What you need for the site, and how to get the best from your visit:

about me and this website

Finding your way around the site

Navigation between pages on this site can be done in more than one way. Firstly, the top menu gives you a quick link to the upper hierarchy of topics: travel, online privacy, music, cannabis and the catchall "More..." category. Although a click on any button on the green bar here will take you to the main page in that topic, each button with a tiny arrow on the right is also expandable downwards. The full menu of site offerings is available from these drop-down sections. It's a fairly standard navigation system, but it does need JavaScript running in your browser to be able to use it. Most pages also have a "Jump to another zone:" drop-down menu at the bottom of the content, with a more summary selection of choices:


Just click on the arrow next to the menu, then click "Go!" to navigate to that page. Finally, some zones spread over more than one page (the online and gallery zones are two examples of zones which do this) and have extra drop-down menus which let you  navigate within the zone itself. It probably sounds a lot more complicated than it is - just click around and you'll find your way. Should you want a simplified overview of the site to see what's on offer, take a look at the site map in the helpfully-named site-map zone.

Information about the pictures in the photo gallery is given as a tooltip - hover your mouse pointer over the banner to see details of where and how the photos were taken:



 

What's new in 2010

With tokezone celebrating its tenth birthday, it was time for a change in the navigation structure. The side menu bar has been a boon to visitors wanting fast navigation but a hinderance for getting the site properly indexed in search engines. Another obvious drawback was the loss of a slice of screen area to the left. Additionally, the frameset began giving errors to people arriving from a search link with later editions of any Gecko-based browser (Firefox, SeaMonkey); if they were directed to the parent page of the frameset, only the side menu loaded, and the browser told them (erroneously) that the site couldn't be displayed as it uses invalid compression.

Many types of top menu design were mused over. I wanted something which gives more complete access to the tokezone pages than fourteen buttons on a static side menu. The navigation device I picked came with its own particular obstacle to universal access (using a dynamic HTML menu with JavaScript needs the user to have JS activated in the browser) but seems to offer the best balance of utility-disutility (more than 95% of visitors have Javascript enabled and those which don't can still use the bottom, drop-down menu to get around) from anything else that could have worked. I'm happy with the menu change (for now at least).

If you need help with enabling JavaScript in your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera) look at this page.

Renaming the page titles in the menu as something more directly understandable than "...zone" (ramble zone, maurice zone, etc.) will - I hope - empower users to get where they want faster. The original, rather cryptic names are still there on the bottom menu, but I may revise them in the future.

Browsers and screen resolution

The tokezone supports "any damn browser." The site has been tested on four different browsers in Windows - Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox and SeaMonkey 2. I'll just run the version numbers past you in case they are important: IE 6, 7 and 8, Opera 8, 9 and 10, Firefox 1.5 to 3.6, and SeaMonkey 2x. It also looks quite good on Firefox 2.0 to 3.6, SeaMonkey 1.1.18, Mozilla 1.7 and Konquerer 4 in Linux, and is fully functional for navigation and site searching running from that OS. There are plenty of (seemingly-contented) visitors to the site who use Safari, so there should be no problem either there or with the Web-Kit browser from Google, Chrome.

IE and most other browsers shows the rollover colours and buttons correctly; only IE, Opera and Konquerer (of the browsers I've tested the site with) show the top menu with its unfold animation. (When I say IE, I mean both Microsoft's Internet Explorer and browsers such as Maxthon and Avant Browser which use Internet Explorer as the rendering engine.)

Although 800 x 600 screen resolution will work on the tokezone, 1024 x 768 will mean freedom from horizontal scrolling on all the pages. Only around 5% of site visitors have monitors with an 800x600 pixel resolution anyway, a figure set to drop further as older CRT monitors are replaced. 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.


"Send to a friend," rating and social bookmarks buttons





"Send to a friend" button (1), rating stars (2) and "social bookmarking" buttons (3)

You can rate the content on certain pages with a simple 1-5 stars system. Just click the number of stars you want to give the page and your vote will show. As your IP address is also recorded, you may not vote on this particular page a second time.

"Social bookmarking" icons can be found on many tokezone pages. These bookmarking sites easily let you store, tag and share links across the Internet. You can share these links both with friends and people with similar interests. You can also access your links from any computer you happen to be using. When you have read a page that you want to save for future reference or share with other people, click on one of these icons, which offer some of the most popular sites. If you are not sure which bookmarking site the icon represents, hover your mouse pointer over it.

Some brief information about the bookmarking sites:

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. StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles. Web pages are presented when the user clicks the "Stumble!" button on the browser's toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which Web page to display based on the user's ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests.

All of these bookmarking sites are free to use, but require you to register. Once you have registered you can begin bookmarking. As you can see, each of the sites works slightly differently, so have a look at more than one if you are just starting in your bookmark collection, and find out which service offers what you need. You can read more about social bookmarking on the Wikipedia.

