The goal of this rationalization was to set things up in such a way that issues
of the Webzine could be put together by other Hip staff members as time permitted
or by contract (or volunteer) labour on a part-time basis. There were a number of
factors that influenced the directions I took in setting up new production
procedures:
2.2.1.1 - Rationalizing the Webzine production process
Publishing on the World Wide Web requires that all material be "marked up" according to a standard known as HTML, or HyperText Markup Language. HTML uses a system of formatting tags, enclosed in < > characters, which are imbedded in the document's text and sent to the Web browser over the network along with the text. The tags are then interpreted by the Web browser, which formats the page for display to the reader (Graham, 1995:2-3).
As an example, consider the following selection of text and HTML tags:
<TITLE>The simplest HTML example</TITLE>
<H1>This is a level-one heading</H1>
Welcome to the world of HTML.
This is one paragraph.<P>
And this is a second.<P>
which a Web browser will display as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: A simple HTML example
Markup of the Webzine material was done using the BBedit software for Macintosh. Other alternatives were explored, but they were found to be either unreliable (a beta version of Internet Assistant for Word for Windows crashed repeatedly during testing) or not suitable for regular production work. Once the material was marked up, I proofed it using the Netscape browser. After final proofing, each new issue was published on the Internet according to the procedures described in Appendix A.
In addition to copy markup, I did a minimal number of editorial revisions on the copy, and communicated with authors to keep them informed of upcoming publication deadlines. I also proposed some changes in the page layout and design within the Webzine in an attempt to improve the readability. In early issues the text pages were all manually "double-spaced," with fixed length lines separated by a blank line. My redesign eliminated this double-spacing, and added a cleaner "look" to page headings through the use of centered titles and an enlarged cap at the beginning of each page (Figure 3).
Figure 3: A Webzine page after layout redesign
(click to see full size version)
As an outgrowth of the Webzine redesign, Dick had me participate in redesigning
and restructuring of the Focus catalog. Focus International was among the
earliest of Hip's paying clients. Based in New York state, Focus describes itself
as "Your Sexual Health Education Store," and it markets a range of sex-education
material (primarily videos) thorough its online catalog (housed on Hip's Web
server).
2.2.1.3 - Restructuring the Focus catalog
The catalog redesign centered around some new Perl scripts written by Greg
Lipowy, a Hip employee during the spring and early summer of 1995. These scripts
provided a simplified ordering interface that allowed browsers to order products
from the Focus catalog directly over the Internet. Items could be paid for with a
credit card, with Hip receiving a percentage of all sales.
My second major area of responsibility during the internship was to investigate
the logfile that was kept by Hip's Web server. The logfile recorded each page
reference, or "hit," providing a chronological record of all activity on the
server. Since Hip's server holds pages from a number of different clients, all
page requests are intermingled, creating a disorganized, but potentially very
rich, collection of data.
2.2.2 - Analysis of Web server logfile data
Dick was interested in coming up with analytical software tools that could sort through these Web server logfiles and extract useful information on the readership of the Webzine. These tools might later serve as prototypes for the analysis of activity on other Hip clients' sites.
A number of goals were established, and existing logfile analysis tools were examined to see how well they could meet our goals. While the information that we hoped to obtain through logfile analysis was specific to the Hip Webzine, I also hoped to be able to obtain some insights into reader behaviour within hypertext publications in general.
With these goals in mind, we decided that I should work towards extracting the following information from the logfiles:
The process of extracting this information, and the development of suitable methods for analyzing the data, are described in greater detail below.