Re: [tlug] OT (MagLev & Expo-05

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Lyle" writes:

I can't really speak to the specifics at this time, but in general,
here are my opinions. 

    Lyle> Study time for me again.  I found this site:
    Lyle> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt.html

    Lyle> Is that a good reference?

Anything by Korpela would be excellent; he's one of the standard Web
resources for charsets and other internationalization techniques, and
ISTR his advice on web pages is pretty good (though academically
oriented, ie, he expects his viewers to be there for the content not
the flash).

    >> If you're targeting folks with keitais etc you might want to
    >> provide a separate set of images prescaled to minimize d/l
    >> costs, but that's extra work for you.

    Lyle> - has only text and no images of any shape or form.  (Only
    Lyle> text, but now you mention the keitai angle, I see where it
    Lyle> may be a bit too much text.)

Think "wiki".  Yah, I know, to really do a wiki requires more control
over the host than you may have, and that you take responsibility for
the CGI maybe getting hacked (or simply link spam).  However, there is
software out there that allows you to generate a wiki-like blog (ie,
less sequential than blogs usually are).  (Sorry, all the ones I know
of are Emacs-based, and require some additional scripting to be
useful.  But the concept is clearly feasible.)  It can get
undisciplined quickly, but that's the unit of text I think about.

OTOH, lots of people want the whole document in one go.  So that's
another case where multiple presentation formats may be worthwhile.
Note that people with a reasonable-sized screen will probably like
having images and a small amount of chatty or fluffy text up top, eg,
quote-of-the-day, while people with keitai or handhelds will want
newspaper-style get-to-the-point writing.

For the future I'm probably going to go to Zope to handle this kind of
stuff.

    Lyle> I wanted to avoid using a template and end up with a site
    Lyle> looking exactly like everyone else's,

That's more a matter of choosing a fitting template.  And you don't
have to use the same template everywhere on your site.  It's actually
rather easy to "theme" each area by using relative image links and the
like.  So all your Banpaku pages have the "dinky maglev" photo, and
your Spring pages have the "sakura" photo, but each is named (or
linked) head-photo.png in the relevant directory, so the same site
template can be used.

    Lyle> but I seem to have ended up with a rather sloppy site.  I'm
    Lyle> beginning to realize this, but how serious of a problem is
    Lyle> it?

Depends on what you're doing.  I can't imagine your site is any worse
than mine, since I have a captive audience.  Students sometimes say
it's ugly or klunky; they rarely say they can't find something (unless
it's a dangling link (^^;; )---that's good enough for me at this stage.

If you're looking to get customers and/or an audience (they're
different, of course!) you need to pay a lot more attention to having
an attractive site.  To keep them, your site must be easy to navigate.


-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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