Search the Community

So give me an idea of something you'd like a program to do, keeping it relatively simple. Also Mr Fang if you have a copy of that Prime Number program I sent you, mind sending it back x.x

I've made a number of updates and improvements to the RuneScape Notifier for Chrome in the past week or so including speed improvements, news and notifications which can be seen in the comments. Today's change brings another change, this time to the way in which the GE offers are displayed. Rather than being lines of text, it's been changed to be more visual and easier to pick things out at a glance. I'm not totally convinced about the colours myself (I've tried taking them from the in-game GE), so if anybody has any suggestions please say! <_< The current UI - hovering over the GE status bars changes the displayed text Notifications when it updates Get the RuneScape Notifier for Chrome

Yesterday Jagex announced a RuneScape Game Bar - a toolbar for IE, FF and Safari. Although there's the usual problem that it's a toolbar and toolbars always take up too much space for the functionality they provide, it does provide some interesting data relating to the GE and Activities. It also spawned a number of 'y no Chrome, u fail!!!' posts. Well, toolbars are ick and us Chrome users have no desire to have an icky toolbar ruining our minimal UI. The Jagex devs realised this, so didn't give us the silly 1.7mb of bloat. :glasses: They did, however, provide access to the data through the authorisation system and Chrome extensions have access to it, so I've spent the last day working out how to create Chrome extensions, the result being the... RuneScape Notifier (for Chrome, not at all finished and contains known issues) >.< The popup window (old pic, now also includes the latest RS news) Notifications when things update It's a Chrome extension that allows you access to the data that Jagex has provided for the other browsers. To get started, click 'Authorise' and follow the steps to allow your browser access to the data. I've noticed that the data can be very slow to update (half an hour to say I killed Bork, 3 hours and waiting to tell me that Maple Logs have bought), however this is a problem at Jagex's end. The extension fetches GE data every 5 minutes and will add a notification to the icon to say if any offers have completed. It will also fetch GE and activity data when you view the popup, meaning you may get blocked by Jagex for a few minutes if you open it up too regularly (causing things to look odd). This initial version is designed to get the new data across and not a lot more, so there will be problems. If you do encounter anything odd, or think something could do with improving / adding, please leave a comment and I'll do my best to see what can be done about it. I think auto-updating is working, but I may be wrong. Get it now (for Chrome, not at all finished and contains known issues)

Jagex goes along, creates a fantastic looking website for Stellar Dawn which both looks amazing and feels good to use. All over the place, the 'title' tag is used where 'alt' should be, but other than that it's a very nice design and feels fantastic. You then click to view the forums. Who in their right mind decided to use the same forum design as is used for the War of Legends forums? It's hideously bland, is horrible to use and doesn't in the slightest bit fit in with the hawt design that's been created for the rest of the site. Of course, simply leaving it alone isn't what I do, so I've gone off and made a blue skin for the Stellar Dawn and War of Legends forums (they're currently identical). It's designed to have a similar look to the forum section of the Runescape Website - Blue skin, so if you like that, you'll hopefully like this too! :( Get it now: Stellar Dawn Forums - Blue War of Legends Forums - Blue (they're currently identical in terms of looks, but are separate encase they become different in the future)

I've made another batch of updates to the Blue Runescape Website Skin, focussing on making the Adventurer's Log readable as well as a range of smaller fixes and additions. The list of latest updates describes the other changes that have been made. Rather than blabbering on about what's been changed, here's a batch of screenshots of what various parts of the RS website look like in Chrome... :P (there are some minor differences when using Firefox or other browsers) The homepage Old image The Dev Blog main page, with the number of visible articles reduced so that the image isn't so huge The Grand Exchange Database Homepage The Hiscores rank view The Runescape Forums Main page, with various sections collapsed The Runescape Forums category view Posts by a Forum Mod, regular player and a Jagex Mod (taken on 133-134-899-58872565 page 139) The Email Registration page - all webpages have a special background A Knowledge Base article select page A (shortened) Knowledge Base article showing image borders and tables Get it now for all this and more! :D http://userstyles.org/styles/16009

The RuneScape Website - Blue skin has been updated to fix the problems caused by a forum update that occurred today. The 'showhide' boxes appear buggy at Jagex's end, so they look slightly odd, but the rest appears to be OK. If I've missed something, please say! I've also taken the chance to update the background colour of adverts on news pages. There are also a couple of other updates relating to colours in JMod posts on the forums. Get it now: http://userstyles.org/styles/16009 (screenshots)

