![]() ![]() ![]() |
|
Finding your way around the site Navigation between
pages on this site can be done in more than one way. Firstly, the side
menu gives you a quick link to the top hierarchy of "zones:"
travel zone, gallery
zone and so on. Within each of these may be several other zones
which share the same topical content. For example, sheltering within the
port of the travel zone are the
tips zone, the DIY
zone, the travel CV zone and others.
Most pages have a "Jump to:" drop-down menu at the bottom:
The
tokezone supports "any damn browser." The site has been tested on four
different browsers in Windows - Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Mozilla 1.
I'll just run the version numbers past you in case they are important: IE 6 and 7, Opera 8 and 9, Firefox 1.5
to 3.0, and SeaMonkey 1.1.9. As Firefox/Mozilla approach the old Netscape 4 in their rendering of sites, I think Netscape
users won't find any startling problems. It also looks quite good on
Firefox 2.0 to 3.0, SeaMonkey 1.1.9, Mozilla 1.7 and Konquerer 3.5 in Linux, and is fully functional for
navigation and site searching running from that OS. No testing in the
Macintosh OS with either Camino or Safari yet: does anybody want to send me a report?
Although 800 x 600
screen resolution will work on the tokezone, 1024 x
768 will mean freedom from horizontal scrolling. I used to have the option
to allow visitors to remove the side menu and gain a little more screen
real-estate, but I have so much hot-linking to individual pages without the
side menu (chiefly from how the tokezone is
indexed in search engines like Yahoo! and Google) that I removed that option. As only around 15% of visitors have
monitors with an 800x600 pixel resolution, I thought it was time to
optimise the site for the majority. High colour (thousands of colours) is
OK for the photo gallery, and you'll probably get by with 256 colours on
the rest of the site, although it will look rather grainy.
del.icio.us is one of the most popular social bookmarking
sites. It allows you to keep track of what you read online, but also to
share those bookmarks with other users, letting others find the stories
you like. You can add short descriptions and keyword tags to each
article you bookmark – making it easier for you to find them again, for
others to find them, and for you to find other websites that might
interest you. Digg is another of the most popular community
news sites on the web. Users add articles to it and every user who then reads and likes that
article can vote for it ('digg' it). The most voted for articles then
climb the rankings of the most popular articles on the site.
Reddit is
a site where every vote and recommendation you give trains the site to
know what you like and dislike – so it can recommend other sites and
stories that it thinks you will like. You can submit
sites, vote on ones submitted by other users, and explore sites
recommended by the site and other users.
Newsvine is a news site where
the prominence of stories is decided by what users think is most
important, rather than by an editorial team. Like Digg, you can submit
articles, which will rise up the site's ranks the more votes they get.
Additionally, with Newsvine you can also write your own articles and comment on articles
by others. Today's date is shown at the top of the column on the homepage; if it's wrong, don't blame me. The information comes from the date set on your own computer, read by a simple JavaScript then outputted as text to that place. So try and fix your computer's date and time using the Control Panel first! Multimedia content
(music on the toke-cards, video and audio clips) need the
appropriate plug-in for your browser. The Firefox browser in particular
can be fiddly when trying to configure a plug-in for the e-cards' music.
Opera and IE nearly always play these cards without problem. You will
need to have the Flash player and QuickTime player installed as an
absolute minimum - if they are not detected, you should get a message of
where to download from on the page in question. Site search is
implemented through a search engine loaded at the server, so nothing
needs to be downloaded to your computer before you can begin searches. The search engine has more options available for in-depth
searching across the 800+ pages of this site. You can access these (and
advice for successful searches)
by clicking "Advanced Search" on the homepage, or the
search zone button on the side menu from
any page. This search tool searches the entire site except for
the current tokeblog (December 2007-March 2008). To search that
blog, type your search term into the small box at the top-right corner
of the blog page and hit <enter>. The only cookies sent to
your browser from the tokezone site are
"session" cookies from my hit counter or specific cookies to
remember your e-card selection or photo favourite as you move through
certain pages. These
cookies normally expire once you leave the
site. If you received a
"long-lasting" cookie
visiting here, it is because you used the shortcuts
wakeup.to/ke or kickme.to/toke These
shortcuts have their uses (and I'm surprised how many people continue to
come here through them), but as well as cookies, you'll have advertising
popups to fend off with these shortcuts. "Kickme.to" is particularly bad
for this, sending popups and cookies on a timed basis. I've been unable to change the
kickme.to/toke shortcut to the new site
address, so you will land on the old hosting page for this site,
quadranet.org, after being redirected.
Use the main site URL and you will always reach the site: I'm always looking for
feedback and suggestions on the site, so if you have a comment, please
contact me here.
Technical notes: Style sheets (CSS) have become the regular way of html writing code for corporate websites, and many small private sites are following this practice. The attraction is that font types and sizes (plus colours, and many other aspects of the page's appearance) can be specified in one central location, simplifying updating. This does not necessarily make it simpler for the READER. Internet Explorer, when rendering a CSS-defined site, will be generally unable to resize fonts using the "size" command ("View > Font Size"). Many websites feature tiny, 8-point fonts (you're reading 10-point Verdana now, and that's small enough, isn't it?), and this CSS tyranny of typography at once removes one advantage the hypertext medium had - that the viewer was in control. As a way around this, you can graduate to a better browser such as Firefox or Seamonkey, which will allow you to resize any font simply by rotating your mouse wheel while holding down the SHIFT key. As a stopgap measure in Internet Explorer, so you can choose your own font size (you have a choice of five) - open the "Internet Options" menu and click "Accessibility" at the bottom. Tick the box "Ignore font sizes specified on Web pages." |
|
|