Vogons Wiki is mostly a knowledge base it seems (correct me if this is wrong). The museum is write a different idea. I love looking through people's collections, especially when I've got a graphics card I can't identify, etc. I don't expect anyone to actively photo and upload their entire collection with descriptions and the like or more people would be doing it already.

If you have a big collection, set a good example for everyone by taking photos and uploading them to the vogons wiki. You can make a separate entry for each card.

I think the problem is that people are just unaware that vogonswiki even exists.

It seems easier to work with something we already have rather than creating something from scratch.

I haven't uploaded too many photos yet, but I add entries and fill in details whenever I'm bored.

Ahh... Did not know this. Oh well.. I could change the name then, as I am a bit hooked on this project now. 😀
Just saying, that if the DB is going to be a reality, it's going to have awesomme features. Speaking of features. The case section, have seperate entry's for stuff like number of Fan's, number of 3.5 inch drive bays, number of 5,25 inch drive bays and quality of the build. Going all in on how many different type of information that each hardware type's can hold. Yeah... If someone can create a DB from my writing's, then it's going to be a massive one.

mwdmeyer wrote:

I started writing something like this for CPU collections but never fully finished it.

Yep, this is pretty much the idea. Graphs would indeed be awesome - a properly constructed project should be able to draw graphs based on the user's criteria e.g. show me all results of VLB graphics cards on OPTi chipset boards, etc. It would be an amazing project if it really got up and running - what were the problems you encountered / reasons you didn't continue developing it?

The main issue was time. Although I did just release an update a few days ago that supports basic graphing of results. Although there is still a lot more work to go.

The other issue is compiling all the various brands/models/makes of items. You want to try and match these in the database correctly so that you can compare like for like, but you also want it to be flexible enough for users to add their own custom items.

You can sign up and get some ideas if you want.

Here is an example of the first version with graphs:
http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/File:PCB_2.0.png

http://pcb.vogonswiki.com

The wiki is perfect for displaying your own products and photos (no limit on what you can upload, also no adds etc), but doesn't have the database and graphing features to compare user benchmarks.

Finished the paperwork, scanned it and uploaded it to dropbox today.

Did a rough template, in visual studio. Nothing much. Only about 10 minutes worth of work.
Did the masterpage + css-file + a single content page. Everything from scratch.

Every color is a div box. And need to be changed as it all progresses.

Brostenen, you're amazing! I'm checking this thread on a regular basis and am very eager to see what this thread will accumulate to 😀

Tetrium. Well. When there are more meat on the bone's, I'll release the code for the webpage without any license.
My webprogrammingskill's are not so great, that I need to protect anything. And yeah... It's just a give-away. 🤣

Anyone up for design of a banner? (960x100 pixels)
Just some random good looking pictures of old hardware, slammed together in a beautifull cocktail will do.

EDIT:
Made some changes to the project, and of course, the colors can allways be changed, as well as images and perhaps adding round corners and shadow effect's for some 3D-Action.

Added smoothscrolling features, in order for smooth scrolling whenever page-up and down are used.
Added code for menu-item to be highlighted, whenever the entry's destinationpage are shown (kind of "permanent" hover-effect-sort-of-thingy)
Added feature for showing a favorite icon. (no image avaliable at the moment, need's to be in "ICO/JPG" file-extension)
Added feature, for a background image to be stretched, in order to fill out the entire screensize. (testimage choosen at this point)
Added some more font/design stuff in the CSS-File.

Result:

And yes... Lot's of comment's in the code, for someone other than me can edit and code without too much trouble.

Here is a demo of my little app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6c4y85zPX4

Feel free to get ideas/features etc for your program. Keen to see it once complete 😀

mwdmeyer wrote:

Here is a demo of my little app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6c4y85zPX4

Feel free to get ideas/features etc for your program. Keen to see it once complete 😀

Nice job.... Not really keen on full-screen here. Doing all in fixed 1024x768 (minus the background), for older type of monitors.
I know that there are a lot of people here, using old machines for surfing, so I am not that found on too much stuff.
Mostly doing jQuery and Java/JavaScript, and keeping the hell away from flash. That sort of stuff. 😉

When the time is right, and the features have to be programmed, I need someone to do the database-functions.
This will take me just too long to program, because I have not touched ANY coding in 2 to 2,25 year.