With the Return of the Players' Gallery, I noticed that there were thick borders appearing on narrow images, so I've fixed that. I've also taken this opportunity to change a couple of background and heading colours on the forums to increase contrast as well as eliminate a problem that was sometimes causing the mouse to flicker when hovering over links. Both of these changes have a very high chance of causing something to change unexpectedly that I've not noticed, so if you see anything amiss, please shout! :D Get it now: http://userstyles.org/styles/16009 (screenshots)

As mentioned, I've gone and updated the Play Classic page so there's no brown on it. In doing so, I finally found out how to blur the edges of an image so it's not pixellated. :( (the 'Feather' plugin for Paint.NET) The selectors for the AoG 'Updated' text on the homepage have been updated so it looks the same in both Chrome and Firefox. The menubar above the game applet has been given some blueness so that there's blue on every page on the RS website. The advert background on this page has also been made blue. While doing this, I found a few px of wasted space that have now been recovered and can now be used to make the game window even bigger when in resizeable mode. If you find the blue above the game window too distracting after playing with it for a few hours, please shout and I'll see what can be done! Get it now: http://userstyles.org/styles/16009 (screenshots)

A small update has been made to the Runescape Website - Blue skin so that text on the grats on install page after installing the downloadable client is readable. (based on 15-16-979-61057883, the new downloadable client appeared at some point last week - a quick look at the source shows it to be an older build of this that's been tweaked a bit to fix 4 problems, plus ~100 lines of C++, all put together in Visual C++ (note that I don't know C++ and haven't looked in detail at the source)) Get it now: http://userstyles.org/styles/16009 (screenshots) (I'll hopefully get round to updating the 'Play RS Classic' page over the next day or two)

A month ago there was the release of 'Forum Communities' on the RSOF, something which has been slated since release and is going to be made even more confusing tomorrow when more timers are being added. Guthix knows why. Anyway, for those who want to forget that the silly things even exist, I've created a userstyle which will hide anything to do with the communities, simply leaving you with the 'Everyone' section to post in and explore. It is still possible to access threads in the other communities through profile and external links, but they will not get in your way during normal browsing. The 'omg u r active in anotha communitee' messages when making a post are still visible to avoid any confusing errors when you forget that the silly system exists, but other than that any traces of the other communities have been removed. If I've missed anything, please say! Get it now!: http://userstyles.org/styles/30772 (Sal's Realm in a platinum fansite (103-104-6-60844459), so there shouldn't be problems with referring people to this post if you want to spread the word) Hide all the silly bloat (below) that you quite clearly don't care about! - In related news, the Runescape Website - Blue skin has had a couple of colours tweaked and some minor modifications made to work seamlessly with the above. The Sal's Realm - Wide skin is also working again.

I mentioned that I wanted to add a couple of extra bits of information to my Election Results summaries and have done just that. :P It's now possible to see the maximum number of possible voters in each constituency as well as the actual turnout on both the Constituencies Listing page and the individual constituencies pages. There's also been another link added to the latter. Data is nice. ^_^ http://ukelection.byethost32.com/full-data.php

After the election on Thursday, I didn't like the way the results and summaries were displayed on various websites (in particular, the grouping of smaller parties as 'Other'), so decided to do something myself. I've wanted to learn PHP for a while, so this also provided a perfect opportunity to do that. :D I started off by trying to work out how to get the data, which was a mess involving regular expressions that worked some of the time and not others, so I ended up using regexps for some things and other methods where nothing 'sensible' would work. 300 lines of mess and much frustration later, I had the data entered into a database! ^_^ Next, I had to work out a way to display the data, deciding that giant tables with an ability to sort them would be best. I then went through and wrote some scripts to generate or work out useful bits of information that weren't visible in the raw data. With everything in place, I worked out what information would be wanted in each table before going and creating them. The end result may not be the prettiest thing in the world, but the data is hugely interesting. ^_^ http://ukelection.byethost32.com/full-data.php Above everything else, I had great fun creating the 'Seats' columns on the Party Listing page. Basically, 'how many seats would different parties get with alternative voting systems?'. Of course, the values are horribly crude and a bit of a 'plug in some numbers until the output totals 650 and the BNP doesn't have a majority' situation, but the numbers are interesting nonetheless. I've learned a lot and it's nice to make something where people IRL can make sense of it too. -.-

