WoW Heroes -> View topic

Ruddygore

1. Broken html » Tue Sep 09, 2008 11:05 pm

Every time I try to use wow-heroes, I enter the realm, server and character information, hit "Search" and all I get is the spinning circle. Even waiting overnight, there is not a response.

So, I did some digging. I dropped a proxy server in and watched the requests. For my toon, I got:

http://www.wow-heroes.com/get_char.php? ... 0993297322

Which pretty much makes sense (other than the stamp).

Plugging that link (it is clickable) into a browser shows the data but it's really messed up.

So, I did a wget of the link to see what the actual page contains and it shows that the html is not valid. There is no <html>, no <head>, no <body> tags. The first few lines returned are:

Code: Select all: <table width="100%" border="0"> <tr> <td colspan="3"> <div class="score"> <div class="title"> <div class="lefttop"></div> <div class="midtop"></div> <div class="bartitle">Character Info</div>

Which explains why the browser is not happy. It looks like the php script is not emitting the required wrappers.

Tested on Firefox and Chrome on 3 different computers - all generate similar errors.

Alex

Site Admin

2. Re: Broken html » Wed Sep 10, 2008 7:33 am

There was a problem with "never ending spinning circle" lately because WoW Heroes got too many visitors than it's shared MySQL hosting could manage. I've moved it to a private server last night, which helped a LOT. Everyone should be able to see their character within few seconds.
Problem with the link you've provided is that it's not the "official" link - in other words, it's purpose is to be inserted in the middle of the page, where all the headers, tags, css, well even ads from which this website survives, can be seen.
Try to use http://www.wow-heroes.com/?zone=US&server=Bloodhoof&name=Ruddygore and let's try to see if it works. You could try to force a full page re-load with Ctrl + F5, just to make sure it doesn't take any cached files. If it doesn't work now, I'll take a look why it could happen and fix it. Either way, I promise it will be working within 1 day

Ruddygore

3. Re: Broken html » Wed Sep 10, 2008 9:54 am

That link works correctly. But clicking "live" & "search" gives me spinning circle. As does entering another character name, leaving "live" blank and clicking "search". Ditto for any sort of compare.

Alex

Site Admin

4. Re: Broken html » Wed Sep 10, 2008 10:07 am

Can you try to enable cookies & javascript, and put all options in browser to Default state please? Also, are you using any firewall or similar program which has some sort of cookie control/ad blocking (like Zone Alarm)?

Ruddygore

5. Re: Broken html » Wed Sep 17, 2008 11:21 pm

I pointed a friend at the issue, here is his reply, just pasted here:

Quote:
There are many sites that will validate html. You might wish to point him at some of them to clean up the many errors.

I did not spend much time looking at it, been busy and stuff like his livequery script are a total mess - I'm not going to take time to reformat it to dig through it. But it kinda looks like he's trying to be overly clever in how he is embedding data within the page. Things would work much better if he simply emitted the entire page within his php script rather than what he is doing now with the embed.

If this isn't enough to point him in the right direction, bug me next week and I'll try to take a closer look at it.

Alex

Site Admin

6. Re: Broken html » Thu Sep 18, 2008 1:05 am

Quote:
There are many sites that will validate html. You might wish to point him at some of them to clean up the many errors.

If your friend is getting "many errors" then it's time for him to get a new browser, something newer than IE5. I do validate html & css from time to time, and check for javascript errors, and so far there were no big issues. If there was any real need to fix stuff, I would've done it asap, but when
1. the page looks fine in IE 6 & 7, FF 2 & 3, Opera, Safari and now even Chrome, on at least 10-15 different computers I've checked
2. from several millions page views wow-heroes receives each month only few people complain (for example, 550.000+ characters were added to the database since last update - only 8 days ago :shock:

)
....then I don't see the need to fix anything, at least not as a priority.

Quote:
I did not spend much time looking at it, been busy and stuff like his livequery script are a total mess - I'm not going to take time to reformat it to dig through it

Each person has it's own style in programming, someone's mess is another ones home. And tbh, this "mess" works pretty fine imo, and much faster then someone would expect. Livequery is not my script ofc, I'm really surprised your pro friend is mentioning this one, because it's one of the most popular plugins for JQuery (library used by Google, Dell, Bank of America, NBC, CBS, Mozilla...). Calling it a mess is just.... :rotfl:

.... I only use it at one point, and at that point it's done "by the book", just like tutorial on the creators website suggests. Overall, you can just ignore it, since it's only used to make table sort in guild tab less painful.

Quote:
But it kinda looks like he's trying to be overly clever in how he is embedding data within the page. Things would work much better if he simply emitted the entire page within his php script rather than what he is doing now with the embed.

Things would NOT work much better that way because then the whole page would have to be reloaded, without any need. Also, you would not be able to just switch from Character/Compare/Guild view, or, you would, but the previous page would be destroyed.

Quote:
If this isn't enough to point him in the right direction, bug me next week and I'll try to take a closer look at it.

Looking forward to hear more suggestions from the expert :clapping:

At this moment, this website is just my hobby, something on which I try to spend my free time because I like the idea that some people find it helpful. I don't get payed for it, I have a full-time job, and I can't sacrifice any more of those precious spare moments to fix problems which only occur in 0.001% browsers. No offense to your friend, but he sounds like he could make something much better then wow-heroes, which would be great, then I could go back to raiding full time and live a happy life lol

In the meantime, I suggest you try to go to any internet caffe, I'm sure you won't have any problems with wow-heroes from there :good:

I might make a non-ajax page for people who have problems with javascript, but I can't promise it atm. I hope you understand. :friends:

edit: oh dear, I've just found out why he said livequery is a "total mess"....well....javascript can be compressed.....

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