Hiho people,
A few thoughts on the "Encyclopedia" idea:
1. STAFF
1.1 The "Editor"
There should be nominated (or volunteered) one person who shall oversee the
project - a Project Manager, if you will. It will be this person's
responsibility to ensure things are running smoothly. This person will also be
the contact point for all submissions. Essentially, "the Editor".
1.2 Assistant Editors
These are a group of people - 5 or 6 - who GET things done. Together
with the Editor, they also make up the decision making team. The numbers may
swell, or shrink, but these people perform an important job - deciding,
delegating, and doing the dirty work if necessary (coding, writing, reading,
illustrating). These are the people who need to Know What They Are Doing
-
both in terms of GZG literature, the Encyclopedia iteself, and in their
respective skills (artwork, design, coding etc).
1.3 Staff
The people who do the work - essentially, anyone who wants it. Of
course, the rules would be that if you're given a job (or take a job) and you
don't follow through, don't expect to be asked again.
I know this is not necessarily democratic, but speaking from experience this
sort of organisation will actually see the project come to life - a full
democracy probably wont.
2. GOAL
Define a goal. Define lots of goals. Define lots of little goals that build up
to a big one. Define a schedule. Stick to the schedule. GET SOMETHING UP AND
FOR PEOPLE TO LOOK AT is probably the first goal that should be defined.
3. COVERAGE
As someone else said, nothing that's printed in GZG books should be
reproduced. Stuff may be quoted - with full credit - and stuff may be
paraphrased, to a certain extent, but the point of the exercise is that most
of the stuff should be original.
4. HOSTING
With the amount of information that could be stored in this thing, the space
required could get very large. Now unless someone has their own server, this
could lead to problems. A free space could be used, but then we have
ads...
My suggestion: host it all over the place. Different sites host different
aspects. Timeline stuff may be hosted at one place; equipment at another. As
long as the look is consistent throughout, who cares if it's at one place or
not?
My biggest suggestions at this stage are to sort out exactly WHAT will be
covered by this project, the GOAL of the project and WHO will be in what
positions - probably in that order.
My 2 cents.:)
In a message dated 99-01-26 04:01:47 EST, you write:
<< 4. HOSTING
With the amount of information that could be stored in this thing, the space
required could get very large. Now unless someone has their own server, this
could lead to problems. A free space could be used, but then we have
ads...
My suggestion: host it all over the place. Different sites host different
aspects. Timeline stuff may be hosted at one place; equipment at another. As
long as the look is consistent throughout, who cares if it's at one place or
not?
My biggest suggestions at this stage are to sort out exactly WHAT will be
covered by this project, the GOAL of the project and WHO will be in what
positions - probably in that order.
My 2 cents.:) >> I have 20mbs of web space from AOL, as I'm planing to do a
small page about the UBW other FT stuff maybe a little bit of EFSB and some
stuff about WC I could host part of it.
-Stephen
> On Tue, 26 Jan 1999, Jeremy Sadler wrote:
i'll volunteer, too. i can write decent english (government certified and
published in respectable journals, of a sort), and i'm adept with html, xml,
java, and a bit with javascript, perl, unixes and other typical hacker type
things.
> I know this is not necessarily democratic, but speaking from
absolutely true. i'd far rather be a follower than a leader, if only because
(a) it means i don't have to cope with looking after the other
idiots on the project :-) and (b) since everyone else (on the inet) will
be a leader, i'll have the real power (BWAHAHAHAHAHA!). sorry.
so, do we know who the leader is yet? could someone make an official
unofficial pronouncement and establish core addresses for things. come on,
people, it's boot time!
> 4. HOSTING
if we write 100 pages of text, it'd be roughly 100 - 150 kB. graphics
would multiply this by ten. we will write more than 100, but probably less
than 1000, so 10 MB is a good starting point.
xoom do 11 MB free web space, and the only advertising is by email to the
account owner - we could set up an account on a free web mail thingie to
catch it.
> My suggestion: host it all over the place.
a distributed system. AAAAARRRRGH! no! centralise data, distribute processing!
> As
the person who has to look after it!
Tom
I can do HTMLizing for parts of the project. I guess that makes me a subEditor
or something...I've been doing HTML for long enough now to be comfortable with
it. (is it really only September I started my webpage? Jeez, it seems longer
than that...)
I've also got a lot of free Mgs on my site, if we need them - sounds
like we don't thanks to Jerry.
Next question: Can anyone recommend a good freeware/shareware graphics
program? I've got Corel Draw 5, but it doesn't handle.gif or.jpg files that I
can tell, and it's also got some oddities that I don't like
much...
<shameless plug> I've just started using MS Photodraw 2000. It's a graphics
editor were going to be shipping with Office 2k. There's a 30 day eval at this
location:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/2000/PhotoDraw/Trial/default.htm
It's rather large (6-8 meg IIRC), but it's a nice program for making web
graphics.
</shameless plug>
There's always Paint Shop Pro 5 which is a great shareware app.
Good luck, Nathan
> -----Original Message-----
In a message dated 99-01-26 17:59:35 EST, you write:
<< Next question: Can anyone recommend a good freeware/shareware
graphics program? I've got Corel Draw 5, but it doesn't handle.gif or.jpg
files that I can tell, and it's also got some oddities that I don't like
much...
> [quoted text omitted]
Paint Shop Pro
-Stephen
> <shameless plug>
If you mean the eval version of Paint Shop Pro 5 then it works fine until your
60 days (30 official and 30 giving you the benefit of the doubt) are up and
then you're off (i.e. it don't work no more). However, if you get Painshop Pro
4 eval version then you can happily use it until the cows come home (they must
have figured out the kill switch after #4) and there are no real differences
(well no major ones) between 4 and 5. Not that I'm condoning using a product
past the trial period, after all that's illegal or something isn't it...;)
Cheers
Beth
> Jeremy Sadler wrote:
> 1.3 Staff
I volunteer. For whatever.
> I know this is not necessarily democratic, but speaking from
Benevolent monarchy with libertarian subjects. Gosh, that sounds familiar (cf:
Alarishi political system, angelfire website soon to be announced).
> so, do we know who the leader is yet? could someone make an official
Didn't Jerry start this? We should all volunteer him. Then he can delegate
as needed (Please note--I've already volunteered to help, and a leader's
job is mostly to delegate).
a) I propose a black background with white text, green links, line breaks by
simple horizontal rules <hr> or <hr 50%>, the header jpeg but no background.
The objective is to keep it simple. We can always include a link to a
cascading style sheet and play around with the CSS later.
b) I propose we layer the amount of detail in descriptions, with each item
allocated one line on an "index/glossary" page, then a paragraph or so
on the Encyclopedia page, then a link to the full web page of whoever wants to
maintain it. Obviously some topics ("History of the NAC") will take up more
space than others ("Night Music" recon corvette). Something along the lines
of:
Glossary: Night Music: fast recon corvette of Alarishi design.
Encyclopedia: Night Music. A product of Imperial Technology & Transport (ITT)
(link) of Alarish (link), the Night Music class was designed as a
reconnaissance vessel. The Night Music carries no weapons other than a point
defense system, but has a top of the line sensor suite and twice the
acceleration of most escort type warships. Variations include an express
courier design. The vessel is a particular favorite of mercenary ship owners,
and has also been licensed to New Israel (link) and the NRE (link). The Night
Vision (link) class is an updated model with improved stealth capabilities.
For more information, see the Alarishi Fleet List (link).
[Most of those links would be to other paragraphs of the E-GZG--the last
one would take you to a copy of my page, reformatted to fit the Encyclopedia
standards, which would have the ship stats]