I've made a couple of small tweaks to blogs over the past couple of days to hopefully make things nicer... The text won't suddenly shrink when you add a quote or paragraph tag You can embed YouTube videos without removing the 'www.' part (it still works if you do remove it) Embedded YouTube videos now have a fullscreen button (<_<) Hopefully these tweaks won't cause too many side-effects, but they've been bugging me for a while so I finally got round to sorting them out. :P (I can't make spoilers work because the files that need modifying can't be changed through the ACP, or if they can then I don't have access to them) - As for my own blog, I've changed my Stats image so it's a Runewise one that'll automatically update since it was about 70 levels out of date. There's also a search box that I don't think I mentioned adding (ages back).

Three in a week... blame Jagex even more this time. This time, I've added styling to the 'Community Forums' section on the forums as well as the various menus it creates. I've also made a number of small tweaks to remove brown borders and text, make the login screen look nicer and finally found what was causing the 'Go' button in the GEDB to look ick, so that's been fixed. :D (it had a border, but shouldn't have) Updating info can be found here. For lots of screenshots of what the RS website looks like in blue, see this blog entry. Get it now! :/ http://userstyles.org/styles/16009

Two updates in two days... blame Jagex. This time, I've added styling to the World Select list that appears when the game crashes. I've also added another colour to the list of colours used in JMod forum posts so that Bug Report threads are more readable. You'd hope that there's no need to bother updating because in the ideal world you'd never have to see these pages, but if you want to... Updating info can be found here. For lots of screenshots of what the RS website looks like in blue, see this blog entry. Get it now! http://userstyles.org/styles/16009

The Dungeoneering update has caused a change to the Runescape Homepage. I've gone through and fixed various things to make it look all nice again. http://userstyles.org/styles/16009 [name=update-steps][/name][Existing users] To update, head to the Runescape homepage and press Ctrl+F5 to reload the various images (one, two, three, four) that have changed. After that... Stylish (Firefox) users head to the above link and click 'update'. Chrome users will have to head to chrome://extensions/ and uninstall the previous version, before re-installing it again from the above link. Anybody using other browsers, I've not tried it out, so see what works and share the solution with the rest of us. For lots more screenshots of what the RS website looks like in blue, see this blog entry. Get it now! ^_^ http://userstyles.org/styles/16009

The Bonus XP Weekend Calculator That was something fun to make yesterday evening. :D When in-game yesterday, I noticed that a huge number of people had no idea how the multiplier over the Bonus XP Weekend will work and a large number of people who did understand it were having trouble with the numbers. These discussions made me interested in how the figures actually ended up cumulatively over time, so I started off by creating a 5000 row table in Excel with various numbers in, only to find that it couldn't do quite what I wanted. The next step was to make a very basic calculator with the same functionality as the spreadsheet, but working as I wanted. This first version had an hour split into 100 segments, with decimals to indicate minutes. At this point, I decided that if I was going to make something basic for myself, it might as well be made slightly easier to use and available for everybody. Next was adding a way to change the start time so that you don't have to be doing the same thing for the whole weekend. For this, I decided to split the hour and minutes into separate inputs to make it nicer to use - who knows what 47 minutes is as a decimal of an hour? (it's 0.783333333...) I then changed the Task Length input to this Hour / Minutes format so that it was easier to do calculations with the two values. This meant that the multiplier would be calculated to the nearest minute rather than nearest 36 seconds. It was only today that I got round to reading the answers by Mod Fnord in the RSOF thread and realising that this is how it'll be calculated in-game, so go me! This also solved a problem that could crash the browser if you entered a really high value rather than decimal. :) With the basic functionality sorted, I did some playing around with the values in the input boxes so that there's a default of '0' and it'll auto-clear when you click in it. It'll also clear any values that you enter which aren't numbers - you can't easily do calculations on 'gh' xp and I didn't see the point in making Roman Numerals work... maybe next time! I also made it possible to hit Enter to calculate the multiplier rather than having to click the button simply because I found myself attempting to do so while testing. Next came the styling - making it look nice and ensuring various element fits the table cell that they're in. This took a couple of attempts and had to be 'redone' when I decided to add a title to the table that the calculator is in, but that's all part of the fun With that done, I realised that it would be a lot more useful if it'd actually tell you how much xp you would get rather than simply provide the multiplier. A couple of minutes of copypasting and a small addition and that functionality was added. Finally was writing the text to go above and below the calculator as well as a bit of final testing in various browsers with a range of values to make sure they were the same as what Excel gave. The calculator itself took about an hour to make, with styling, testing and writing the instructions adding another hour. I'd say that's two hours well spent. :)

