What about a webring?

[Kempo Joe]

Here's an Idea that all the fan sites can do, someone should make a webring for all the COTN fan Forums. (and sites)

That way all the forums, (and sites) could share traffic.

Anybody else like it.

If there's enough support I might figure out how to make one myself.

[G-Force]

Simply use a frameset to create a frame at the top or buttom that contains the links to the other sites.

G-Force

[Pecunia]

Simply use a frameset to create a frame at the top or buttom that contains the links to the other sites.
In my opinion, frames are ugly, not user-friendly and old-fashioned..

As for webrings: one of my sites has been part of a webring for a few months in its early days, but it really didn't make a difference in the number of visitors. Only one or two visitors per week or so came to my site via the webring, out of some 300.
My personal opinion on webrings: old-fashioned and amateuristic.. old-fashioned because I don't see them very often nowadays, while I saw them on every other site 5 years ago. Amateuristic because most sites which are part of a webring are personal sites, made with frontpage (or some other crappy html editor), and have a lot of annoying GIF animations :p

[homegrown]

There's nothing wrong with FrontPage for people that know how to use it. :p

[EmperorJay]

There's nothing wrong with FrontPage for people that know how to use it. :p
Until one starts to understand how it works after having learned out to use it :p ;) .

[Pecunia]

There's nothing wrong with FrontPage for people that know how to use it. :p
People who know how to use FrontPage usually still don't know how to make it spit out correct HTML. The only way to let it spit out correct HTML is to give it quite some guidance, and basically you can just whip up a good plain text editor instead, saves you some hair-pulling.

Example: validating a FrontPage generated webpage (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://houstonguy.iwarp.com/&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline) of someone who implicitly says he knows how to use it :p

[homegrown]

People who know how to use FrontPage usually still don't know how to make it spit out correct HTML. The only way to let it spit out correct HTML is to give it quite some guidance, and basically you can just whip up a good plain text editor instead, saves you some hair-pulling.

Example: validating a FrontPage generated webpage (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://houstonguy.iwarp.com/&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline) of someone who implicitly says he knows how to use it :p
Now that's just hateful. ;)

[Reed]

Example: validating a FrontPage generated webpage (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://houstonguy.iwarp.com/&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline) of someone who implicitly says he knows how to use it :pWell, most of that isn't any problem. Not all graphics need nor should have an ALT tag. The validation program can't tell that though, so it just complains about every instance.

Frontpage and such are fine for smaller sites, but for anything beyond that hand coding is the only way to go.

[Pecunia]

Now that's just hateful. ;)
If it came across as hateful, I apologize, I didn't mean it that way :)

Well, most of that isn't any problem. Not all graphics need nor should have an ALT tag. The validation program can't tell that though, so it just complains about every instance.
True, that not all graphics need a filled-in ALT attibute (a 'tag' is something different ;)), but in those cases, one should place an EMPTY alt tag, like so: alt="". Reason for this is that screen readers (you know, the programs blind people use to read web pages aloud) stumble over images without ALT attribute: if it has an empty one, it knows the image isn't important to the page, and is most likely just there for layout.

Standards have been made so that websites designed according to the standards display the same on every browser which implements those standards correctly, and to improve usability. So far, it's going the right way with browsers. Now just the web designers need to move over to standards-compliant (X)HTML, and learn how to separate presentation and content. It's amazing what you can do with a structured HTML document and a dash of CSS. There are plenty of sites dealing with that (one (http://www.alistapart.com), two (http://www.htmldog.com), three (http://www.csszengarden.com), need more?), now it's just a matter of time before we have a better web.

Oh, sorry for going quite a bit off-topic, this really is my pet peeve ;)

[G-Force]

There are plenty of sites dealing with that (one, two, three, need more?)

I can always use another good site, give'm all :)

G-Force

[Pecunia]

I can always use another good site, give'm all :)
Well, I'd say take a look at the 'links (http://www.htmldog.com/links/)' page at HTML dog. The "Developer References" section has quite a few good links :)

Two others I find highly useful:

Eric Meyer: CSS (http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/) - a couple of links to useful utilities, plus articles and examples. Be sure to check out "css/edge" and "Articles by Eric"
Position is everything (http://www.positioniseverything.net/) - useful because of the list of browser bugs in CSS rendering, and their possible solutions.

That should give you enough information to keep you busy for quite some time ;)

[G-Force]

Thx Pecunia

[JDF]

Tough crowd.

Surely there must be some way to lure members to the new Children of the Nile FANSITE forums too.

Webring won't do it, huh?

I'll offer beer. Beer does great things. Beer can get people moved by friends! :D

[JimmyReb]

Hey I'm an experianced webring builder and manager, I have had a pretty good experiance with webrings (how a webring is run makes most of the difference in how sucsessful it is, I manage over half the webrings I am a member of and always keep them top-notch.)

Not to beat a dead horse but this topic seemed to change to html discussion pretty quick... :D

I am a pretty good html editor myself (notepad and all) and I set up a mean webring when I set my mind to it. So if you guys ever want to run one I'd be glad to assist any way I can. ;)

[tobing]

Hi Folks,

I just opened a webring for City Building Games at http://www.webring.de the first Site being http://www.staedtebauen.de where you can find the links necessary to put your own page into the ring. I thought it would be a good idea to have such a webring and my research only yielded one! webring about pharaoh and ancient egypt, which I also linked in on my site. So now I would be happy to see a lot of fan pages join in into the City Building Games Webring!