h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...a pre-release beta-testing phase, to chase out any bugs the software design team may have missed?

That's what beta testing means.

more buttons to press&and twiddle with.


Will there be a St Bernard dog with brandy for if I get lost ??

So, if you get lost in the mountains of New Zealand, you get rescued by a sheep bearing red wine.

I hate pre announcements..just wait and give it to us with an announcement.

Down with announcements about announcements.

I love alabaster. It's so much easier on my old eyes than goo and so much easier to navigate than brunel. That aside, I'm not prepared to cheer or boo either one until we have a chance to work with it for a while. And I'm glad it's finally nearly almost practically ready.

Sounds most interesting. I will look in when I can

Websailor

Why do we need Facebook for feedback? Can we not post feedback right here on hootoo?

Facebook wasn't mentioned in the announcement...

>>There will be a chance for you to feed back to us with any comments or corrections once the link is up, and we'll point you towards a specially created Feedback page just for this purpose.<<

>> I love alabaster. <<

Yes it is the best possible web page layout.
No distracting or abstract visuals, just simple blocks of type.
Alabaster in frames made sense to the original formatters of h2g2.

And it is ironic that today many other websites looking for readership
and attention spans longer than 24 seconds are opting for logically
formatted layouts - lots of horizontals, boxing individual posts, a list
of choice buttons down the left, clear reply button...
Form should not only follow function but lead it as well!

Here's a website that just came on line a couple of weeks ago.
Note the overall layout. The upper bar is visual and colourful on
every page, the rest is boxed and logical. Just like alabaster.

http://www.britishmotoringfestival.com/BMFnew.html

There's a lot more pages to come of course but they will follow the same
logic structure and visual coordinates. It's quite suitable for disseminating
overloads of info while wrangling passions down to socially acceptable
levels, a huge benefit for some of the more civilised sub-cultural groups.

The true value of Alabasterframes may never be fully understood until
all so-called intelligent sites have the same 'level' 'playing' 'feeled'. All
hail the horizontal for it is the Edge of the whirled.


~jwf~ (give me alphabetical order or give me Chaos)

<<(give me alphabetical order or give me Chaos)>>

you called???

<>

said the CDO sufferer

I agree ~jwf~. How come they used white text on a dark background though

Cus it's sexy.

Old farts in old cars like to see themselves as sexy.

But at least it isn't the usual white on black reverse that
was so popular in print in the last half of the 20th century,
especially in slick sexy magazines. Some chic restaurants and
bars still depend on B&W reversals in print ads.

Of course as a British car event they like to feature the old red,
white and blue. The red got used for the buttons and the contrast
of white on blue is much easier on the eye.


~jwf~

Someone may have already mentioned this - I haven't read the backlog yet - but I notice that this page is still called "h2g2 announcements" and not "H2G2 announcements"

I'm pretty sure it was called H2G2 when I joined back in 1999; I can't remember when they went lowercase in the first place.

Did it come into use about the same time as texting ?

I've sussed it , I know why h2g2 is being changed to H2G2

You see, what happened is, once all the complicated work of the redesign was completed, and all that was left was the tedious work of renaming the pages, the Powers That Be in their wisdom brought in someone on a training scheme, now this person didn't know that h2g2 was spelt in lower case, and in their ignorance mistakenly typed H2G2 on the web pages; by the time the mistake was noticed it was too late to go back and change all the pages, so we were stuck with H2G2.

So the Powers That Be then had to put their heads together, they had a Think Tank around the camp fire, to come up with a excuse for the trainees mistake, that's the answer we'll be getting.

So, there you have the answer.

Emmily