As part of something I'm working on in Javascript, I wanted to add commas to long numbers to make them easier to read. Of course, the simple option would be to do a quick Google search, find something that works and use that. But where's the fun in that? :D To start with, I did do a Google search and found a number of ways to do the job with varying levels of complexity and extra features, finding that this (which also happens to be the top result) is the fastest by a factor of ~4 - using console.time() in Firebug when run 2,000,000 times. The 'Google code' with some tabs added to make it easier to read: function Comma(number){ number = '' + number; if (number.length > 3) { var mod = number.length % 3; var output = (mod > 0 ? (number.substring(0,mod)) : ''); for (i=0; i < Math.floor(number.length / 3); i++) { if ((mod == 0) && (i == 0)) output += number.substring(mod+ 3 * i, mod + 3 * i + 3); else output+= ',' + number.substring(mod + 3 * i, mod + 3 * i + 3); } return (output); } else return number; } Ignoring that, I set off to reinvent the wheel on my own, deciding that I also wanted my version to work with decimals (no commas in the decimal part because that's how I write it IRL) and it didn't need to worry about negative numbers. After a bit of playing around, I arrived at the following: function addCommasToLargeNumbers(number){ if(number >= 1000){ var noStr = number + ''; var decimalPointPosition = noStr.indexOf('.'); var decimal = ''; if(decimalPointPosition != -1){ decimal = noStr.substr(decimalPointPosition, noStr.length - decimalPointPosition); noStr = noStr.substr(0, decimalPointPosition); } var numberOfCommas = Math.floor((noStr.length - 1) / 3); var output = noStr.substr(0, (noStr.length - (numberOfCommas * 3))); var lengthBeforeCommas = output.length; for(var i = 0; i < numberOfCommas; i++){ output += ',' + noStr.substr(lengthBeforeCommas, 3); lengthBeforeCommas += 3; } return output + decimal; } else { return number; } } Running the 'Google code' and my code a further ~50,000,000 times indicates that mine is ~15% faster. :P I know that tiny speed differences like this will make no difference in the overall scheme of things (and for all I know, my version may be slower on non-FF browsers), but it's a bit of fun and doesn't do any harm. :)

Today reveals a new look for http://www.jagex.com/ and it keeps up the recent trend of well polished webpage design and implementation. It's only a couple of pages with the new look, but almost everything has been looked at and even the 'strange' decisions have a perfectly acceptable reason behind them if you put in a moment of thought. Starting with the navigation (and pretty much every link on the page) - when you hover over anything, the colour of the background (and text) changes instantly, no waiting for the image to load because it's saved in a different file. I know this is widespread nowadays, but there are certain websites that I use such as the MGE that don't and when it works you forget how fantastic an idea it is. The other thing with the navigation is that you don't need to be hovering over the text to click a link - your mouse can be in the gap next to it and you'll still be whisked off to somewhere else upon clicking. It's something that Amazon totally fails to do, but Jagex does. Another instance where Jagex beats Amazon is giving focus to the box you want - you'd expect focus on the Amazon homepage to be in the search box, but no, you have to click before typing. On the login page for the RuneScape website, "If the username field is empty, it gets focus. If the password field is empty but username is filled, it gets focus." - no need to click before entering your details. With the news feeds, at first I felt that the 'Read more...' links had too little contrast with the background, making them hard to read, however I can see a clear reason for it being like that. On the RuneScape / FunOrb websites, the links are made to stand out so you're more inclined click the link and read the full article rather than complaining that 'Jagex didn't tell me that they'd done x y z'. On the Jagex site, they don't want you to click the links - you're there for an overview of their products and anyway, LOOK THERE ARE PRETTY PICTURES TO THE LEFT which you want to click instead. It's the one specific thing about the site design that makes me go 'wow'. ^_^ This is the first Jagex site that has been designed for a 1024x768 resolution rather than 800x600. IIRC, it was a year and a bit ago that it was mentioned that this change would occur, so I wonder how long it'll be until other Jagex sites are given this treatment. As for negatives, there's only one - the tabs on the T&C pages require you to load the next page rather than using JS to switch between them (like the news feeds on the homepage). I understand that it'd me slightly more complex, but if you're using tabs in a website design, don't make me load a whole new page to view what's behind it. Tabs in software generally indicate something that's already open - in Paint.NET (and newer versions of Photoshop) tabs indicate an image that's open, in a web browser tabs indicate a page that has loaded, in Excel tabs indicate a worksheet that you can switch to without anything loading. Why doesn't the same rule apply for webpages? A fantastic job well done by the unidentified* beings who created Jagex's new homepage. ^_^ *there are no comments (that I've noticed) in the source code to identify who made it as there are on the corporate site

