TRAVELLER Web Site Advice

[Sifu Blackirish]

Okay, I am going to take the plunge.

When I get back home (wnenever that is), I am finally going to atempt to build a web site to share the madness that leaks out of my brain and is filtered by CT.

Yes, the Confederation/Dominion/Alliance, that entity that spans almost six hundred years of human history and over 30 stories (to date), will finally be accessible to the CotI public!

(hears crickets chirping)

Now, I am so far behind the curve of web site design, or anything else WWW, that the road still looks straight to me. So, I throw myself on the bed of nails constructed by you gentle readers and beg for advice:

Any freeware out there for website design (I'm a cheapskate...well, married a long time)?

Are there advantages to being affiliated with downport.com?

How much OTU stuff can I legally post without MWM wanting a pound of flesh?

If I post random artwork from my collection (some stuff 25 years old) am I still obligated to pay the originator for its use? How would I even find him?

I have an adventure that I use to introduce new players to TRAVELLER, set in the late Dominion era. If I was psychotic enough to want to publish it, is there a market?

I know, the man's helpless. Sorry, but all my computer knowledge came from the late 70's-early 80's...hmmm...sounds like another thread topic...

Really, any advice given will be greatly appreciated.

 

[aramis]

Downport: advantage - findability.
Disadvantage - just part of the crowd.

OTU Stuff: Judgement call there, but read his policy at
http://www.farfuture.net/ffe/n7000.html

Freeware for site design: loads. Most of it is drekh.
Best, but time intensive, is to get bbedit with the HTML add-on, or something similar, and learn to hand code.
If you use a Mac, iCab icab.de does html code checking.

Notepad works fairly well. You may need an FTP client, many free ones are available, in a variety of levels of interface niceness.

you can find the rules for HTML at www.w3c.org

You have my explicit permission to use copies of my index pages and frame pages as template... change the names.
aramis.angeltowns.com
The actual content (the information) however, is not fair use.

Artwork: if you don't have explicit permission, you can't use it. Period. Making a derivative sufficiently different is usually not a good option, as it's clearly underhanded, very subjective, and if put before a jury, is likely to lose.

That's why all my various graphics are home-made.

Publishing your adventure: if you are asking about a market, I assume you mean for money... that means you need to either go through MWM, Hunter, or SJG to publish.

 

[clementk]

Also a suggestion to not worry about the site design too much at first. Plan basic navigation and how you want files organized but the most important thing is getting your Traveller info and articles up. You can always make it look snazzy later if you like.

Personally I'm finding Openoffice's ability to create simple pdfs very handy. I can't get its spellchecker to find even obviously misspelled words though.

HTML is good for web display but not as good for handling documents. So I'd offer both html and pdf files. I'd avoid other document formats unless absolutely necessary. Anything that relies on additional software or involves security issues is likely to diminish the usefulness of your documents (i.e. fewer people will download your document).

As for Fair Use Policy, the key thing is to let FFE know you have a site up and follow the rest of the policy. The most common error I've noticed is not putting some sore of notice on the main page.

Hope this helps.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Actually, OpenOffice will make HTML pages, too. Figure out how to get to the HTML code, though. It's always a good idea to go in and scrub the code, as some editors (read: FrontPage) clutter up a page with all kinds of unhelpful junk.

 

[Golan2072]

Originally posted by Casey:
Personally I'm finding Openoffice's ability to create simple pdfs very handy.

Can Open Office import MS Word 2000 documents? If so, I could easily convert my documents to PDF.

 

[clementk]

Originally posted by Employee 2-4601:
Can Open Office import MS Word 2000 documents? If so, I could easily convert my documents to PDF.

Yes it can import MS Word (looks like 97/2000/XP). You might need to tidy the end result some, but Openoffice is free. ^.^

http://www.openoffice.org/

 

[Theo D Lite]

I think the others have covered most of this quite succintly, however here's my Cr0.02 worth.

I had to set up a web site (non Traveller) at short notice and as a reasonably intelligent (honestly) and computer literate guy figured it wouldn't be that difficult to get the hang of what is basically text with a few instruction tags thrown in. How wrong I was. In the time avaialable I couldn't work from the web tag lists and get anything approaching a decent layout and I was forced to plagarise from a long standing friend of mine to meet time scales.

This proved to be much better as I was able to hack around in the source which gave me a much clearer idea of what each tag did and how to use it. I then went out and bought two 'Dummies Guides' you know the big yellow and black books. One on HTML and the other on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Over Christmas 2004 I sat down at my PC and hand coded a new layout. It's at

http://www.g7kna.ukfsn.org

I use Crimson Editor which is free but allows multiple documents to be open and has syntax highlighting so that tags and key words are easier to spot. To upload to my ISP I use Filezilla which is a free graphical FTP client.

Images are always edited outside of the web page to keep size to a minimum (I have a limit of 20Mb web space atm), this can be in any image editor, I use GIMP for windows which is also free but others prefer Paint Shop Pro.

It pays to have a couple of browsers to test your creation in as not all browsers render pages the same way. I use IE and Mozilla Firefox, Firefox is my browser of choice.

I keep a local copy of the pages on my home pc with relative pathing in the links (OK getting techy now sorry). The HTML pages and the CSS will be open in the editor and in one or both browsers. Edits to the pages are saved and the pages refreshed in the browsers to check the effect. When I get to what I want (or as close as I think I'm going to get) then the altered pages are uploaded to my web space in one sitting.

Feel free to borrow my basic layout and CSS structure if it will help you get started, the more HTML/CSS that you can read the easier it will be to work out the basics. Tables, Images, Links and Positioning should allow you to get a tidy if static page put together in short order.

Best of luck; post your URL here when you get something sorted.