Helen Borrie wrote:

> At 12:52 PM 29/12/2004 +0000, Lester Caine wrote:
>
>>Webring is OK if you have time to rummage through several links to find
>>what you want, but it's not much use if you want to search for - say -
>>French Firebird Sites, or Indonesian ones ;) I gave up bothering with
>>any of the webring lists a long time ago.
>
> From feedback I've had, a lot of people don't bother with the webring
> links because they are assumed to be about InterBase.

Claudio - as I said - it's probably 5 years since I bothered with a
'webring' - I still prefer managed links rather than 'random selection'
;) My main problem was and still is, the non-english links being served
up in the list with english ones. Sometimes you got a full page of
unreadable links - after waiting for a slow dial-up download. So old
habits die hard, like not bothering to try :)

>>I would hope that the main site www.firebirdsql.org could be expanded to
>>provide an improved 'links' system, perhaps with planet.firebirdsql.org
>>as a direct entry point?
>
> It already has the Umbrella pages.

Where? Not obvious from the first page - and I *AM* English.

>>Something where non-english users would find a little more friendly
>>support and pointers to their own 'region' of the 'planet'.
>
> How long is it since you visited the main site, Lester?

Since it WAS rather slow loading the front page ( something that seems
to be fixed now ? ) I'd drop straight to the links I already had set up.
But I still stand by my comment about non-english users needing a
little more help. ALSO ( since I have been immersed in the problem for
the last couple of months! ) the colours and fixed font sizes are not
very helpful to the visually impaired. The side menu is unreadable
because it has no contrast, and while the drop down menus scale font
wise, the heading keeps it's small size. Even ignoring the 'disability'
aspect, I have trouble with it on my main monitor which is running
1600x1200 and set to 200% in the browser ;) Even with my glasses on ;)

( Also the column widths should scale to cope with browsers on different
resolutions. )

What you have done on the firebird site is nice Helen, but it needs some
more work to get the framework complete. A awful lot of sites are very
difficult to handle even if you are just using glasses, but a few
careful observances clear a lot of the problems.

--
Lester Caine
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L.S.Caine Electronic Services