It's been a few days since the launch of the new-look Jagex store, so it's probably time to comment on it. Hopefully what I've written makes some sense, although huge differences between the EU and US stores probably make it slightly harder to follow than it could be as I jump between the two. Slightly over a month ago revealed the new-look jagex.com which I mentioned was pretty darn good. A day later and I noticed annoying problems with the Adventurer's Log. Unfortunately, the creator of the latter appears to have had their hands on the Jagex Store. :P To start with you load the site and get a choose country page in your face which is riddled with painfully bad design. First, there are three rows on the page, each of a different width which makes the page look unfinished and generally icky. Secondly, clicking on the 'Remember this location' text doesn't change the status of the textbox, a simple thing that makes it feel much more usable. I know somebody at Jagex knows how to do this - it happens on login pages for the Runescape website. Next are those big buttons that link to the EU / US stores. When you hover over them, everything is done using JavaScript rather than CSS which means it's sloooooooooooooooooooow. -.- Heading there now, it took a second and a half for the background to turn orange when I moused over the button (it should be instant by changing the background-position on an image) - ask the person who designed the buttons in the Knowledge Base for help with this. The second problem with the buttons is the country list that appears - once again, it's slow to appear and always appears at a slightly different time to the orange background. This could probably be solved in a similar way to the navigation on the Runescape website, so ask the person who did that to help there or head to here as referenced in the Runescape global stylesheet. Ontop of this, when you mouse over anything that you're supposed to click (checkbox / those big buttons), the cursor stays as an arrow rather than changing to a pointer. It's a usability nightmare and whoever allowed it past needs shooting. To add to this problem, there's a link in the top-left corner of the page which DOES change the cursor, but clicking on it simply sends you to the page you're on. -.- #theThingYouWantPeopleToClickOn { cursor:pointer; } There, was it really that hard? Lastly, why is the page even there? When I head to google.com, it redirects to google.co.uk and if I head to amazon.com, there's a nice big thing at the top saying 'ooo, you seem to be in the UK, why not check out amazon.co.uk instead?'. So, detect where somebody's shopping from and send them to that store automatically rather than sticking a hindrance in the way. Ask the creator of the Account Creation page for help with this. OK, I've worked out that I'm supposed to click on the thing that becomes orange and am now in the store itself. The Login button is ugly. I know you want it to stand out so people click on it, but really it's ugly and doesn't fit in with the rest of the design at all. It's missing any kind of border, the gradient doesn't match the background of the rest of the border at all and when you mouseover it, the colour of the text becomes icky and hard to read (may simply be me). There's a login button, but no 'Register' button. In the FAQ, the first question tells you what to do, but since there's no clear word 'Register' in any of the questions, it seems like an obvious one to miss and makes your life as a user that bit harder. Also in the FAQ, the link in the 'International Orders' question doesn't send you to the Country Select page, simply to the EU homepage, meaning there's no easy way to switch stores without manually deleting cookies (something you really shouldn't expect a user to know how to do). On the Registration page itself, for some reason the texboxes are different lengths and it's unable to pre-select a country that I'm located in (as is managed on the Runescape account creation page). The title text of the link in the top-left corner doesn't have 'Go to' at the start of it like EVERY OTHER link towards the top of the page. Consistency is good and small differences like that aren't a massive problem, but it's a small niggle that it'd be nice to have 'fixed'. There was a post on the RSOF I saw saying that the area you can click on for links in the top navigation bar is too small and not clear enough, though I'd disagree in part. It's good that you can click slightly to the side of links, however it'd be nice to have the ability to click on the full height of the navigation bar - larger areas = easier to click = faster navigation = happier users. [EU] What is up with the footer? The text is totally unreadable against the background and half the stuff is repeated. Why aren't the T&C / Privacy Policy links in-line with the text, instead being above on a separate row? Having deciphered what it says, I don't want to have to hunt around to find links to the things - they may be just above, but it took me several seconds to spot, read, work out the meaning of, move the mouse to and click on them. This is one of the few things that looks better in the US store. The 'Browse the