Technical Information

Content:

Redesign | Browsers | Sound Streaming | Cookies | Software

The Redesign

In December 2003, the Disco Galaxy website was undergoing an extensive redesign and some people might ask: Why did you do that? It looked better the way it was before! This section should clarify that topic a little bit. If we were simple-minded, we would say Use Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows or shut up. Then we were going to repeat the same mistakes done by web designers for the last 10 years.

A look back

In the past, the look of a site was determined by graphic designers. The approach was to develop a site, that looks mostly identical in all browsers. A lot of work was done to consider the capabilities of different browsers and find individual solutions for them.

The future

From now on, the visitor (namely you!) will decide about the exact look of the site. This gives you much more freedom, but also means more responsibility cause choosing a browser or device has major effect on appearance. It's like playing a record on different speakers: the sound colors will change, but the music stays the same.

The new approach

When you visit our website, what you want to get is information. Anyway, this is what we believe. You want to get information about our artists, our latest releases (including sound files), the next events and so on. Therefore information is the primary design goal. We want to deliver you that information wherever you are and whatever device you use to visit our site. So e.g. if you're sitting in a beach cafe, browsing our site with a pocket pc, you'll get what you want.

Using this example, it comes clear that the often used Best viewed with Internet Explorer on 1024x786 will not do it. What we really need is an approach that shows the best presentation each device (or browser) can deliver. And some browsers are capable of displaying more stylish features than others.

Our way to reach the goal is to follow the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is an accepted independent organisation for defining web standards. The buzzwords important in our context are XHTML and CSS.

In conclusion: The site will look different in different browsers. This ist not incompetence but intension! If you don't like the look your browser will give you, it's why your browser lacks of displaying some elements correctly. Maybe try to use another one. We focus on information, not flying toasters.

Don't get us wrong: This is not another annoying Best viewed with Netscape campaign, but a Best viewed with a good browser initiative, where good means standards-compliant.

Browsers in the Wild

When doing the website redesign and testing it, we got in contact with a number of browsers commonly used by you people out there. What you'll find below is a summarisation of our experiences and a personal browser hit list. Information in this section was collected at the time of writing (December 2003) and may be outdated sooner or later.

Please forgive us that we use Linux as representative for other Unix-like operating systems like FreeBSD, Solaris, BeOS.

Mozilla

Homepage: http://www.mozilla.org

Available for Windows, MacOS X, Linux and more.

This is definitely the reference and a must-have for all web developers and open-minded people. It has the best support for today's modern web techniques and the lowest number of display bugs. If a site is not shown correctly in Mozilla, you can be sure that the cause does NOT lie within the domain of Mozilla. Many people complain about Mozilla being slower than other browsers. This is just half of the truth: On one side, Mozilla uses a different display method, on the other, Mozilla is capable of doing much more things than its competitors. And, it does a lot of security checks that keep your system clean.

Opera

Homepage: http://www.opera.com

Available for Windows, Linux and more.

Opera is a good and very fast browser with a lot of functionality. Also being very standards-compliant, it occupies a sure 2nd place after Mozilla, which is (in our opinion) more bug-free. Opera features a lot of superb configuration options, giving the user great flexibilty to customize it. A number of features are also very attractive for web developers (e.g. small screen view for simulating pocket pcs). Opera is not free, so you either have to buy it or live with being served banners, eating up valuable screen space.

Safari

Homepage: http://www.apple.com/safari

Available for MacOS X.
Safari ist the newest of all browsers developed by Apple for MacOS X exclusively. It is based on the open source component KHTML of the KDE project, including some improvements. Although being on the market for a short period of time only, Safari is quite fast, has a good compliance to the W3C standards and looks very nice. But it must also be stated that it is far away from being perfect and even far away from Mozilla.

