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

I'm just stopping by to make the acquaintances of some of my fellow ACEs. Hello!



~Irving

Hi there - thanks for popping by! I'll be doing the same myself in the near future, so I'm sure we'll see more of each other

By the way, a quick pop question - what's your favourite page on h2g2 so far, and why? Just curious as to how other people see the site...

All the best,
Azimuth

I've set up my own virtual coffee house and spend quite alot of time there, it's probably my favorite because it's my own pet project. It's called the Aroma Café and there's a link off of my page. Aside from that, Merkin's page is very cool, and Looneytunes_&_PP has a great page, with lots of great pages connected to it.

What's yours?

~Irving

Ooh, tricky one - thought you might ask me that, though

So far, my favourite pages tend to be individual articles (I've got a soft spot for the 'Parsnips' article, because it's one of the first things I found when I was looking for something else. Very amusing, and quite accurate). I'm quite impressed by the collaborative pages, though. Some time ago, I spent ages searching round the web for a decent cocktails list; now I know precisely where to go

The 'chat-room' style of forum leaves me a little unsettled at the moment, mainly because the pages are huge, take a long time to download and are a little unwieldy in their current format. Trying to get to grips with a lengthy forum you've only just come across can take quite a bit of determination However, I do like the idea of the various clubs you've set up in your coffee house, especially the film and book clubs. I'll pop by at some stage and get stuck in...

Since the topic of interactive fiction was raised, I've been looking round for some good examples - wouldn't mind having a go myself... the nearest I got were Merkin's limerick pages, although I did find the start of HHGTTG v6.1, sat on for reasons of sensitivity. Have you come across anything like that in your travels?

Azimuth

I think I have seen that attempt at a new hitchhiker's story, and it seems like there was another round robin style story in a forum somewhere, but I don't remember where.

I agree, forums get unweildly after a while. My computer used to like them alright and just let them take a long time to load, but now I get error messages and can't always load the whole forum. I've been in several conversations where everyone has been fed up with the lenght of the forum and therefore moved to another forum altogether with the same topic. What I'm worried about is what happens in the next year or so, when the guide is absolutely full of forums like that? There'll get to be a storage problem somewhere eventually, won't there?

~Irving

It could become interesting, that's for sure. My exposure to online databases stops short of creating large objects, so I've only dealt with systems where each entry can be a maximum of 8 kilobytes (that's under PostgreSQL, anyway). I guess you can always tack on more disc space, but indexing limitations of the type we're seeing already could prove more taxing. I wonder what the technical people have up their sleeves? If there's one thing that I've learnt, it's that database design is incredibly complex - trying to provide for all of your future requirements when you're not sure whether the project will even get off the ground is - well - challenging

Azimuth