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  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

New Technofile site unveiled after a year of preparation


Sept. 26, 1999

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 1999, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 1999, The Syracuse Newspapers
   This is a day of celebration. My redesigned Web site is finally going public, after a year of hard work.
   Time Warner's Road Runner service is hosting my new site, at http://twcny.rr.com/technofile/. The best feature of the new site is a built-in search engine that lets you locate articles very quickly, but the site has dozens of other improvements.
   I opened the first version of the Technofile site four years ago on Dreamscape Online, a Syracuse-area Internet service provider. The site was a natural extension of a long-running online service I created in 1983 called the Technofile BBS.
   If you like nostalgic twists, you'll appreciate the fact that the first Technofile articles went online before most teenagers were born. I suppose that makes me a pioneer in the online movement. (It also made me an expert in the arcane commands that modems use as I struggled to get computers connected both at the office and elsewhere. Anyone who wants to speak "AT" commands with me can send me a modem.)
   I got a lot of help in the final weeks of preparation from two talented Web designers on the Road Runner staff, P.J. Anzalone and Stephen Goede. They kept me from embarrassing myself many times with their guidance and suggestions. Anzalone was a familiar sight in our newsroom for a couple of years when he worked for Syracuse OnLine as a Web designer and programmer.
   Road Runner is a natural partner. I'm one of the hosts for an award-winning TV show on computers called Point 'n' Click, produced by Road Runner's parent company, Time Warner. (You can watch the show live each Tuesday at 7 p.m. on channel 13 in most Time Warner cable TV areas. It's rebroadcast Wednesdays and Sundays.
   I started working on a new design last September. I had two goals -- making all the articles easier to read and adding a real search engine.
   The redesigned site emphasizes readability over all other things. Every article -- there are nearly 650 -- is presented in the fashion of printed pages instead of the style of Web pages. Paragraphs, for example, are actual paragraphs just as you'd see in a magazine or book, with the first lines pushed over a little to the right. Normal Web design ignores common sense and sticks a blank line between blocks of text to create pseudo-paragraphs. Pages look disjointed that way, and your eyes don't get the clues they need to follow the flow of words.
   Small "teaser" headlines to the left of all articles help explain the content, and each of the articles loads into your browser very quickly because not a single image or graphic is used on any of the text pages. (The fact that they look good without gimmicks or images is a tribute to my wife's patience. She spent many hours judging which of my design methods worked and which did not during long sessions last spring.)
   I also spent a lot of time cleaning out code that is used only by Windows. You may not realize that Microsoft failed to follow standard practices in much of the code Windows uses for certain kinds of characters in Web pages. The apostrophe, for example, is misused in many of the pages created by Windows users. On a computer running another operating system, apostrophes that use this non-standard code show up as question marks. Many other codes are wrong in Microsoft's implementation of HTML (hypertext) code, too, and they're been rewritten so that everyone will see the text properly.
   The search engine is a delight. I knew my site needed to let users find articles and subjects as soon as it got too big for me to navigate. I just couldn't keep things straight -- and I wrote the articles and created the site! You can search for words or phrases just as you'd do on AltaVista or any other Web search site, and you can also use a "natural language" search. Just type a sentence and let the search engine use its own logic to locate what you want. It works surprisingly well some of the time. (Hey, it's a computer, so don't expect it to figure out everything.)
   There's no charge for using the Technofile site, and my site does not require your browser to use Web cookies (snoopy files that Web sites use to track who you are and where you've been). You'll also find links on the site so you can send me e-mail, and other links lead to the Point 'n' Click Web site, to a site where you can tune in, on the Internet, to the radio show Gene Wolf and I do and to Wolf's own Web site.