Yeah, well, I'm older now too, and I know better than to let you ignore my argument under the pretext of 'Kyle trusts me.' He trusted you, then you nearly quit, then you sorta came back and now it's all about you.
This one's for keeps, Seany boy. I'm not going to back down anymore.
You insist your code is not spaghetti code. Very well, allow me to demonstrate.
First thing, on the main page, the sidebar is longer than the rest of the page and requires copious scrolling to see all of it. Doubly, triply so in the code. This is made worse by the fact the Blog and News overlap, the Updates page has a bizarre format which denies access to a month if it has no content without telling you which months have update content, and, oh, the most important part so far: there's no real shared page layout, but a constantly morphing amorphous sea of links, headers, and <p>s.
Now I'll give you that no one could convert all of it by hand by now, but just a small sampling shows a lot of half-empty pages which don't even have any Mario related information.
Oh... but now... the Era pages.I'm gonna pretend I'm joe newbie. Lessee... the old layout, last seen near that ancient April Fools thing, had nice visible buttons. Today? We got some half-visible, buried links. Okay, let's say I find it. *CLICK* I'm looking at Wii Revolution.
I am greeted by:
* An unnecessary repetition of 'SMBHQ' with its own grand picture
* An image to show that I actually went where I wanted to ("Wii Revolution")
* The archived old sections, which don't even have any Wii Revolution-relevant stuff
* And now a list of stuff.
I won't even check if it's recent or not, all I'll be looking for now is, like any website viewer, is content. So I click on Mario Hoops 3 on 3.
I am greeted by a layout which takes up about 1/5th of my screen size with small text on it that is right now suggesting I go and buy the game. Okay... what's the game about? Lessee... instruction manual is good... screenshots... etc.
The only problem is that the layout crushes it all down to nearly nothing size-wise, making it awkward and weird to look at things with. Not to mention each subsection is its own html page. Oh, and at this time I should mention that, for the billionth time, the layout and coding style keeps changing from page to page.
Which is the exact problem I'm talking about. The Mario Eras are a labyrinthine complex built to warehouse what could be displayed on one, maybe two full size pages tops. Furthermore, if we wanted to be serious about Mario information, we'd use a database, so that staff members could just add it in--yes I know about the whole 'no SQL' thing. We'd just use a text-file based database instead. Or something. Anything that would simply display more than one 5th of the information miiight attract more people to this forum than the old diehards and me.
See, the secret is that all these separate files are fine to a certain point, but there becomes what is known as a sort of bottleneck: split something up into too many fragments, too many file pieces, and then it becomes a complex game to match them all up.
It may all make sense to you, but to the viewer they've just had to go through a maze (with dead ends peppered about) to find about 1/2 of the information they'd get elsewhere.
It's not about me trying to break your spirit. That would have been an entirely different course of dialogue. I'm trying to get you to see where things have gone wrong and help fix them. You have the capability to fix these problems, but you stubbornly ignore help of any kind and refuse to be wrong.
So I figure it's only best for SMBHQ I drive you to examine the flaws in the SMBHQ layout rather than ignore them, for if you simply applied your knowledge appropriately we wouldn't be having this discussion.