ATM: How to contribute
The Australia This Minute
(ATM) project by
Australian Computer Society
members to help the community to document
Australian culture on the World Wide Web, and as a
supplement to the Government's Australia on CD initiative.
Choose a suitable topic
Remember that ATM is intended to be viewed by school children,
so the topic and material must be suitable.
Get permission of the organisation
Usually you will be preparing a World Wide Web hypertext document
for a club, society, group or other organisation. Approach your
organisation for permission to distribute its material via the
Internet. Remember that you must obtain permission of the
copyright owner to use any text, graphics or sound recordings.
Start with something small, long lasting and already prepared
Preparing hypertext documents isn't that hard, but it takes a bit
of work. Choose something short for your first effort and
something that won't go out of date quickly.
You can get guides and software for preparing Web documents from
several sources on the network. You don't need much computing
power or software (the initial ATM documents were prepared on an
Intel 486/25Mhz 4Mb PC, with "Lview Graphics" and "HTML Writer"
shareware software, plus "Microsoft Works" for spell checking).
You can get by with just a text editor, but that's hard work.
Getting the text and graphics in
One good approach is to turn an existing pamphlet (one or two A4
pages) into hypertext. This will still take several days work.
Try to split the document up into several logical pieces, each of
which will be a separate file. Have the "home" page small,
with perhaps just a logo, few lines of text and no photos
(for example see:
http://www.tomw.net.au/cnbst1.html).
Readers can then get a quick idea of if your document is worth
reading, without consuming lots of time and bandwidth.
If you have a scanner with optical character recognition, you may
be able to use this to enter the text. You might even be able to
use an ordinary fax machine, if you have a fax modem on your
computer.
Go easy on the images
If you are working from a printed pamphlet or book, quality of
photographs may not be good enough to scan in. You may be able to
get adequate quality by scanning the photos at a low resolution.
You may be able to obtain the original photos for scanning or
take some new ones.
Remember that photos take lots of bytes to store and home computer
user's modems will only transmit at about one or two thousand
characters per second. . The bigger the photo on the screen, the more storage. Experiment with reducing
the size of the image and number of colours, to get a reasonable
compromise between file size and image quality.
You can put small in-line images in the main document. Try using
160 x 120 pixels (which is one fourth on a normal PC screen) by
64 colours for a file size of about 8,000 bytes. You can have a
"hot-link" to a higher quality image (for example see:
http://www.tomw.net.au/cnbst5.html
).
Line drawings scan very well from printed material, look good on
the screen and take little storage (for example see:
http://www.tomw.net.au/cnbst2.html).
Don't forget to set your scanner to black and white for line
drawings. You might be able to use a fax machine to scan in
acceptable line drawings, when it won't be much good for
photographs.
Include contact details
Don't forget to include your contact details, as the maintainer of
the document and the contact address of the organisation on the
first page of the document. Also include a link to the ATM home
page on your first page (for example see:
http://www.tomw.net.au/cnbst1.html
).
Test the document and get final approval
Ask several people to look at the document. You can also give the
organisation and on-line demonstration, hand out disk, e-mail and
paper copies.
Upload to your Web provider
Remember that you are responsible for paying for storage of the
document (at commercial sites) and for meeting any content rules
of your Web site.
Upload the document to your Web site. At this point if you have a
slow modem, you will appreciate not having made the document too
big. Set the necessary permissions for access. Now stop for a
while and ask some people to try the document, before you make it
public.
Ask for ATM link
Send a message to the maintainer of the relevant ATM contents
page, requesting a link. Include the URL of the document and the
one line entry, you would like in the contents page.
Maintain your document
You will receive comments, requests, suggestions, complements and
some criticism in response to your document. Try to respond
positively to all of them.
Help others
After you have designed one document, you are ready to help others.
About the ATM Project
Comments to Tom Worthington at
tom.worthington@tomw.net.au