New Total Thrills Launches

[Richard]

After literally tens of hours over the past six months, I've finally got the new Total Thrills site up in some sort of working form. It's fair to say that it's quite a lot different from the previous site, and Roller-Coaster.com.au. It'll focus more on "me" (without being too overly vain) - my travels etc. rather than Australian parks as this site does. Content's still a bit bare - I'll work through my photos from my USA trip over December/January (there's 3,000+ of them to sort through) over the next few days in my spare time. www.totalthrills.com is the url in case anyone's forgotten. As always, feel free to give comments, suggestions etc. (And to clear one that I might otherwise get a few of - yes I'm aware some image popups don't work and that will be fixed soon. )

[Schwarz_freak]

Looks good, i'd give it 7/10.

[T-bone]

Looks really good richard.

[mikrowave]

Nice work, I like the layout. Gonna have a closer perusal now =)

[simon]

It sucks. -4.35/6.995

[Slick]

2 posts and you came up with that? Don't worry, TWO POSTS EVERYONE!!!!! ....I'd like to see your website....

[Flea]

Uhh... Slick, Simon is Richard's brother.

[Slick]

Sooo it's a joke?? Sorry, rough day...... Sooooooo...... who wants to Dreamworld on Friday or Saturday??? Serious?

[simon]

My posts got deleted in the Great Fire. I used to have 6. I dreamworld all the time.

[GoGoBoy]

I Dreamworld friday too. It good. Richard the site looks excellent. The layout and graphics are fantastic. Now I just think you should jazz up the design of roller-coaster.com.au a bit

[Flea]

I also speak England good

[Richard]

The "fancy" look of Total Thrills comes really at the cost of easy-of-use. As it is, I think it's easy enough to get around, but there wouldn't be much room to expand on that, such as into what Roller-Coaster.com.au is. I know Roller-Coaster.com.au ain't gonna win any awards for outstanding web design anytime soon, but on that same token I think it's as effective as it possibly could be given the depth and large amounts of information it needs to display. The most important thing to note is that none of the content is actually stored in the site. It's all in a database so the design can be changed at any stage and all content will remain. Given the time invested into this current design, I can't see it being significantly changed for a good few years yet. There are some web designers out there who could make a site as pretty as Total Thrills with as much content and as easy to use as Roller-Coaster.com.au, but I don't think that I'm quite talented enough to be able to pull that off. Usually those that do pull it off are paid tens of thousands by companies to do so anyway.

[Gazza]

Were you drinking red cordial when you wrote the captions for the pics?

[joz]

I don't think they're sarcastic enough Good work on those Rich

[Gazza]

A far cry from the professionalism of this site , but what is with all the slashes that pepper the captions?

[Richard]

The slashes are a very cheap and easy way to get around a problem that occurs with the Javascript image popups. I will fix it eventually. If you want un-slashed captions, go to the full size images, not just the mouseover ones. I see no real reason to be serious with the captions. That's Roller-Coaster.com.au's job. Total Thrills lets my sardonic sarcastic and just plain stupid sides through.

[Gazza]

Yeah, I suppose, Maybe more of that should come through in your posts

[Richard]

I've added Las Vegas (parks, nightlife and Grand Canyon) photos, in case anyone's interested. I might get to Texas and then Florida some time today if I have the time.

[Gazza]

One thing you could implement for Roller Coaster and TT is scroll bars on the large versions of the images, some peoples screens cant handle the higher resolutions which makes veiwing the whole picture hard.

[Richard]

The images on Total Thrills are even causing troubles? What screen resolution are you running with? Total Thrills was designed for 800x600 minimum, Roller-Coaster.com.au for 1024x768. If your screen is set to a resolution lower than these, then the full-sized images will be too big for your screen, in which case the best you can do is the thumbnails. That's not all bad - here for instance, the thumbnails are 300x225, which is enough to see most detail in any given shot. I do have plans to eventually add something to Roller-Coaster.com.au that will automatically resize the full sized images to accommodate smaller screen resolutions. Probably not any time soon though.

[Gazza]

No wait, TT does work, but the captions get cut off. I have found RC enlargments work if I copy and paste into paint, I can scroll around in there.

[Richard]

A problem that's been hanging around since the beginning has been resolved; I've fixed the problem with slashes. Long story short, Javascript makes use of apostrophes to enclose certain parameters. If you want these parameters to include an apostrophe (as with contractions or possessives), you have to put a slash before the apostrophe, otherwise it'll basically cut the parameter short where you put one. What I was originally doing was putting slashes straight into the database, which meant when the thumbnail titles were shown (when you hold the mouse over a thumbnail), they included the slashes. A single line of code which acts as a "find and replace" fixes that problem. Six Flags Over Texas gallery is now up, as is one from Universal Studios Florida. I said this a few weeks ago, but I'm hoping to get the Florida ones up pretty soon. As always stay tuned!

[Richard]

I've gotten the Islands of Adventure gallery up. At 100 photographs it's the biggest gallery on Total Thrills and I believe the biggest I've ever made. See it here. The rest of the Orlando galleries will be coming as I find time to put them together. There's easily another few hundred photographs to come out of Orlando parks alone.

[GoGoBoy]

Great gallery Rich but what I'd really love to see is some more Australian park photos for Roller-Coaster.com.au. I've noticed that many of our own Aussie rides don't have any pics at all. It'd be great to see a full database at some stage, with pics of even the smaller various flat rides etc.

[Richard]

It's all slowly coming together. I myself can only really focus on three parks - Sea World, Movie World and Dreamworld - and the amount of content for each of these reflects that fact. If anyone has high-quality photographs from other parks around Australia, don't hesitate to send them my way. See the Contribute page for more information. I can't be everywhere, and most of the gaps in the gallery are simply because I haven't been to a particular park, or not in a long time.