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Building a dynamic list for an HTML Marquee

Forums: Questions and Answers About Building Your Site
Created on: 07/22/11 08:01 AM Views: 1963 Replies: 17
Friday, July 22, 2011 at 8:01 AM

Hi all -

I have a few scrolling HTML marquees on my home page, and one of them is for missing classmates.

Rather than manually updating that list in the source, is there a way to dynamically build that list with some embedded SQL or something? I am looking to include all classmates who do not have an email address on their profile.

Thanks for any help!

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Friday, July 22, 2011 at 1:57 PM - Response #1

I'm looking forward to the answer on this one! It hints at some other things I'd like to see happen, like being able to imbed some of the right-side & stats page features/data onto other pages. It seems to fit into the Advanced Programmers category that's been talked about.

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Friday, July 22, 2011 at 3:24 PM - Response #2

I don't know why you would want to do this, but yes, there is a variable you can include anywhere you want a list of missing names to appear in your text content. Just put this $missing_names$ and the names will appear there.


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Friday, July 22, 2011 at 3:25 PM - Response #3

There is no special characters to embed the STATS or any right-side module like that. It must be a cut/paste operation.


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Friday, July 22, 2011 at 3:55 PM - Response #4

Thanks - that seems to work well... much appreciated.

As a followup, is there a list of these predefined variables available? That could be handy...

Thanks again,

Jim.

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Friday, July 22, 2011 at 3:56 PM - Response #5

By the way, which one of you admins actually MADE the change to my site? Not that I mind, it just caught me a little by surprise??

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Friday, July 22, 2011 at 4:08 PM - Response #6

Jim - The programmer who created this new ability for you probably needed an environment to test the functionality when he was programming the variable. His name is Mike. I'll be thanking him now! Smile


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Friday, July 22, 2011 at 4:11 PM - Response #7

Awesome - thanks guys! Much appreciated!

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Friday, July 22, 2011 at 4:13 PM - Response #8

Here is the list:

$missing_names$

It was just added and is the only one available


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Edited 07/22/11 4:35 PM
Friday, July 22, 2011 at 5:07 PM - Response #9

Wow! Thanks for the speedy help, guys!

Kyle, to answer your earlier question, when my classmates land on the home page I am trying to scroll through who is still missing right up front to prompt them to encourage missing folks to sign up at the site. I have a fair amount of traffic right now as we signing folks up for a reunion, but it's obviously critical to get as many updated email addresses as we can. Every little bit of communication helps...

Thanks again for such a speedy solution - you guys are awesome!

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Saturday, July 23, 2011 at 11:49 AM - Response #10

I love the "missing list", however it scrolls too fast. Can you click to stop it or slow it down? I'd like to do something like this for our website, I sure many others would too. How complex is it to set up? You are dealing with someone that still can't post photo galleries.

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Saturday, July 23, 2011 at 12:35 PM - Response #11

The HTML MARQUEE tag can have a delay. It is explained here

http://www.htmlmarquee.com/


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Saturday, July 23, 2011 at 2:39 PM - Response #12

Be sure to check Marquee with motion! XP users and IE8 may find it a bit sluggish. Test it with a few that use that combo and see what they say.

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Sunday, July 24, 2011 at 3:18 PM - Response #13

Thanks for the coolest code trick of the month. Idea Cool To keep it from sliding down the page due to page width restrictions, I put the marquee code inside a 1x1 table.

It's a nice touch to have it just below my "missing classmates" graphic on the home page, and it's self-maintaining.

I don't know for sure, but I believe it might help our home page move higher in the search results when a classmate searches on their name.

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Sunday, July 24, 2011 at 5:40 PM - Response #14

Tested my XP machine with IE8 and for sure that sort of Marquee - combined with the animated background - gives borderline response. If you run GoogleAnalytics you can see if that's a problem for your class.

The information is already on your missing page, so the marquee adds nothing extra for searches. Plus the profile page is also already indexed by Google.

Do not think this will help finding anyone since it requires patience and that is in short supply. I'd recommend linking to the Missing Classmates Link and make that an attractive part of the home page.

Not trying to bum you out, just pointing out some basic problems that are not obvious, esp if you have a newer machine.Wink

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Sunday, July 24, 2011 at 8:08 PM - Response #15

Jack Vermeulen wrote:


Not trying to bum you out, just pointing out some basic problems that are not obvious, esp if you have a newer machine.Wink

Not a problem - I like to make sure the site isn't overloading the various machines that use it. I have Google Analytics, so I can get an idea of the PC capabilities. The animated background is coming off soon, and I try to keep those small for performance reasons, anyway. I tried to test the marquee code in a hidden message forum first, but the "$missing_names$" variable wouldn't resolve the list there, so I reluctantly moved it to the home page.

http://tools.pingdom.com says my page loads in 5.2 seconds, but everyone's mileage varies.

I'm going to do more testing with browsershots.org, so thanks for testing with XP & IE8.

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Sunday, July 24, 2011 at 8:25 PM - Response #16

Load time and page response time are two different things. My page technically loads like a dog Exclamation But that's actually misleading since it's loading images in the background for the slide show.

Here's another one for testing that I think you will get a kick out of. Has a HUGE amount of detail. PLUS you can also select the browser used. I get an F on that one for the slideshow, lol.

http://www.webpagetest.org/

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Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 9:15 PM - Response #17

Jack Vermeulen wrote:

Here's another one for testing that I think you will get a kick out of. Has a HUGE amount of detail. PLUS you can also select the browser used. I get an F on that one for the slideshow, lol.

http://www.webpagetest.org/

Holy stats, Batman! Exclamation Shocked

There's enough statistical data there to keep a geek happily analyzing away for hours. I like being able to choose the software environment and location to run the test. There's much more information than I've seen at browsershots.org.

I'm switching to this site for testing from now on.

Thanks.

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