Store' box looks empty and although it's nice that it means the bottom of elements line up on the homepage, they don't anywhere else and it looks silly instead. There's a nice picture of a featured product and I can see that it's a shirt of some kind, however the title text simply says 'Featured Product' rather than naming it, meaning I've got to click and spend 5 seconds of my life to find out what it is specifically. Now I've looked around the homepage, onto other pages. First the item search pages... [EU] It's nice having bolded text on the currently selected section - Accessories, Apparel or Books. [EU] At the same time, the background isn't quite as helpful - the selected one is exactly the same as you get when hovering. This means that hovering over a selected link, the background doesn't change colour, making it harder to see that your mouse is in the right place, slowing navigation. [EU] As for the search results themselves, on the Country Select page I complained about a lack of different cursors, here I'd say there's too much (at least with things as they are). :D You're able to click on the gap between item images to head to it's page - great, bigger areas = good! :P Unfortunately, there's a 1px gap between the two columns, meaning it's almost impossible to see that the mouse has moved onto the other image. To fix this, make the background colour change slightly when hovering over it to show which item you're about to click on. As for the Search Page itself, (in the EU store) you can click on labels and the textboxes themselves will obtain focus. What was the person making the Country Select page on to make it so bad and why doesn't this happen in the US store? The 'Search' button itself also has no pretteh background in the EU store, while in the US store it's a stupidy tiny 'Continue' button that takes an age to find. ...all of the above appear totally different in the EU and US stores. If they're doing pretty much the same thing, why do they look so different? It looks like it'll be a pain to maintain without more consistency. The text in the US store is generally too small, the 'Wishlist' link from the top bar is missing, Then the item pages themselves. When viewing an item, there's a code that comes up next to the item name along the lines of 'JGX141' for Betrayal at Falador. As a user, I don't care what it is ad if I'm filing a complaint about an item, I'm going to give the name rather than a code that means nothing to me. Fine, use if on the back-end for working things out, but don't tell me what it is because I don't care and it takes time for it to load. Like on the Country Select page, background images for buttons are saved as different images, to take time to appear, during which a blank gap shows on the page. This may work wonderfully with Runescape where everything is in one magical cache that rarely gets deleted, but when looking at a website like this where somebody isn't going to be visint every day, it doesn't work. Things get overwritten too quickly, meaning it's the same problem every time you fix it and it simply becomes annoying. Change it and change every similar implementation on other websites to stop being annoying. In the US store, there's a 'Zoom' icon which you can click on to see a larger image of the item. Why can't you click on the image itself (as with the EU store)? The lightboxes being used are also different. Why the EU and US stores look so different, I have no idea. It seems like two groups of people were sent off to make designs, then they were combined in about a day, sharing the worst parts between each other and meaning that neither feels properly designed. The Country Select page is diabolical to use as it is, although 10 minutes of work would fix most of it. Although I really don't like white backgrounds for websites (as the Jagex Store was before), I'm not really sure this is an improvement in much other than reduced shipping costs to the US since it's clearly been put out in a rush before Christmas. But I guess the key part is: If I was a parent of a kid going 'mummy, daddy, plz can I have something from the Jagex Store plz plz plz', would I buy it for them? If using a non-FF browser and they'd not ticked the 'Remember' box on the country select page, No. It simply doesn't feel polished enough to trust hem with my information despite the 'https' in the address bar. If using FF, it says that it's been verified by somebody and the favicon has a blue background, so I'd be more trusting, but the fact still stands that it isn't friendly to use. If they had Remembered the status so I didn't have to pass that nightmare of a Country Select page, possibly. I would, however, be significantly more likely to say 'yes' if it told me up-front what the P&P for items was. The country can generally be detected from various factors, so use that to work out where I am and how much it'll cost to deliver to me rather than making me sign up before going "that's how much? O_o". OK, it's nice to know that those in the US are paying less for shipping, but as a site itself there's still quite a bit of work to be done with design and usability. Clearly something rushed out quickly before Christmas. :P

