In the Autumn of 1996, Paul
McIlvenny's Tutorial Group C for first-year students of the English
department in the University of Oulu were given an assignment to
complete a free-form pop culture project during the term. The project would be made as a
group effort, and the subject could be anything in the vast field of English-speaking
popular culture. Our group (Jukka Mäkelä, Minna Lapinkangas, Alexandria Tervaniemi and
myself) chose to put together
a movie magazine with four articles, each written by one person in the group.
I had been doing a lot of personal WWW stuff during the year (check out my home pages) and I've been planning to get professional, so I thought it would be good exercise to publish our magazine on the Web. That would also grant us the possibilities of hypertext - that is, to provide sources for information on movies and persons via hyperlinks in the text. For a moment, we considered a possibility of doing two separate magazines with identical content - one of the Web and one traditionally on paper - but Paul convinced us that it would be too much work. We agreed happily. :-)
The process of writing was done very much individually; we didn't set any strict rules for the articles, and we didn't even read each other's texts before they were available on the Web. As a result of our anarchistic approach, the articles are varying a lot in style and length. Don't let that confuse you, it's just to keep the reader from getting bored. Please believe me.
Each writer did the basic HTML formatting (such as
<P>'s, <BR>'s and <H>'s)
him/herself, and the text files were then given to me to complete the markup and the
links. As for the latter, we agreed to take the easy way out and just linked every title
and person to an appropriate Internet Movie Database UK card. With all the
online information about such movies as Independence Day, it seemed the only
sensible way to go. At first I tried using Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0 to
construct the pages, but after a while I lost my temper (never used HTML
editors before...) and back to pico it was. ;-)
Then it was time for us to scan some pictures and agree about their layout and size. (The pictures in the Romance and Horror articles were just snatched from other people's Web pages - the deadline was just a bit too close to do any scanning at that stage. The source URLs are mentioned in the end of the article.) We tried to keep them nice and small by using JPEG compression sensibly. Anyhow, some JPEGs could not be packed hard because of their high detail (witness the 75k ID4 image in the Sci-Fi article), so some of the pages can be a bit heavy with a slow connection. The image processing was done with Adobe Photoshop 3 and Corel Photo-Paint 6. The Frame X logo and the imagemap on the index page were done with Corel Photo-Paint 6 and Paint Shop Pro 4.12 and they remain © 1996-97 sairwas.
My intention was to make the design clear and simple; there's no fancy Java animations and not even (gasp) a single frame included in the pages. One client-side image map is included, though. As every page on the Web should be, all our articles are Best Viewed with Any Browser, including Lynx.
The counter was included December 17, 1996. (Note that the counter only tells how many times the page has been loaded with a graphical browser with image loading turned on.)
Some minor corrections and improvements, such as GIF optimization to reduce loading time, were made in May 1997. Also made the zine validate as HTML 3.2.
Any comments are welcome, except those on the spelling. ;-) Comments on the text itself should go to the writer (whose E-mail address is mentioned in the end of each article), while comments on the design, HTML code and other technical matters should go to me (whose E-mail address is below).
Have fun reading Frame X... we certainly did.