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"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"


The Back Page

LG to get a makeover and wants your help

LG will be getting a facelift in the next month or two. A stylesheet, revamped headers/footers, and perhaps a few more images. My biggest pet peeve of the current layout is all the the extra whitespace the browsers put around headers and <HR>s (horizontal separators). Stylesheets make it possible to squeeze out all that space, allowing more content to show on the first screenful. Non-stylesheet browsers would still have the whitespace, but at least they'd be no worse off than they are now.

I'm actually thinking about an article header something like this:

-----------------------------------------------------------
|   LG LOGO   LG LOGO   Home > issue 77 (April 2002)      |
|   LG LOGO   LG LOGO          Title Title Title          |
|   LG LOGO   LG LOGO          Title Title Title          |
|   LG LOGO   LG LOGO              by Author              |
|   making Linux ... more fun    (e-mail link)            |
-----------------------------------------------------------
That's a smaller version of the LG logo, and no more <H1> and <HR> in the header. "Home > issue 77 (April 2002)" would be Yahoo-style links like we've used on the Linux Journal site in the past.

I also aim to revamp the navigation links between pages, to cut down on questions like "Why doesn't LG get a search engine or an index of all issues?" (It already has them.) Or, "How do I send a question to The Answer Gang? Oh wait, I didn't know there was an Answer Gang, so I just sent it to gazette. I looked on the author info page, but I'm still not sure where to send my News Bytes entry." All these links are available... if you know where to look. Making the links more findable in the places people are likely to look will be the goal.

The Answer Gang and I are looking for some more images to decorate the site with. Don't worry--we're sticking to our "minimum graphics" philosophy. Just loosening it up a bit. The success of the various cartoon series in LG over the past year shows that we can increase the size of LG slightly without incurring the wrath of those who find 200 KB an expensive download.

So, to Leon Czechowicz and all those who have been asking Why we stay plain when we could look Really Cool, now's your chance. Send in your suggestions, images, HTML fragments, stylesheet fragments, navigation flowcharts and wishlist items to gazette@ssc.com. How would you like LG to look? We'll probably make a decision (or start to think about when to make a decision) around April 15th, so the sooner the better, or at least send us an e-mail so we know something is coming. Any ideas or examples we like but don't use we'll put into an article, so at least they'll get some exposure.

Those who follow LG closely know our general policies for layout. I've tried to articulate them below, but no doubt have forgotten something or other.

So put on your thinking caps and send in some ideas.


Happy Linuxing!

Mike ("Iron") Orr
Editor, Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com


Copyright © 2002, the Editors of Linux Gazette.
Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html
Published in Issue 77 of Linux Gazette, April 2002
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