Like many people, we have, over the years, moved on to a more modern PC and even to Windows XP, only to discover that we had lost the original upload software and some of the information provided on the Compuserve Web Site was rather out of date (the IE V3.02 has not been the latest version for quite a few years now!!)

Now after a long search and a helpful nudge from the German Compuserve support staff we have found that it is in fact relatively simple: You need two files:

• wpie415-x86.exe - Upload Wizard, downloaded from the Microsoft.Com site and
• CSi4WPW.exe -  downloaded from ftp://ftp.csi.com/ourworld/win95/ note this latter FTP server is case sensitive.

First install the Upload Wizard and then the second file, a patch that installs a number of added DLLs to tell it also about the Compuserve server. After that follow the instructions and Robert is your father's brother!

HTML/Software:

We have tried to keep it simple for the users, but also for ourselves to keep things up to date. As we are on CompuServe and so cannot use any Server-Side processing, it all has to be on the Browser, whichever version you may happen to have.

Nevertheless to try and get our navigation reasonably modern we have done some experimentation with a few alternatives - initially using DHTML, but now having reverted to JavaScript and Frames for the picture tours. For those still interested in the DHTML attempts (works in IE4+ and Netscape 4+), click here, although the main site is now using the simplified approach - this has the advantage of quick initial load, but short delays for each page as opposed to the DHTML method, which downloads the whole thing in one,  naturally with a significant initial delay of 1-2 minutes and then no delay between views.

If you are wondering, what much of the Javascript is doing, this is simply to make each page independent of which order it is called in, so that we can rearrange the running order without having to re-edit all the other pages, only change the page and image names. The no-frames aspect is now also covered.

The original site has been developed using the Personal Web Server (PWS) 95-v2.0 with MS-FrontPage 98 and a copy tested on our tame Linux/Apache web server.

So far we have tested it against the following browsers:

• MS-IE 3, 4+, 5 and 6  and
• the text only browser Lynx - for that we put the ALT text behind the images in brackets, so that it is clear that an image is at the spot being viewed, even if the Lynx cannot render it. Also the square brackets for the hypertext links make life clearer for the text only browser. And of course the No-Frames comes in useful here!
• Netscape Communicator v4.07

This latter browser gave a number of headaches with the DHTML.

Also, if your monitor only supports 256 colours, the IE seems to do a far better job of the photos (all JPGs), than the Netscape. With high colour (16 bit) both give equally good renditions.

The original idea was a "Home Page", with maybe a few added pages, but as things are, even before we put up the first version onto the web it had grown to include some 18 pages, and although that is not vast, it still takes some organising and the navigation requires some thought. Given that we are using the "straight" CompuServe/ Ourworld site, we do not have any server-side add-ins to help out, so we hope that you find our manual Navigation scheme reasonably intuitive.

As you will see from the Site Map, we have turned away from the image map as it took too long to download and have decided on the simple table - we think it gives a better, quicker overview and that is the aim of it all.

The key area in this site are the photos and there we still do have a lot of work to do. These will always be a compromise between quality and file size.   In this initial version of the Site, we have tended to err on the side of small file sizes to improve loading times. Some of the pictures have come down to 2k and are still recognisable. Some of the views could be a bit bigger, so we shall see how they develop. Also for your info, we have added a calculated load time to each page, assuming a 14.4 modem.

The photos themselves came from two sources:

• Normal Photos taken with Pentax SLR and then scanned in and stored as JPGs - these are clearly the better pictures, but . . .
• Stills "grabbed" from Video Film using a WinTV card - which was recommended and donated by a very good friend (thanks Peter!), as being a good value alternative to a digital camera. We think he was right, although there are still a number of improvements we can think of to the way we take the shots, the results before processing are still too detailed and too big to be sent over the Net and so we still had to compress and lose some quality. The advantage here is that these are instantly available and we can sort through and take only the better shots and then delete the rest - just like a digital camera. One added advantage of this method is the amount of material that can be collected in one session = 90 minutes per tape! We now just need a few more sunny weekends to collect the next set of shots!
• We really will now have to get down to sorting through our, in the meantime thousands of real digital photos - now just waiting for some long winter nights and time!

Another important aspect of this site is our planned use of small sketches to illustrate and break up the text. So far they are not yet all there or in the right place. We still have a long list of sketches to be done - we will continue to add in as they are completed! My artist partner, Robin has done all the sketches personally (she is the one leading the way in many of the Tour Photos).

Again we have tried hard to make the files as small as possible, so that in the case of the larger sketches, we have avoided using the GIFs and tried JPGs. Now that has the disadvantage of not giving the transparent colour effect, which for a GIF makes it looks as if it was drawn on the page by removing the rectangular box shape. Unfortunately, where we have given the JPGs the same colour as the background, the merge-in effect only works on screens with high colour resolution. Sorry everybody else! Let's see how the load performance goes and maybe we can revert to a few more GIFs without making the load times too bad.

Contents - Disclaimer:

As to the content, that has been a great deal of fun researching and we are still finding lots of interesting info that we are just itching to add in to the existing pages or probably to a couple of completely new pages. Obviously, there can be no guarantees, about absolute accuracy, but we are trying our best! Sometimes the information is merely passed down by word of mouth or is our own subjective observation.

So, we are still working hard at all of that, so don't give up hope!

Contacts:

If you have any comments, helpful hints or a similar "Home" Homepage, drop us an email at mikebailey1 AT compuserve DOT com