from scratch, and it never works right. They then conclude that JS is an abomination, unnecessarily complex and go back to either straight up static design, or trying to crank out rats nests of table crap with 5,000 line PHP cluster fscks.

They don't know how to do REST stuff with JSON, make use of JQuery, or start off with one of the 20 billion CSS templates laying around.
Title: Re: Building A Website
Post by: jsixis on June 16, 2012, 01:09:20 AM
http://www.cowtownmusic.com is 100% built by an amiga, pretty dated as I did it 12 years ago.