Anyway... Flash is only usefull for benching how fast the cpu-cooler can run...... 🤣 🤣 🤣

Yeah I hate flash. I'm using jQuery + HTML5 for all my stuff.

The website should work on any resolution and mobiles too! 😀

Nice... Keeping away from mobile platforms too...
Vogons are running nice and troublefree on windows phone. Yet other sites make my mobile-browser crash.
So yeah... Allways hated mobile platforms and I refuse to code for all mobile platforms, at any point in time. 😁

This looks very interesting! I have actually been playing around with a Semantic MediaWiki instance to achieve a similar goal. The beauty of that is that you don't need to worry about a database schema ahead of time, you can just add fields as they come up. It can be queried like any other database, so if for instance you want a list of VGA cards that work in an 8-bit ISA slot then you can do that, or if you want a list of motherboards with a 32-pin EEPROM socket to use for putting XTIDE into a new flash chip then that's easy too.

The problem I have with a non-wiki format is that if someone else comes up with a new piece of data that could be added, it's not easy to include it. I am new to Semantic MediaWiki but I like the fact that anyone can do the equivalent of adding new columns to the database tables.

Regardless of the underlying implementation, I think what would make this sort of idea generally most useful is the querying. It's all well and good to record this information but what if you have a card you can't identify? Can you produce TH99 style diagrams of everything in the database, but restrict it to 8-bit ISA slots with a single VGA connector, and a PCB-edge style feature connector? Or can you have a "my hardware" section where you can add all the items you own, and then do things like ask "which network cards do I have that can read 28-pin JEDEC ROM chips?" and get a list of devices *you already have* which can do just that. Asking something like "which VGA card do I have that has a max of AGP2x and also has S-Video output?" should be just as easy.

Going further, you could even in theory ask "which CPU/sound/video cards do I own that work with this motherboard?" then sort them by speed/memory size/power use, to simplify the task of building a new retro PC with a specific goal in mind.

This is something the Vogonswiki could do pretty easily (by just installing the Semantic Mediawiki extensions) however it would need a dedicated custodian to get it off the ground, and I'm not sure there's anybody doing much editing there at the moment. I don't know whether the site is at risk of disappearing without warning. It seems stable enough but what happens if people start uploading megabytes of high resolution photos for each hardware device...

Vogonswiki isn't going anywhere. It is hosted on my companies servers (I own the company) and it is backed up nightly to another dedicated server.

Currently I have 100GB of storage allocated to it but I can easily expand it. I want people to upload megabytes of images. Retro computing is very important to me, so documenting hardware is great, I don't have a huge amount of time to do that, but I can provide a place for it to occur.

I'm more than happy to install any MediaWiki modules that will be useful.

Malvineous wrote:

This looks very interesting! I have actually been playing around with a Semantic MediaWiki instance to achieve a similar goal. […]
Show full quote

This looks very interesting! I have actually been playing around with a Semantic MediaWiki instance to achieve a similar goal. The beauty of that is that you don't need to worry about a database schema ahead of time, you can just add fields as they come up. It can be queried like any other database, so if for instance you want a list of VGA cards that work in an 8-bit ISA slot then you can do that, or if you want a list of motherboards with a 32-pin EEPROM socket to use for putting XTIDE into a new flash chip then that's easy too.

The problem I have with a non-wiki format is that if someone else comes up with a new piece of data that could be added, it's not easy to include it. I am new to Semantic MediaWiki but I like the fact that anyone can do the equivalent of adding new columns to the database tables.

Regardless of the underlying implementation, I think what would make this sort of idea generally most useful is the querying. It's all well and good to record this information but what if you have a card you can't identify? Can you produce TH99 style diagrams of everything in the database, but restrict it to 8-bit ISA slots with a single VGA connector, and a PCB-edge style feature connector? Or can you have a "my hardware" section where you can add all the items you own, and then do things like ask "which network cards do I have that can read 28-pin JEDEC ROM chips?" and get a list of devices *you already have* which can do just that. Asking something like "which VGA card do I have that has a max of AGP2x and also has S-Video output?" should be just as easy.

Going further, you could even in theory ask "which CPU/sound/video cards do I own that work with this motherboard?" then sort them by speed/memory size/power use, to simplify the task of building a new retro PC with a specific goal in mind.

