Optimize RPGWatch for widescreen?

[Kostas]

Hi guys i'm new around here.I learned about RPGWatch after the death of RPGDot witch i have been visiting every day just for the news .I liked RPGDot's layout and it was looking good in my 22 inch widescreen monitor but RPGWatch aint exactly great
is there any way to optimize the site for my 1680 x 1050 resolution?I am using Firefox 3 i have tried zooming with FF and the "Large Zoom" but still it's not very good.Any help would be appreciated.Sorry for my English and for the stupid question but if i am going to make this site my homepage i would like it to look better

 

[Dhruin]

Welcome to RPGWatch and I hope you enjoy it here.

We decided on a fixed-width format, I'm sorry - Arhu or Myrthos might remember the conversation better than I do. On the bright side, none of the space is wasted on ads, redundant forum links and years-old game resources.

 

[Gorath]

Unfortunately that´s not trivial. As you may have noticed the content is already displayed correctly at the moment. Allowing the site to stretch would ruin half of our layout and it would create a lot of horizontal white space. Maybe Arhu has a creative idea. A new skin with a second news column could be a solution, or more articles.

 

[Toaster]

I like centered fixed-width layouts, makes content easier to read and avoids the feeling of emptiness i get from many dynamic width sites. Only a few, like Wikipedia, where there's a lot of content to display manage it well, in my opinion.

 

[Arhu]

The site is already optimized for large resolutions: it doesn't stretch over the whole page.
Ok, in different words, we made a conscious choice to limit the width, because text is more readable that way.

Pragmatic solution: don't browse in fullscreen on a widescreen monitor.
Aesthetic solution: a graphical background? (would increase loading times)
Complicated solution: 6 column layout for widescreen resolutions?

And another solution that I'm using myself: Use WinSplit Revolution. It's a program that lets you easily split windows on your screen into chunks with just the press of some keys on the numpad. There really is no need to browse in full-screen on a widescreen monitor, you could very well use one half for other stuff.

 

[Kostas]

Thanks guys i will probably stick to WinSplit Revolution cause it does just what widescreen monitors need.I never thought the creators of the site would be interested in the problems of a newbie but that just shows how good you people are.Thank you again site+admins great RPGWatch FTW.
Sorry for my English

 

[Thaurin]

I always read RPGWatch at home on my 36" LCD widescreen TV. I have no problems with it being like that, but I have it zoomed in somewhat, as I'm further away from the screen. Having the text stretch out over the entire width of the screen would make it harder to read lines of text, in my opinion. This is actually an industry standard, I think.

 

[shadow_hk]

Hello everybody, in my opinion the displayed width (and whatever else) could be changed from user side with the use of "Stylish" add-on for Firefox - http://userstyles.org/stylish/ for example but I'm not familiar with vBulletins or CSS itself enough to find appropriate code myself. Maybe someone else will help.

Opera browser should be able to do this kind of changes in stylesheet itself.