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by Holger Reichard,
November 2006
translated by Beate Walz |
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Creating web pages becomes a problem,
if you have to face them too often. Sometimes you just don't
like them anymore. That's what happened to us with www.tcboyle.de
this spring. For more than three years we had to face the same
old pages, when we did our updates and additions. On the other
hand, we wanted to keep the site going because of its theme,
the author T.C. Boyle, still inspires our enthusiasm. But structure
and layout began to bother us, because our skills and ambitions
had fortunately advanced.
In the beginning we didn't know at all which challenges we would
have to face. Which amounts of material would accumulate where
and when? Where did we go wrong? What did our visitors expect
- from fans, interested readers, teachers and students to journalists
and publishers? Well, after three years we finally know better!
Therefore, in spring 2006, we slowly started to modernise the
skin of our online presence, to iron out a few wrinkles, to
rearrange the categories, to remove the superfluous, and to
add missing information.
What has been changed?
First we should mention the removal of framed pages. We expect
to increase the page views for middle and long term, because
we believe it will be easier for search engines to index those
pages. Visitors are now getting whole page translations more
easily through Google or Babelfish translation engines, which
had been a rather complex operation, by copying & pasting every
single paragraph. Foreign-language visitors will still despair
at translation engines, but will no longer suffer from our frame
completion script.
Font size and line space have been increased for better readability,
except book data, disclaimers or marginalia - it's still in
fine print. (We won't tell you about your obligations for visiting
this site.)
You'll find a new structure in the areas of »Autor« and »Werke«.
We added a new topic, called book
tours under Autor.
We hope to inspire Boyle's wanderlust, so he wants to fill up
the space with many more visits to Europe.
The collected works by,
with, or about T.C. Boyle were listed on a single page, which
was getting so huge you had to scroll furiously. Now the catalogue
of works is more clearly arranged: We divided it in novels,
short stories,
illustrated editions,
audio books,
school and studies,
anthologies
and miscellaneous.
We could have classified that list even more, but the single
row sub navigation would have run out of space eventually. In
other words: If some new art work concerning T.C. Boyle shows
up, we will be in big trouble!
A brand new feature is the site's own search engine -
critics can now find out if their reviews are mentioned in our
pages. Only the future will show how good the script will work.
Give it a try. Just don't type the words »T.C. Boyle« - you'll
get an overwhelming amount of results.
The forms for reader comments
and the guest book are
now protected by image codes (captcha) - to prevent junk mail
and let us put an end to the spam flood. Perhaps it's just a
matter of time, until the next script will be necessary to protect
us from "offers" which would put this text in junk filters,
if we named them here.
With a major effort all texts have been updated. A lot of information
was stuck in the years 2002/2003; broken links were common as
a felicitous pun in a Boyle novel. Now all pages are fresh and
clean.
New information has been added, as for example the book Weltempfang
(where Thomas Böhm lists and analyses lectures of international
writers, including T.C. Boyle, of course). Or a personal rememberance
of our first meeting with T.C.
Boyle 1996 in Goettingen, when the internet had just begun
to grow, and this website was still unborn.
Another new feature is information about short
movies, noteworthy magazines
or special editions of The Tortilla Curtain for example.
All the small and big changes are too numerous to mention in
this place. We would rather tell you more about the future of
www.tcboyle.de.
And the future looks bright indeed. The old website latest statistics
did show our best results ever, with more than 3.000 page views
and almost 1.000 visitors - daily! The subscription list for
our newsletter is growing slow but steadily. In the dim past
the list consisted solely of the webmaster. These days hundreds
of Boyle-afficionados are getting our monthly
newsletter (and maybe even reading it).
What we hope for the re-launched site is an ongoing growth,
and that it will take longer than three years before we'll get
bored with its look again. If it ain't so - all the same. Change
is life, life is change.
Have fun and enjoy www.tcboyle.de 2.0 |
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| © 2006 www.tcboyle.de |
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