It's been a while, but I've finally got round to updating the Blue Runescape Website Skin so that it works again following the changes in URL a while back. It's taken this long to update it because I've had no personal incentive to do so - I've switched to using Chrome since it has a significantly faster statup time (measured in seconds rather than minutes) compared with Firefox. Up until now, it's had no easy way to install Userstyles, so I've simply not bothered. Today, however, I decided to download the BETA version of Chrome which has the ability to install extensions, which also means easy installation of Userstyles! :/ There's a slight pause between loading the page and it turning blue on Chrome (none on Firefox with Stylish installed), but that's not a real problem when it looks so much nicer. :D I've also made the RuneScape Forums - Wide style work again, so the forums will fill up more screen space rather than hiding in the middle. As something small, I've also made a separate style to Define the Avatar Size on the RuneScape Forums. If you have the Runescape Website - Blue skin installed, you'll have it anyway, but what it does is set dimensions for the avatars on the RuneScape forum even before they have loaded (as Jagex should do anyway). This makes scrolling through multiple pages of forum threads significantly less annoying since the 'Next' button doesn't keep running away as more avatars load. <_< So, if you wanted it working again or simply want the RuneScape website to be nice and blue, be sure to check it out (and tell me about any problems you see outside the Adventurer's Log - I'll do my best to fix that asap). http://userstyles.org/styles/16009 http://userstyles.org/styles/18358

