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

Hey Nick O' Teen,

I'm doing an article for the h2g2 POST on user pages, and I had a few questions to ask you:

1. What do you use your page for?
2. To you, what makes a good page?
3. Do you often update your page?

Thank you so much!

~The Cheese

I'd be happy to help out. Out of curiosity, why'd you pick me?

What do I use my page for?

Well, I use it primarily to tell people about myself, but also to promote my (rather disturbed) alter-ego here on h2g2, where I am just crazy about weevils. Every now and then I add a new heading if there's something out there in the world that catches my interest (such as my addition of a 'Boycott etoys.com' section which I added and kept all the way up to and just after Christmas).

I tend to construct my paragraphs such that you can read the first sentence only and still get the gist of what I'm talking about. The rest of the paragraph is just elaboration on the first sentence. This way, people can skim my page and still get something out of it.

What makes a good page to me?

To me, the best pages are the ones that load fast, avoid java, and use javascript very sparingly. Java is a good idea, but it's not the 'write once, run anywhere' language that it professes to be. Many browsers treat java and javascript differently, so I take a bit of a zen approach to my page design. I tend to go with the flow of HTML and not try to force it to arrange things against its will, if you know what I mean. This just results in a page that winds up getting formatted differently for everybody else, usually in a bad way.

GuideML is a good idea in that changes to the basic visual metrics of H2G2 will cause my page's look to change automatically to suit. However, this hasn't been tried yet. It would be interesting to see what would happen if H2G2 did something even slight such as changing the background color to puce, for example.

To me, fast loading pages are very important. I tend to visit user's pages more often if they load fast. Some pages are so full of imagery and java and javascript that my browser can't even handle it (and usually crashes). In that case, I have no choice: as much as I want to see that person's page, I can't.

Do I often update my page?

Yes. Or, at least I try to. It's pretty obvious to me that a page that changes once in a while is a page that people will be more inclined to visit on a regular basis.

Currently, I make a point of updating my page when I buy new DVDs, although occaisonally I'll take the page in a slightly different direction if I have the time and energy. I am thinking of placing a 'last updated' date at the top of my page, which is helpful for people who'd rather not waste their time scanning the whole page just to see if I've added anything new. Perhaps the powers that be could add this feature.

Hope this helps. Good luck with your article, and have a weevil-riffic day.

Why'd I pick you? I opened up the pop-up window, and went throguh, trying to find users with good pages (a.k.a. pictures, colors, etc.). I saw yours and deemed it worthy.

*blush*.