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About Pete Town
All 40.000 commercials in the commercial archive are in Apple's free and fab Quicktime player format.
You should download Quicktime if you don't already have it.
Reason the URL changed back to the old: Ad-blocking software was far too effective and blocked all of ad-rag.com because it read "ad-". Instead of spending huge amounts of time teaching people how to unblock our site in Norton Internet Security and Adblock, I changed URL's since "commercial-archive" is not blocked by default.
More on that here: Norton Internet Security kills entire websites, but fails to hide actual ads. and when we switched domains last year we announced that too.
Reason the look changed so drastically: I was getting stupid hate comments about how "ugly" the old site was and how it "caused headaches" and other crap like that. Ok, I get it, it was ugly.
I thought it was pretty functional, but there you go. We now have a new backend and I'm working hard to make it do all the same things our old backend did.
Ugly? I always really liked the look of the old site.
But this new look is nice too :)
You did!? Wehey! Thanks! :) That's not what I used to hear from peeps, and while I could change the looks slightly I was pretty stuck in that table-structure with boxes and things (always and everywhere) due to the backend. Which in theory, I don't have to be here. But now I might have painted myself into a corner on that by jumping on new solutions too soon... Oh, that's another story. ;P
I like the new clean thing which I think is what those "ugly"-people were after but I'm hating the search-issues so I'm working on fixing that. Only when that "re-construction" logo changes at the top will I be signaling "ok, sorta done here". Right now there are many things I want to make a lot better. It doesn't function as well as the old did in some immediate user-gratifying ways but it can (and better) once some issues get sorted. I do like that it makes just plain old browsing, that is just wandering through topics, a lot easier for people. (and I've gotten positive feedback on that)
But at least it's purdy.
I like it. It's lemony fresh.
Holy feck is it ever different.
Is this the thread where old users report for duty? I'm here.
I feel lost. Which way to the porn?
This is great!
This is ....new.
I love it!
When it comes to websites I prefer functionality and speed over looks. The old site was fine with me.
Of course that is the opposite to how marketing works, so perhaps many commercial fans prefer style over substance.
I liked a lot of things about the old site worked, like the search, how it was sectioned, and stuff like that, though the backend did cause trouble at times. Make that quite a lot of trouble at times. It was after all, getting rather old. What I really disliked about it, apart from being quite stuck in a table-layout that was locked down and could never change to bleeding edge CSS which loads faster and is kinder to all browsers, was that people would email me comments of how fucking ugly it was all the time. If they weren't doing that, they were complaining about this site whenever it was mentioned on other sites in the comments there. Sure, one or twenty you could ignore, but picture this going on for years and every improvement is met with dead silence and soon after that another comment about how ugly the site is shows up.
So here I've spent an enormous amount of time going from one system to another hoping to please me (better backend) and those people (prettier front) and I didn't get much improvement on the backend, the search is still wonky enough to drive me insane, and it turns out the silent majority who hung out here never minded how the old place looked in the first place.
Damn. I should have left well enough alone, aye? ;)
I'll fix the search, I promise. I've been working on is since we switched.
Ok, I sorta take all that back. It sounded testy and I didn't mean it to be. I take the testyness back. Besides I just got another "nice redesign" email and that made me want to make damn sure a few actual bugs and things that plain bug me get fixed asap around here. So hey, how about listing things you miss/want/think could be better?
I'll start. CSS bug - the page renders awfully long and it's driving me batty. Try scrolling down and you'll see that in Firefox, Safari AND IE6&7 the page has a long white bit below the footer. I have no idea where this comes from or why. It must be killed dead. It's driving me nuts!
Backend bug - all three current searches are inadequate, as neither nail a search "most recent first" and "exact title" really well. It's also why I have three searches, I'm trying to edit at least one of them to be perfect, or at least as good as the old one. Though I know even a perfect search can't help people who like browsing (which is why the new "browsy" setup is making it easier for those folks to just wander around the archives). This is partly due to the fact that we use categories (module) rather than taxonomies (module) and I'll glady accept advice from anyone versed in drupal on this.
Another backend bug - with Unix timestamps it makes thing dated before January 1 1970 not appear in archives and searches and stuff even though we have plenty of ads from back then. This is gonna be a tricky one to fix. Le sigh.
Edit by Dabitch:
I think you meant to start a new thread, so here it is: THE WORST LOGO IS THE NEW LONDON 2012 OLYMPICS.
I wonder how they found the time to complain so much about how "ugly" the old site was while being so busy holding down jobs and living their lives away from the computer. Oh. Right.
Just one request, if you would consider it. Could the archives
be (optionally) presented in the old format (or something equivalent)
where an entire year of ad links could be seen on one page,
instead of like a hundred in the new format? It is now really
difficult to find a single ad or browse thru them.
Thanks in advance.
