Hey there, bd -- ard here with questions and ideas.[The template for this page is vrml.html in the hotlinks folder. That page is, of course, untouched.]
1) First, first, first ... what do You have in mind already that you'd like to do with the hotlinks? I'm groping in the dark right now, just getting familiar with the pages, printing out page and text and proofreading them, clicking on links just to see if they work or not, that sort of thing. What follows are little, tweaky things.
2) Note the background on this page is a modification of your bgstars2.gif. In general, I darkened the star field and removed streaks, and after reading this page awhile during its composition, I further muted the gif: there's no actual white in the star field, only the colors you've used and some medium grays. And finally, I turned it into a transparent gif, which makes it mighty small. I'm still not satisfied with it. Perhaps it's too uniform and needs streaks of black. But by now, I'm way too eye-strained to work with it further.
bgstars2.gif unmodified3) Below, I repeat the heading a few times a) to show that some headings are smaller than others, and maybe they can be more consistent; trials follow; and b) to see whether you like the look of Hotlinks as one word.
4) Then there are a few topics I have questions and ideas about.
Here's the original:
Virtual Worlds
Hot
links: VRML Browsers, Resources and Content Sites |
Here's the smaller version, taken from the page it names:
Virtual Worlds
Hot
links: News and Views on Virtual Worlds |
Here's one possible way to merge the two for consistency:
Virtual Worlds
Hot
links: VRML Browsers, Resources and Content Sites |
What do you think about Hotlinks as one word?
I think it looks cleaner, easier to read, even hotter.
What do you think of using browser-safe colors only?
(That is, using hexidecimals composed solely of
00 33 66 99 CC FF combinations; no matter what platform,
these colors remain these colors and don't dither.)
Used below:
Virtual Worlds
HotLinks: VRML Browsers, Resources and Content Sites |
Wait a minute, wait a minute. A table in a blockquote... this works for both the line wrap and the fluctuations in bullet size. Hm. By golly. It does work. So the question becomes, which do you prefer? Eddy told me a joke yesterday: How do you cook in the jungle? On a gorilla. Heh heh heh. Ahh, six-year-olds, they tell jokes. Fascinating development. Enough testing, already. Lastly, what is your reason for using various styles of bullets? Are you satisfied with the effect? Let me know when I should use which, ok?
The more valuable the page -- especially if I'm researching -- the more likely I am to print it out. I know, I'm a really exceptional person :-) but for the one or two other people who also print pages, the white lettering equals invisible ink. One possible solution, in keeping with the space theme, might be to use a light, nebula background. Would you like me to try out a test page?
Again, my penchant for printing pages and saving as text makes me partial to having urls spelled out. I'm also keen on having very brief descriptions of what to expect at each click. And I'm all for linking to a content page rather than a splash page. (One vedu.html link took nearly four minutes to load and was only an uninspired java animation of spotlit lettering; zero info. Grr.)
What are your thoughts on these matters?
My first concentration has been on the vedu.html page, where I've tested all links to offsite locations. These ones are dead; tried twice or more, two different days.
The last two are the only entries under the category
Brian Williams' (Underling) Sky
City project.
Bienville
University, a nonresidential distance-education institution for undergraduate
and graduate studies in business and healthcare administration
Virtual Antioch University
Apple Americas Higher Education: Distance Learning
Virtual University from SmartStates
SmartState Workplan for a virtual university
"Initiatives in Internet-based Distance Learning,"
so that might be a good place to link to VHS's Pedagogy Page.
Here are a few usage decisions that are nice to get in place.
[At Sky & Telescope magazine, we kept track of all such decisions in a Sky Style Manual, much supplemented with the University of Chicago Style Manual. For web work, perhaps the Wired Style Manual would be a better supplement to Ccon Style. Or do you prefer another?]
This is just a beginning list:
online or on-line
Virtual Worlds or Virtual World
Active Worlds or ActiveWorlds
3D or 3-D
Three Dimensional Worlds or Three-Dimensional Worlds
(same question for Two-Dimensional Worlds)
Blaxxun or BlackSun or Black Sun
Virtual Worlds (always capitalized?)
homepage or home page or Home page or Homepage
worlds or Worlds (as in VRML Worlds)
DigitalSpace (right?)
hotlinks or hot links or Hot links or HotLinks
more to come as I continue to proofread pages
I've done a teeny bit to the hotlinks pages:
On hotlinks.html and biota.html
I changed Its Alive! to It's Alive!
On vedu.html
I changed Pedagocial to Pedagogical in two headlines.
On vedu, a broken image icon for nulogo6.gif inspired me to delete its lowsrc, since that wasn't used on the pages that worked.
Here are some Next Steps:
I'd like to hear your ideas on changing the pages.
I'd like to hear your responses to these questions and ideas.
Then I'd like to meet with Bonnie within the week. (She and I just talked about that today.) She's got a notebook of links that she'll pass on, and she's got ideas about categories and about how to make very brief and useful descriptions. She's a treasure! But I very very much want to get a notion of your thoughts before I go ANY further.
I'll finish proofreading pages for typos and style questions. Obvious typos I'll simply go in and fix (like the ones above).
I'll check through all the links to note a) any that have died, and b) any that are splash pages only, and try to find the real index to the desired information.
I'll try email queries and search engines for lost links.
This will be a longish process.
It is not pleasant to read a lot of white text on a star field background, is it?
Back to HotLinks Index Page
Big apologies to fibrillating eyes.