This is something the Vogonswiki could do pretty easily (by just installing the Semantic Mediawiki extensions) however it would need a dedicated custodian to get it off the ground, and I'm not sure there's anybody doing much editing there at the moment. I don't know whether the site is at risk of disappearing without warning. It seems stable enough but what happens if people start uploading megabytes of high resolution photos for each hardware device...

Been taking this in account too. The stuff of files being of large size. The DB has an entry to whatever file wich are in question.
Then the code-behind (C#), takes the path from the upload-dialog, and writes it in the database.
The file is then stored in a folder/directory on the server, and whenever the site need's to show a picture, it just uses the path stored in the DB.
This way, the database will not get slow and cluttered. Just a strict rule, never to save anything other than this in the database.
I even have set this rule, regarding manuals, files containing undocumented features and drivers.

Not a rule that all of this has to be implemented in the database, just that I have made room for these features to be implemented if this should be desired. This is my proposal for the database. Nothing is finished though, it is just a proposal for what the database should contain.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13450020/ … aseProposal.zip (52/53mb, 800dpi)

It's just some quick work I did in the last weekend. So perhaps something is missing. (Please have that in mind too)

mwdmeyer wrote:

Vogonswiki isn't going anywhere. It is hosted on my companies servers (I own the company) and it is backed up nightly to another dedicated server.

Currently I have 100GB of storage allocated to it but I can easily expand it. I want people to upload megabytes of images. Retro computing is very important to me, so documenting hardware is great, I don't have a huge amount of time to do that, but I can provide a place for it to occur.

I'm more than happy to install any MediaWiki modules that will be useful.

I think Vogonswiki is very useful actually. I don't really know how many non-Vogoners have used the side though and it's kinda complete. I added as much to the Vogonswiki as I could but at some point I had very little left to write about and then my camera broke 🙁

Changed the highlighting of the current page loaded, from jQuerry to C# code in the page-load.
This just gives me a bit of extra work, yet it's all copy/paste from now, as the function is working.
Allso.... Found an older project of mine, that I think suits the design better.
What do people say. The blueish design or this design that I made back in 2013?

brostenen wrote:

Changed the highlighting of the current page loaded, from jQuerry to C# code in the page-load. This just gives me a bit of extra […]
Show full quote

Changed the highlighting of the current page loaded, from jQuerry to C# code in the page-load.
This just gives me a bit of extra work, yet it's all copy/paste from now, as the function is working.
Allso.... Found an older project of mine, that I think suits the design better.
What do people say. The blueish design or this design that I made back in 2013?

Make it look like VOGONS/VOGONSDrivers, with the same purple/pink color scheme. 😁

That, and find some way to collaborate with the VOGONSWiki guy.

Stiletto wrote:

Make it look like VOGONS/VOGONSDrivers, with the same purple/pink color scheme. 😁

That, and find some way to collaborate with the VOGONSWiki guy.

I agree - he has done some amazing work on his own project - I didn't realise someone was relatively close to achieving what we're looking for! @ CHIPS: I didn't know about any of the wiki's features until someone told me about them. Same goes for Vogon's Drivers. If these things are well publicised there should be no problem attracting users.

Like this?

Getting rid of the banner-space in the top, and going for a second menu, were I will place the logo and a login-view.
This way, there will be two identical designed menu's, and then the content DIV will be shown, and finally the footer.
Perhaps the footer will be abolished too, if I have to make a good design.

Speaking of easter egg's. I have used the konami code, and something stupid will popup, when it is used.
Should I incorporate something else? Something like "Raptorizing" it 🤣

http://zurb.com/playground/jquery-raptorize

Uhh.... Just forgot to ask, who made the Vogons-Logo?
Perhaps, if I can be allowed, I will use it as a sort of template for a museum-logo.

EDIT:
Did the changes.... Any feedbacks and further suggestions?
As it is designed now, I am using box-shadows and border-radius and some gradiant's.
This way, I get a sort of 3d-look when the browser can do CSS3.
I have used standard CSS2.1 right before the CSS3 in the CSS-File, in order to maintain backwards compatibility.
Hope this is good enough, as this is just some basic code, nothing too wild or fancy.