http://eu.wowarmory.com/_js/armory.js Line 612. :glasses:

Following a blog post a few weeks back, website styles on http://userstyles.org/ can now easily be used by those other than Stylish users. :D This means that if you use any of the following, you can use the hawt below linked styles... Stylish, Greasemonkey, Chrome [info], Opera [info], IE7Pro :D The hawt below linked styles Runescape Website - Blue - make the Runescape website all nice and blue, based on the Runescape Blue skin on these forums Runescape Forums - Wide - make the Runescape forums fill the width of your screen rather than being all squashed in the middle of it, with all that wasted space at the side Sal's Realm of Runescape - Wide - like the above for the Runescape Forums, but makes the main Sal's Realm site fully fit the width of your browser rather than having to 'suffer' the design that has been optimised for 800x600 Lots of other things - have a browse and I'm sure there'll be something else that looks hawt to you :D For pics... http://runescape.salmoneus.net/forums/blog...=1914&st=20 - Head from the oldest entries to the newest ones to see what various things look like. Some pics have sections that are slightly out-of-date (the RS homepage looks much nicer now as one example, more brown borders have been removed is another), but it should give a good overall idea. :D

Sorry that this is a slightly long post, but hopefully the tips will help make Firefox look that bit nicer and slightly easier / quicker to use. If you use IE, I ask why. If you use any other browser, it may be interesting, but not hugely useful. Various code snippits are for use with Stylish (or userChrome.css if you prefer that). This week has brought the release of Firefox 3.5 - great idea, but with problems. The first thing I did was head to this page to see a nice example video which shows off one of the new features... though it completely failed to load. Going back now, the video itself is working, indicating that it was possibly heavy server load, although the buttons at the bottom still aren't displaying properly and the volume control is abysmal. After that not-so great start, I noticed that whenever I moved the mouse near to the tab bar, an annoying little orange blob would appear - the new tab button. Ctrl+T works fine and you can double-click there to open a new tab anyway, so Google quickly provides a way to hide it... .tabs-newtab-button { display: none !important; } As well as this, one of the settings to do with whether the tab bar should be shown or not wasn't remembered, meaning a trip into Options to fix it. Since I'm a 'heavy' addons user with 40-50 enabled at a time, there were inevitably some that hadn't been upgraded. Thankfully one of the working addons I had installed included an option to bump all others to work with the current version of Firefox. After a restart to make these changes, I notice a problem - icons in the URL bar aren't showing. Ty to Raz for noting that it was probably an addon problem, so off I go and disable all my addons, slowly enabling them 4 at a time until the culprit shows itself... and it ends up being one that I probably expected, but really didn't want. Off I go to update the addon to a version I know to be buggy, but at least it makes the RSS and bookmark icons visible again. :D What the Runescape website supposedly looks like :P For some reason, it's been decided that if the URL bar is empty and not selected, 'Search Bookmarks and History' should show... why? :P Another bit of searching gave me a way to hide it. #urlbar[empty="true"] { color: transparent !important; } I also shoved this onto usestyles so people could find it there (12 installs in the first day :D) http://userstyles.org/styles/19165 Another change to the URL bar in 3.5 is that there's also text in the identity button on 'blue' certified sites such as AMo as well as 'green' ones such as Paypal. This reduces the amount of space in the URL bar for other things, so another userstyle hides the text, but still leaves the colours to indicate. #identity-icon-label { display: none; } Having obtained the basic functionality I wanted, I found myself reading through various Lifehacker articles about Firefox, so decided to check them out. This article showed how you can make the URL bar yellow on https sites, so off I went to install this style. /* highlight HTTPS URLs (works on Mac too, if a bit messier there) */ #urlbar[level] .autocomplete-textbox-container > * { background-color: #FFFFB7 !important; } /* Thanks, Ace_NoOne http://lifehacker.com/396582/turn-firefox-3s-location-bar-yellow-at-https-urls#c6299408 */ I then found this article detailing how to make better use of screen space, so did the various things to move the URL bar up. The one thing I've also done that isn't mentioned in the linked article is to hide the 'History' menu since I never use it anyway and if I want to go to the homepage, Alt+Home gets me there. After a bit more browsing and using the browser, I found that when bookmarking pages, the box that lets you choose where to save them was sometimes so narrow that folder names only had 3 or 4 letters - not great. To solve this problem, I created another userstyle which makes it easier to see where you're placing bookmarks. #editBMPanel_folderTree { min-height:425px !important; } #editBMPanel_nameRow { min-width:400px !important; } With all this tinkering, I decided it was probably worth fixing a problem with AiOS that I've had for a while but never got round to fixing. After Google produced nothing, I decided to look at the official AiOS forum where I found a couple of threads with explanations in. I tried things out as I thought was required, but ended up getting nowhere. After half an hour of trying out various things, I had another look at the very first thread I went to and had another go at following the instructions. In the end, by pressing one button differently, it fixed the problem which caused the sidebar not to show. ^_^ Not purely-3.5 based, but another key beautification I've made is a modification on this styl so the different colours are easier to see and certainly saves me several seconds each day. .autocomplete-richlistitem[type="bookmark"] { background-color: #FCFED1; color: #000000; } .autocomplete-richlistitem[type="favicon"] { background-color: #FCFEF4; color: #000000; } .autocomplete-richlistitem[type="tag"] { background-color: #FCFEAA; color: #000000; } .autocomplete-richlistitem:focus { background-color: #0A246A; color: #FFFFFF; } The one problem I have with 3.5 is that there's a single page within the ACP on Sals which I can't access because it will freeze, meaning I have to load it on another browser. Beyond that, however, I have a wonderful browser with amazing power behind a simple UI. Skin: Office 2007 Black Visible Addons: Stylish, All-in-One Sidebar, ColorfulTabs, Extended Statusbar, Faviconize Tab, IdentFavIcon, Flagfox, FoxyTunes, Organize Status Bar, Resizeable Textarea, Grab and Drag (not visible, but an absolute must-have) I would also hide the titlebar, but other people would complain that it's too hard to use Alt+F4 to close, clicking on the open task at the bottom of the screen to minimise and use another addon two clicks away to resize. :( Pre-3.5, I was having problems with Firefox freezing every hour and wasn't sure what was causing it. Over the cause of several weeks, I tried a number of different ideas to see if it would fix it. None did. As a last resort, I decided to browse with Tamper Data for a while to see if anything was being downloaded when Firefox froze. After an hour of browsing, it froze as expected, but this time there was evidence to show what the problem was... the Live Bookmarks were all trying to update themselves at once rather than one at a time, causing everything to freeze. I'd already offloaded my RSS-reading capabilities to Flock, so didn't actually need them to update. After a single Google search, I found this support page with a nice idea. Setting the value to 214700000 meant that they would never update again and the freezing problem sorted itself out (and startup time reduced my 2 minutes :D). So, if you have lots of Live Bookmarks and encounter problems with Firefox freezing hourly, head here, follow the instructions and set the value to 2 billion and install an addon such as Brief which will still update the Live Bookmarks, but in a controlled manner that doesn't freeze Firefox. :D

Does anybody know of any websites with a green design? If so, could you stick a link to it as a comment? The more, the merrier.