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Windows-Version

Homepage: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie

Most people are using it on Windows, but there's one thing you should know: there are web browsers and there is Microsoft Internet Explorer. We are not talking about the serious security issues, they are discussed in the daily press. We are talking about the endless design flaws and CSS bugs, which caused us (and surely many more web developers) nights without sleep. Freaks call it Internet Exploder, they are right - believe us. Even worse, the need to stay compatible with this botch, prevents the application of modern web techniques. Some of them are necessary to give access to people with disabilities. When testing, our site worked well in all available browsers with one exception: Microsoft Internet Explorer was the only one, we had to support by including some special correction stylesheets. We seriously thought about billing Mr. Gates for that.

Macintosh-Version

Homepage: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/ie

Although owning the same name, Internet Explorer on Mac is a completely different product than on Windows. Different menus, different buttons and different rendering engine. But, and that's the point, it's much better than its Windows pendant. For a long time, Internet Explorer Mac was the best browser on the market - since Microsoft dropped active development a few years ago. These days, it has no chance compared to Mozilla, Opera and Safari anymore. We are trying to support it, but cause of some serious CSS bugs and decreasing number of users, our efforts won't be that hard.

Netscape 4

Don't use this anymore! So we don't provide you a link.

Available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and more.

This is the real problem kid! It uses an 10 year old rendering engine that lacks of nearly all modern features. Our solution for this browser is to disable all stylesheets. What you get is pure information, without eyecandy. It looks very dull but nothing is missing. To everyone who's still using it: Come on guys, times have changed! Get an update and you're in again.

Konqueror

Homepage: http://konqueror.kde.org

Available for Linux and more.

Konqueror is the open source browser of the KDE project and built upon the same rendering engine (KHTML) as Apple's Safari. At the moment, it has some problems with JavaScript code that result in not being able to show the animated DHTML elements of our site. Since Safari does a better job with that yet and Apple is giving back their improvements to the community, we are very sure Konqueror will work fine in its next release expected in February 2004.

Sound Streaming

Maybe you have found out that listening to the demo sound files of our site now works different than before. What we changed is the method of submitted the sound files to your web browser. The new method is called streaming and works similar to listening to a web radio.

The pros

The main advantage of streaming is that sound play starts much quicker after clicking the play link. The player doesn't have to download the whole file before output is started but only needs to buffer a small amount at the beginning. We tested streaming with Winamp and iTunes on Windows, iTunes on Macintosh and XMMS on Linux.

The cons

It does not work out of the box on all systems and configurations. In some cases you have to select a player from the browser dialog to get it to work.

Switching the modes

There is a mode selector Sound streaming On Off on top of every page. If your default configuration will not work, please choose the other.

Cookies

Depending on your security settings, you may have noticed a cookie warning when entering the site. This raises a few questions.

Do I need to accept cookies when using this site

No. If you don't accept cookies, PHP sessions will used instead. This works transparently but results in adding a session id to every link. For security reasons, be sure not to include this session ids when passing such links to anyone else.

What information is stored in the cookies?

The cookies are just session cookies. They contain the session id as long as you visit the site. We use this session information to store some configuration data like the status of sound streaming mode or the selected page number in the releases list.

How long do these cookies exist?

The lifetime of session cookies expires when you close the web browser. No information of previous sessions will be submitted to us.

Software used to run this Site

For those, who are interested in technical details how this site is driven, we give a short overview about what's running behind.

Open source software is used in nearly every domain of developing and running this site. Development was done on a Linux machine, running KDE as desktop environment, where mainly KATE was used to write all kinds of code and markup and GIMP did a good job on processing any kind of image.

In the background, a complete LAMP system was installing in a similar way used by the production web server of our hosting provider. LAMP? What's that? you might ask. This acronym stands for Linux ( the operating system), Apache (the web server), MySQL (the database) and PHP (the scripting language. Not to forget: Smarty, PHP's leading template engine, provides a clean and powerful solution to separate the presentation from the application logic.

Your Disco Galaxy Webmaster

Quick Search
Looking for a specific artist, release or track? Simply query our database with a full text search.


Newsletter
Our newsletter will keep you up-to-date with the latest information about our artists, releases and events.
Your e-mail address:
Subscribe
Unsubscribe