Just a quick update. We will have a themeless SPECTRA preview soon. We are about to move it to a more powerful server in order to test for multiple coin formats.
-James
Themeless!
I'm not a great designer but I've got quite a few hours into the default CSS just to achieve a generic but functional look. Designers will understand how that goes for sure. But I'm going to change the name from "Default" to "Themeless" now!
Seriously though, with that groundwork in place I hope some of you guys will be able to do great looking styles for this.
Architecturally, I've built in some text file inclusions so that non-coders don't have to get into the script code to adjust the headers and footers to suit, adding other elements around the 'working' bits will be pretty simple, as the page scripts invoke the block explorer functionality in, well, blocks for the most part.
And for those that will want to get into the guts of it and I've got a pretty good separation between the functional and presentation layers. All of the rendering code is centralized so you don't have to go hunting through every file in the package to find the parts you want to change.
I did a massive cleanup and re-factor this week and cut the size of the code base by over 50%, which just means 50% less places for bugs to hide. It's all very procedural and loaded with comments (can you have too many comments?) so hopefully everyone who is interested will be able to follow the code and do what they like with it. One thing about open source is you can't please everyone, but I hope in the end this tool will be seeing plenty of use, and fill a large gap in the current open source tool set.
I'm currently trying to load a HBN block chain into a SPECTRA database. 2.5m blocks of POS/POW hybrid block chain. It's a bear, but since a couple of initial issues have been addressed things seem to be going smoothly, if not quickly.
SPECTRA is working great with SPEC (basic POW only) and if it does well with a POW/POS hybrid (HBN) it should be fine with a fully POS chain as well I think. Soon it will be ready for a first release, and we'll see what kind of bugs other people can find with it. I'm sure there are a wealth of surprises waiting in the many available block chains.
I'm working on installation documents as well. Ehh, well, I'm on the forum, 'cause who doesn't love writing documentation, am I right?
It's to the point where getting additional eyes on it is exactly what it needs. HBN is taking forever (it looks like it will literally take several days to load) so maybe we'll see about letting you guys have a look at the development server before that's fully loaded.
Updates Soon!
