Worm Digest
|
Worm Digest :: www.wormdigest.org ::
is a non-profit newspaper dedicated to spreading information about the advantages of recycling organic waste by composting with worms. Their goal is to educate as many people as possible, create an online community centered on vermicomposting and to promote their newspaper and products to pay the bills.
How I got involved with so many worm sites and ended up on the staff of Worm Digest is a long story. The biggest challenge to this site is that there is so much content to organize. This is a nice problem to have. The other staff members, as well as every visitor to the site, provides content on a regular basis and it is my job to keep that flow of information going smoothly. I am always reworking this site.
We change our front page online every time a new issue comes out in print. There is an archive of every cover of the newspaper, a description of its content and one sample article from it. These articles add up to a lot of very good information that people can get for free from our site. It also serves to create a desire to see the rest of the issue in hopes that they will subscribe.
There is a heavy dose of off-the-shelf Perl scripts used on the site. I modify them sometimes to meet specific needs. We are moving more and more towards custom written PHP3 scripts that I write to suit our individual needs. Eventually our whole site will be done exclusively with PHP3 and MySQL. The main Perl CGI script that we are using right now is WebBBS (http://awsd.com/scripts/webbbs/) written by Darryl C. Burgdorf based on Matt Wright's original script. We use it on our worm forum, which is by far the most used feature on our site. It is where our community is located. People are addicted to checking in daily for the latest information about what's going on with worms and vermicomposting or to ask questions and give advice. The Worm Digest staff dispenses huge amounts of their personal knowledge and experience but others who visit the site do so as well. This makes it very valuable.
Other sections of the site make use of PHP and MySQL to publish certain key pieces of composting information. In the Worm Wisdom section visitor can find the definitive guide to small-scale vermicomposting online, worm bin reviews which must be allowed to expand to cover new products and to take user feedback, and also a worm species catalog that must be searchable by the public and easily updated by the staff.
Templates for the header, footer and navigation elements are used throughout the site. These are typically written in PHP and can server different content options depending on which page includes them. I can easily update these files and instantly update the entire site. There are systems like this available commercially and also as freeware but I custom write all of this for Worm Digest.
The editor of Worm Digest has long since use the artist Cyrena Respini-Irwin for illustrations in the newspaper and he wanted to incorporate them into the site as well. These have to be scanned from her original artwork and scaled to fit on the pages. They are primarily just black-on-white cartoons so once a good scan is obtained then the graphics can be optimized quite well. These provide a common look-and-feel throughout the site.
Since the site was for a newspaper I originally did my best to imitate it on the web. I separated the page contents from the navigation by making the navigation look like tabs on the right side of the screen hanging off of the vertical scroll bar. These tabs are created with only two small graphics, text and colored table cells. They are simple and effective. These look almost like they are a part of the browser instead of the page. I like all of my navigation to be on the right side so a visitor doesn't have to move his mouse too far across the page to reach it while browsing.
The content of the pages followed the print format of the newspaper almost exactly. The Worm Digest banner was above a line with a section number and a date where there would be an issue number on the print version. There was a faint background image beneath the words that made it look like columns in a newspaper and even a ragged edge image at the bottom just like on the real thing. All of this was put into a table so that I could leave white space around it to further make it look like a page of newsprint was on the screen. It was quite clever and it all worked but it was taking it too far.
We've since redesigned it using the Article Manager and it is what you see there now.
|
:::
Case Studies :
:: Case Study
:: Worm Digest
:: Happy D Ranch Worm Farm
:: Rainbow Worm Farm
:: Number Nine
:: My Family
:: Enviro-Care
:: Telecom Today
|
