MMO-Champion is the biggest news website of World of Warcraft. The main page is viewed millions times a month and was done with old school tables. As a result, it was really slow to load but worse, all the content had to be loaded before being displayed.
The first thing I did was to rewrite the whole main page template using clean and valid HTML + CSS. The goal was to make it compatible up to IE6. The rendering was so much pixel perfect that nobody noticed a change when we pushed it live.
The main challenge was to rewrite the menu. Previously, the menu was using several images that were cut in order to make it easy to implement it in CSS. However, it was a torture to add another menu. The new one is now using a single image that is basically a screenshot of the rendered menu.
In order to save bandwidth, if the browser is supporting HTML5, instead of storing the menu state in a cookie, it is saved under the new localStorage feature.
optimization
Cineartistes.com
Philippe Pelletier has been gathering information of people working on the cinema industry for years as a hobby. He realized that people could be interested in his work and he could share it over the internet.
The website Cineartistes.com is a database of biographies and filmographies of actors, film directors. Some of them contains a gallery of photographies and film covers. There is a section dedicated to awards (Oscars, Césars ...).
There are two points that make the project unique:
Content is parsed from a Word Document. Philippe Pelletier had thousands of already written Word documents when he asked me to create the website. What he has to do is copy & paste from Word to a textbox. The parser analyzes the text and automatically adds italic, bold and color for filmographies.
Names in biographies are automatically linkified. In order to have a smooth navigation in the site, artists names in the biographies are transformed into links. This is working retroactively and without any special markup for the content manager.
Conference Delphi
Together with Alban Perillat-Merceroz, we organized a one-hour presentation of the programming langage Delphi followed by 3 hours of exercises. The objective was to introduce Delphi to the students in order for them to be able to start working on their year project.
Students had no more than two months experience of programming with Caml, a functional (opposite of imperative) language. The first part of the presentation was a comparison between the two paradigms and how to move from interpreted to compiled code. Then, a brief explanation of the various structures of the languages and how to organize files around the project has been explained.
Even if the conference was not mandatory and took place a friday 9pm, there were about 200 students attending. They have been split into two room and attended the presentation made by Alban and myself. Right after, they moved to the computer rooms and started working on the exercises.
The exercises focused on very basic things like function definition, for, while and structures for the most advanced. We formed a team of 15 people helping everyone out. Overall, this has been a success. You can download the Presentation Slides (Powerpoint 2007), Exercises subject (PDF) and Correction (ZIP).