Uh.. Lemme see - you mean instead of having archive years like this:
http://commercial-archive.com/archive/1992
where there's a "teaser" for each post (headline + first image + whatever the first lines of text is), and then you can go to "next page" either once or twohundred times depending on how many ads/posts are in that year...
You'd rather have the old, just "headline" - which = a link and then below that, next headline, and next headline and so on? Right?
Beacause sure, I can do that, I just thougt that being able to see the screendump of the ad would help in browsing, mebbe. I mean, people might know they're looking for skittles 1998 but there twenty skittles in a row, so which one is it? :)
Also, not enterily sure that I can fit a year on one page - sure with the headline = link only thing, it won't take up so much space so it's possible that a year fits on a page, but some years are really really huge so they might be at least one or two "next page"... thingies.
But yeah, I (think) that I can do headline only, everyone like that?
Oh god, the archives include forums, that's just *wrong* - gonna get messy! Eeep!
Yeah, precisely; thanks!
(IMHO, the forums can probably be dropped from the archives, at
least for the good old "dense" archive retrieval method.)
By the way, that's even what's wrong with Google. They should have
a density control, where you could see a (user-chosen) number of
links on each page crammed as tightly as you like up to some
reasonable max. One size fits all is never good in user interfaces.
Yeah, I hear ya - hmm, maybe I can do a choice thing! Pics or no pics? CoooL! *gets exited*
But the forums should just go, I think they just mess things up - they should have their own searches and archives IMHO. Else they'll just get in the way when browsing for ads. I think we all agree on that. :)
(was trying to work on it today but people kept bugging me to work at work, I mean, on their work - go figure! ha!)
Ok, so here's my first try.. a little something like this?
http://commercial-archive.com/monthlyarchive
So, yeah it's backwards right now with oldest years first , and I set it to show 150 on a each page though I can up that to infinity or 350 or whatever, I was just trying to keep it from getting silly - so, once you grab a year and month , for example March 2003 where there's 600 odd posts you get a few pages to go through (see the URL? 200303, geddit? march 2003!) but then most others are one page like, Feb 2001, and the Monthly archive page itself tells you how many posts to expect.
Oh, and the forums are not in that archive.
Clearly, that first page with month/year links can be prettyfied since it's so long with the dots and all, but what do you think? Good start?
Do the archive-headline links need more useless info? The old one might have mentioned who posted it and how many had seen/read it but that might just clutter things up, because who cares really? ;9
.. anyway, yeah.. if I do a year those pages will get really really long - didn't the old one do months in each year as well? *checks* Yep, yep it did.
Oh, and I've killed that CSS bug that made the pages render really long too, wehey!
Wow that was quick. Yep, perfect--don't change a thing. Thanks.
Take a vacation.
(One thing I always thought people should do more of to
present large amounts of information is
things like the Tag Clouds used in del.icio.us)
Any chance of changing the general background color
to something
darker than just plain
stark Google-White?
It's really bright and hard on the eyes.
(At least for the archives, where the background
is always prominently visible when viewing or studying
something.)
Maybe charcoal or light grey or
or navy-blue or at
least a darker yellow or beige.
Would anyone out there object?
Thanks in advance for considering this.
(I know it's a favor.)
Hmmm, maybe I could do a light green in the archives, or that beige-sandy color we used to have. I'll have a look into it this weekend. Busy busy now, havea deadline for four presentations on Monday. Wish me luck! ;P
OK good luck!
Yeah, the old beige-sandy is good. Thanks again.
Please Dabitch, help me.
The Adland support is awful. I'm a Super Adgrunt (1 year subscription) but the system keeps telling me I'm not, etc. Please talk with you IT guys, and clear that for me please. It's been 3 months not working, and with no contact back from Adland people.
Help!
Heya
I'm IT support ( I do e v e r y t h i n g here), I received an email from you today that I've just logged on to reply to - I see that we've spoken before about it, I have replied to you before but to other email adresses connected to the account that you are registered with. ( @mafalda.com for example ), I think we've even spoken more than twicve on this same subject, though I wonder if you get my emails (maybe I get spamtrapped) since you are back again.
I'll email once more, now to that gmail account that you emailed me from last.
Oh, I think spamtrapped is the case here. My primary email is that @mafalda where I've never recieved any response from adland or you! This is strange, and the gmail account have nothing too. Very strange. What can we do?
Thank you,
guime
Well, you've got me on the line now. Check your status by looking at this film: http://commercial-archive.com/node/139794
and you'll notice that the "sweetie" message will no longer appear for you.
I'll email in detail what happened tomorrow afternoon - sorry about the delay in explaining but I'm 600 kilometers away from my office right now (where I can access everything unlike from this handheld computer) and need to get up at four in the morning to catch a train so I'm a bit.. Wish I had time off. ;P
Hey Guime, did you get my emails now?
(That felt like I should have been saying "can you hear me now?" like some cellphone ad, ha!)