Species info repositories

[Dray]

I'm looking for species info and am wondering who still has their info pages up? Or, alternately, there were a few places who had info gathered together. Has anyone preserved their sites?

[Kitsuneko]

Hi Dray! All of my sites are still online, including the information pages about Athanasia: http://darklingdawn.freehostia.com/athanasia.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Aside from that, I don't think I have records of any other specific species, and I noticed the official site the Draks/Icarus is gone, unfortunately.

[StarFyre]

For what little it's worth, Akelara is still up in it's regular place.

And for what else it's worth, I have a full set of pdf rips of the Icarus site? I'd saved it years ago when I was working on NaNo for the Nexus storyline.

[Dray]

I used to have a basic run-down of all the species I knew of back when I ran Star City, but I've since hopped several computers without a reliable backup drive, so I've lost a lot. I'm glad you two have kept your work up! It'd be so nice to have a representative image and the corresponding species traits in one place to look back on for all my mixed-breed characters... One of the things that I've been doing since getting the itch to Nexus has been taking time to tidy up my always in-progress Nidus database, and I was thinking it'd be really nice to try to create 'breed cards' as best I understand them to get at the root of all the mixed-blood creatures that I have paged over the years...

Then again, I just remembered that we have much better options these days after you and Yakima got to work on things like this!

...Never mind me, haha, I'm still trying to remember what all I've forgot over the last couple of decades.

[StarFyre]

Yeah I keep meaning to go back in and actually add more information into that database than what little is currently there. Even just getting a better collection of species lists would be up there in my to-do list.

And I doubt I'll ever take down Akelara; first off, silveredmagic is basically my permanent email at this point. I've got work emails going there and all, so uhh... yeah. Secondly, dragoning was such a significant part of my life until the past few years that I just... can't imagine getting rid of it. I mean, I really neeeeeed to fix all the coding in those pages, but they're mostly functional even still.

[Dray]

Understandable! The only reason I shut down what I've got was because I wasn't actively using it and someone came around asking about making candidates at a really bad time for me, and when they wouldn't take 'sorry, no' I didn't want to have to spend time combing all my repositories to ensure they had a big 'CLOSED' sign on them. I still have everything stored away, and I think I'll put it up again somewhere some time (with some easily toggle-able 'closed/open' message...) but maybe somehow the nexus forums would be a good middle-ground.

I'm wondering how you guys wanted to handle mixed breeds? Those don't go up in the species database, do they?

[StarFyre]

Wow, rude much? I'm sorry you had to deal with something like that, sounds really annoying for sure. =P My recent coding work makes me go "ooh, ooh, php coding with a database backend! that'll fix being able to switch open/closed signs everywhere!" but that might be too much effort *laughs*

Uuuhh.. yeah I don't think mixed breeds were technically considered species. Honestly I've forgotten a lot of how it all went together and would need to consider it for a bit. I mean there could definitely be a Mix Breed classification included in the species, but considering how random they all were I'm not sure whether that would work. Hmm... yeah I can't remember if Yakima and I ever discussed where mixes would fit in.

(oh wow I really need to fix the whole redirect issue of an index.html page being up considering that page shouldn't exist and it needs to be index.php)

[Dray]

Oh my GOD I started responding to your message and wound up with this massive addled wall of text on 'oh this would be cool, but if X, then would Y be the case?'........

I think it got to like 1000 words before I decided to save a draft and back away until I'm less flustercucked by my cold. It was all hypothetical in any case, but I think I have the itch to talk about organizing things and sorting things.

You mentioned that there are lots of great resources for making easy to sort databases... do you mind sharing some starting points there? I'm mostly interested in sorting all of my riders and dragons by various things (name, nidus, colour, breed, rank, etc.) and maybe colour-coding... fields? Are fields columns or rows? I'm a newb... help...

[StarFyre]

*laughs* Well, when you're less messed up, feel free to post your thoughts and we can discuss viability for sure. I'm learning a lot about how things are stored and displayed through this current job of mine, so I'll probably have a lot better idea about things these days than I would have a couple years ago.

Okay, so first off! What sort of effect are you going for? Like what's happening on the agencies page where you can have the table sort itself by clicking on the column headers and the data reorganizes itself?

"Field" tends to be used to reference a single column entry in a single row (ex: on the agencies page, the name "Falas Weyr" is one "field" in that table). Think of them as individual data points where the row and the column you're interested in intersect. From a coding standpoint, color-coding fields tends to occur by row (so in every table row, td number "x" has "y" effect applied to it) simply because dynamic tables are built up one tr at a time.

Really, a lot of my answers are going to depend upon how indepth you want this to be, and whether or not you're going to store the table information on the page itself, in a javascript faux-database, or in a server-side database such as MySQL. From an "I've been working with this for four weeks straight at this point" standpoint, https://datatables.net/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; is a great resource that produces reliable and flexible tables for viewing. On the other hand, because there are so many options and it tries to give you the capability of doing so many things, the code for datatables can be difficult to understand at first, and the examples on their pages tend to be very simplistic because they're illustrating just one thing at a time.