Ticalc.org just turned 20 years old today. I remember joining that site in late 2001 when its archives were down then came back a few months later to finally see them back up. I didn't realize at the time the site had been around for so long already (back then, a site usually disappeared entirely after 2-3 years). I remember in 2006 when I was amazed to see it was still around after a decade, but time flows very fast it seems. Today, ticalc is still the main TI community hub for calculator file downloads and contributions and it's still regarded as the center of the TI community by many.
Fun fact: Their current design dates back in August 1999 and still uses uppercase HTML tags (I was sure they were removed a few years ago, but maybe
@Travis re-added them for the 20th anniversary?). They also didn't use ads until November 2006 (they had an april fools joke in 2001 where they added them)
Anyway, here's the news and congratulations to ticalc.org for having been around for so long. http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/148/148917.html
Back when I received my first graph calc back around 2005, a TI-83+, of course I had to check about it on the Internet, and of course one of the first sites I found, also the best site that isn't TI's website itself, is TICalc.org. Glad to see it's still the center of the community as when I found it in 2005, with its intemporal design. Many websites don't last as long as TICalc.org did, and I think it's pretty crazy.
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on June 22, 2016, 12:58:53 AMFun fact: Their current design dates back in August 1999 and still uses uppercase HTML tags (I was sure they were removed a few years ago, but maybe @Travis re-added them for the 20th anniversary?). They also didn't use ads until November 2006 (they had an april fools joke in 2001 where they added them)
The tag style just depends on who wrote that piece of HTML at the time (the news posts, for instance, are edited in raw HTML and injected into the appropriate page templates, which themselves contain even older HTML code that rarely changes). All the original markup uses uppercase tags, but as parts of the site were added and edited by different people, some of them were used to other styles and used them (or in my case, just got lazy and stopped bothering with caps :P). If you look around, you'll probably find pages with random mixes of upper/lowercase tags as well as other weird style inconsistencies. ;)
Ah I see. Strangely enough I thought the main page went to lowercase a few years ago. Maybe I looked at the wrong page while clicking "Show source", though. Nonetheless, this is old-school lol.
What would be funny is if on 20th anniversary ticalc.org changed their design to something that looks similar to the 1st or 2nd theme, but modernized. I remember when I added retro themes to Omnimaga back then.
By the way, did you know that Ticalc.org still has some sort of mailing lists, on Google Groups this time? They're just not very active compared to back in the days:
http://www.ticalc.org/community/lists/
I should try to update the TI-Story community-wide forum post stats page to include mailing lists at some point (which should be easy with the archived lists since the total message count by year is shown), but then that would mean I should do the TI-Nspire group as well.
I think I'm actually on one of the mailing lists, I tried to get some help but the inactivity sort of foiled me.
Either that or I joined Omnimaga :P
Yeah the issue is that the mailing lists were closed in late 2003 (they were still kinda open, but no longer public on Ticalc.org website, so few people knew they still existed) and then it took almost a decade before they open again in Google groups form. It's kinda hard to regain an audience after a 10 years hiatus during which the audience moved elsewhere. :P
Yeah, I think there was one person active when I tried it, which was around 2 years ago before I joined Cemetech.
EDIT: I'm pretty sure the only reason I found it because I was clicking every link in the submenus of ticalc :P
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on June 29, 2016, 06:02:23 AM
Yeah the issue is that the mailing lists were closed in late 2003 (they were still kinda open, but no longer public on Ticalc.org website, so few people knew they still existed) and then it took almost a decade before they open again in Google groups form. It's kinda hard to regain an audience after a 10 years hiatus during which the audience moved elsewhere. :P
Yeah, adding to that problem, I figure, might be that the lists are probably not very visible on the site. I feel that a lot of important things on ticalc.org are kind of hidden or hard to find in the site navigation considering our current target audience. I always wondered if we should do some sort of restructuring of the site content, but I haven't yet put much thought into it.
Yeah that was always an issue I think. Ticalc.org has mailing lists and forums, but to access the mailing lists you had to click through 4 links or so, same for the forums, and the forums listed all thread posts in one topic rather than showing a topic list. One issue in particular is that new discussion threads were sorted from oldest to newest instead of the other way around. Eventually it got so messy and inactive that everyone stopped using them.
I actually spent more than a year on just ticalc before joining *omni for axe help*. I sortof wish omni existed earlier. I actually came across the cemetech forum before omnimaga, but the horrible layout turned me away :P
I don't see what's wrong with the Cemetech layout, other than post dates being hidden on mobile view.
IDK it looked (and still does) very weird . Aslo now that I remember, I first browsed the site on mobile, and on mobile basicly the whole page was an ill formated and basically spammed your eyes with text. Its hard to explain.
Well, there is the intro text but CW has one too :P