The New Nuketown

sion of Nuketown. The ol’thermonuclear burg has been thoroughly overhauled, with a new look, a new structure, and a few new tricks.

This redesign has been a long time coming — the last time we did something like this was back in August 2000. That design was a good one, and it served us well for four years, but over time it started to rust around the edges.

In some ways, the new site represents a step backward in time for Nuketown. we’ve ditched the unmanageable “reviews” section in favor of old-style departments for books, movies and games, while adding a new section for music and audio. The fiction section remains MIA, but it’s possible it may return at some point.

At the same time, the new design represents a break with the past for Nuketown as well. All of the truly ancient content — that which was posted between June 1996 and August 2001 — is now offline. We have archived copies of it in my office, but that content is no longer accessible online. Our hope is to go back and re-enter all of that content into the database so that it’s once again accessible, but for now, it’s gone.

And what of those new tricks I mentioned? There’s a couple of those. First, stop by Nuketown‘s new “Statistics” page, where you can find listings of the most popular Nuketown stories (by “all time” and “this month”) as well as lists of the most recent search terms, and top searches. We’re thinking of expanding this section in the future, to include “top articles by section”, but that’s a job for another day.

Second, check out the home page again — it’s got pictures! Even cooler, some of the articles also have pictures. The ability to snap some photos at a con and then easily upload them to Nuketown is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time — and this new design finally lets me do it.

For my third trick, well, it’s fairly technical. The entire site was built using Cascading Style Sheets 2.1 and XHTML — not one table was used for layout (well, except for where tables were appropriate) nor will you find a single font tag. This may — no, this will — cause problems for folks with older browsers, but hey, it’s 2004. If you’re still using Netscape 4 or IE 3, well, it’s time to upgrade to something a little less antiquated. Like say, Mozilla, a free browser you can download and install on your system or its little brother, Firefox.

One other thing you’ll notice about the new Nuketown is that all of the e-mail addresses have been stripped from it. This is part of a larger effort to reduce the amount of spam I’ve been receiving — you can still get in touch with Nuketown and its contributors, you just need to use the new feedback form. We’re interested to hear what you think about the new design, so please feel free top drop us a line via that form (or using one of our e-mail addresses, if you still have it — our e-mail still works, we’re just not publicizing it any more).

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