coffeeshopmenus.org

[Lemming]

The legend of FBN is alive!

We are not currently able to access FBN's email account but if you would like to send a menu to my email address lemming@coffeeshop.freeuk.com then I'll endeavour to put it on FBN's site in the right place.

At least for the time being, thanks to Alpha of Channels and FBN's family, I've been entrusted with the keys to the Menus site so I'll do my best to get it going again. A few years ago, these forums squatted on FBN's server so I know a bit of my way around the site's innards.

If you sent any menus to coffeeshopmenus gmail address in the past few weeks they may or may not be retrieved but if you send copies to me I'll put them up.

See here on FBN's site: Bud Tender's email

[Tokeing tom]

Brilliant news you are best person to take on this job and I'm sure fbn will rest happy knowing its in good hands ..keep up the good work Lemming ill post you some menus soon

[Lemming]

Brilliant news you are best person to take on this job and I'm sure fbn will rest happy knowing its in good hands ..keep up the good work Lemming ill post you some menus soon

Thanks mate. In practice, I may be the only person with the patience and mentality to attempt it! Making updates will be fiddly as the code relies on browsers being very forgiving. In time I may try to tidy up the innards while retaining the look and feel that FBN intended. That might make it easier for someone else to take over in the future.

It appears that the domain and hosting are covered for a while but that will become an issue in the future.

These events have made me conscious of my own mortality and what will happen to the ACD after my demise.

[Lemming]

First new menu!

Risky Business by RealFresh187

I haven't added it to the index page yet.

Please let me know if it displays OK.

Got another 10 or so menus to do yet ...

[jollylittlehun]

And we're off!

Displays fine Lemming. Only tiny thing is the header and footer menus (whos in town etc) go slightly off centre when you go down to mobile view.

[Lemming]

I've always looked at FBN's site on a big screen so I never really noticed how it looked on a phone.

The principle I'm trying to follow at the moment is to keep it looking exactly the same on the outside while I clean up the code on the inside so that it's easier to maintain. In some cases I've tried to make it do what I think FBN was aiming for. For the Risky Business page I did make a couple of small changes to make it work better on a phone. If you view on a big screen it should look exactly the same as it used to. If you compare it to another coffeeshop on your phone you should find it slightly better, if still not perfect.

The index page needs some work to make it better on a phone. For the time being I'm just trying to make the code readable enough to slot in the new latest posts.

Does anyone know how many of these there usually were? The link says 'Latest fifteen posts' whereas the heading says 'Latest eighteen posts'. I'm guessing that it was easier to add a new row of three and he forgot to update the link text.

[Lemming]

Latest: Tweaked the Risky Business page a bit more for phones. Also updated the index page but no improvements to the display there.

Anyone recognise the fonts that FBN used?

[jollylittlehun]

Is it the font for who's in town? It may just be old school clipart?

[Lemming]

Is it the font for who's in town? It may just be old school clipart?

It's the fonts used in graphics. The coffeeshopmenus.org on every menu pic, the shop names, navigation menus and so on. My guess is that FBN used some tool to generate these along with the accompanying styles and then pasted the code into the pages. So far I've used a fairly generic font in the menu pics. The shop names and stuff won't be an issue until there's a need to add a new shop.

I've done about 10 menus so far. It's a very fiddly job. Every coffeeshop page is different and reshuffling the tables on the index page is a pain. It gets easier as I go along though.

I'm becoming quite impressed with Chrome because it manages to display something sensible from very rebellious code. There are display elements within the head element, styles and other stuff between the head and body, lots of unterminated elements, etc. Kudos to FBN for breaking every rule and getting away with it!

For the ACD I have everything in a database so I only have to slot new info in once and then run a generator program that recreates the whole site, dropping the new info in everywhere it's required and reorganising old stuff around it. In time I'd like to do the same for FBN's site so that adding a new menu is much easier.

Alpha has managed to retrieve lots more menus sent to FBN so I'll work through those manually next. As I do this I get more familiar with the structure and can plan how to suck the data out of the site and into a database.

I haven't forgotten your kind offer to help, @jollylittlehun. Once I've got the site up to date I'll get in touch again and we can compare notes and ideas.

[jollylittlehun]

You're doing a good job Lemming. I don't envy you having to sift through someone else's code with no commits to guide you.

Having a quick look, it looks like the font could be comic. I've found a few that look the same just need to get the colour gradient.

I was going to try a reverse image search when I get home to try and track it down.

Will send you a few examples when I have them.

Anything you need in the meantime just let me know.

[Tokeing tom]

Fn great to get the menus back , good on ya Lemming

[Lemming]

Right, I think I'm up to date with the menus now, including all of the ones from January that Alpha forwarded. It was a bit of a slog and I celebrated with a well-loaded Volcano when I finished

Should be easier to keep it up to date now.

[Kermit]

Best news I’ve heard in a while, the Legend lives on

[Lemming]

Here is a 1st draft of a new coffeeshopmenus.org

It may look very similar to the existing site but it's actually completely new.

I've converted the whole site into data and then back into a website again. The method behind this madness is to make the site much easier to maintain.

This new site can be regenerated at the click of a button so slotting in a new menu or even a new shop is very easy. It's also much easier to modernise the design of the site. I've intentionally copied the look and feel of the original site for now but this should provide a stable platform to go in any direction in the future.

If you're familiar with HTML and CSS then you should see that the new version is dramatically simpler.

There's still some more work to do on this but I hope to make it live soon.

Comments and suggestions welcome, of course.