The "Send to a friend" page

Another way to let people know about the page you saw is to use the "Send this page to a friend" button. Clicking on this allows you to send an email to a single friend (including perhaps a short, personal message) with a link from the page you just visited. This is a faster and simpler way if you want to notify just one person about the page. Any email addresses you enter on the form will remain private - this site is a spam-free zone!


The "Quick Poll"

This is a two-click voting system which appears on many pages. There is more than one active Quick Poll question at any one time, and past polls which are closed. To reach other active poll questions click on the Next poll >> link:

When you vote in the Quick Poll, your IP address is recorded to prevent multiple votes in the same question (you can vote again in another Quick Poll question). These votes and IPs are never correlated, so your voting choice remains anonymous and private. You can see archived (and hence closed) polls in a popup when you click the View past polls link. It's about as simple as I could make it!


Downloads and formats

You can download documents from this site in Microsoft Word (doc and rtf), Adobe Acrobat (pdf) and Microsoft compiled HTML help (chm) formats. The doc format is probably most suited to those running Windows computers, although you may have a compatible word-processing program such as Open Office which will read this proprietary Microsoft format in Linux or Macintosh. The rtf format is readable in either a browser or a word-processing program. Adobe Acrobat's pdf is a universal format for documents, so irrespective of your operating system (Windows, Linux, Macintosh) you'll almost certainly find something on your computer to read it with.

The chm format is less universal, but still multi-platform. It is suitable for reading on your desktop, laptop or pocket computer, and is also readable by most tablet PCs and e-book readers. The full text is searchable. Windows users will already have an embedded help system from Microsoft for reading chm files, while the Firefox browser can read chm files with a simple add-on. Macintosh users have a choice of the open-source Chamonix for OS X or Chmox - both free.

If you are having problems with the downloads, don't right-click on the link - the download link works indirectly through a script which loads your file. Don't use a download accelerator. Try downloading with a different browser or from another location (different ISP).


Copyright

Content on this site is available for use under the Creative Commons non-derivative, non-commercial use with attribution licence. This means you can use the resources (pictures, text, downloaded files) here as long as you don't change them in any way, that you don't use them for commercial gain, and that you acknowledge this site as the source if you distribute them or post them on your own site or an Internet forum. If you want to copy the material here to somewhere else on the Internet, you must present it unmodified (quoting text verbatim, displaying pictures unchanged, offering files unaltered), not change any of the links within it, and you must provide a link back to the tokezone. Generally, a link to the site is the preferred way of offering your visitors a view of what's here - I update some information very regularly, and you wouldn't want to be quoting older material, nor would I like that to happen. For more information about the Creative Commons licence, click the button below.


 

Advertising

Aside from an occasional, obligatory "powered by..." notice at the bottom of some pages, this site is free of advertising. I pay for the costs of hosting the pages on the tokezone and for the domain name tokezone.net myself and ask for no donations to support them.


General issues

The "site news" feature launched from the front page works by launching a popup window. If you have an ad-blocker running on your system, you may not see it (try it now). I have retained the "news" feature as a regular page (accessed through the drop-down menu at the bottom of each major site page, and containing more information, such as site visitor statistics) to help such visitors.

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.

I've tried to minimise my use of Flash (see my rant if you want more); in fact it serves simply as window dressing. 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 through More... Site Search using the top menu on any page. This search tool searches the entire site except for the recent tokeblog (2010). To search that blog, type your search term into the small box at the top-right corner of the blog page and hit <enter>.

Problems getting the download to load? Remember to LEFT click on the download link. 

Use the main site URL and you will always reach the site, or search for "tokezone" on any search engine. It's probably easiest to bookmark the tokezone home page here and now:

I'm always looking for feedback and suggestions about the site, so if you have a comment, please contact me here.
 

Compact rant:

Far too many sites which I visit are difficult to use. They require that I enable Javascript in my browser simply to go to another page, or click on a Macromedia Flash menu, or they try to launch photos or text in a tiny, popup window. All of these things could have been done with static html, but the attractions of complexity and pizzazz won the webmaster over, resulting in less usability for the average visitor. Certainly, Flash can perform wonderfully captivating magic on a website, and if the site presents itself as "art" then there's no reason it shouldn't sacrifice a little functionality to such style. However, a website where visitors simply want to obtain information and move on has no excuse for being obscure and overly zippy. Visitors who have Javascript disabled at the browser level in order to block advertisements and popup windows will probably never be able to access those sites which have their navigation functions controlled exclusively by JavaScript.

If Javascript is a mixed blessing, Flash is even more so. Both JS and Flash can be (and have been) used to launch attacks on the host computer, and Flash plugins require regular updating to stay ahead of current exploits. There was no update notification service for older versions of Flash (unlike, let's say, Firefox, or the Microsoft operating systems) so many users run their browsers with an outdated Flash Active-X control as full of holes as Swiss cheese and unaware of the risks they may face.

Even with the latest menu changes, you'll still be able to navigate the tokezone entirely using a browser which has Javascripting disabled (with the bottom, drop-down menu), although you won't be able to do things such as searching the site, sending ecards or downloading files.