Freelance Traveller
- Beowulf Down (David Jaques-Watson)
- http://www.pcug.org.au/~davidjw/
This is Hyphen's web site. First off, a warning to those who are upset by such things: this site uses *frames*. 30% of the left is taken up by a menu, and the rest holds the actual content.
So what's Hyphen's site all about? Well the theme is the port at Tavonni/Vilis. There are four main sections. The homepage ("Welcome to Tavonni") and What's New page ("Just Detected") make up the first section ("Tavonni Customs & Extrality"). "Office of the Port Director" contains an email link, non-Traveller game links, and descriptions of Hyphen's RL existance (his RL alter-ego goes by the name "David Jaques-Watson"). "Off-World Links" has 16 game company links (from "Chuck's Gaming Links" to "Valkyrie Homepage") and numerous resource links (classified into "How to write good HTML", "Web Authoring", "Image Sources", and "Examples of Great Web Sites"). This leaves "The Tavonni System" section as the meat of this site.
The first subsection, "Tavonni Departure Lounge", contains a vast number of Traveller links with separate pages depending on sort order. "Sources" lists official sites only. "Port Director" lists a large number of sites (in author's surname order). "Port Rating" lists the same large number of sites (in order of Hyphen's preference). "Port Title" again lists the same sites (this time in site title order). A page called "Milieu" is planned. Sites listed here have their title, author, a rating from 0 to 5 stars, milieu, and a brief description. ... Though I did notice that my own predominantly CT/MT site is listed as TNE milieu (probably for the 2 TNE items on it). Also, some of these links are broken (time for a spring clean, Hyphen?).
The second subsection, "Tavonni Repair Bays", is a nice juicy resource page: talk on problems in canon, a couple of spreadsheets, some house rules (including MT character generation for "Police" and "MoJ"), some FAQs on photocopying and copyright, and a bunch of other useful stuff. However, it was a bit surprising to see a "new" tag on something dated "9 Mar 1998" (last updated on 29 Oct 2000) ... I suspect it (and others) aren't aged off.
Subsection three, "Tavonni Specialities" provides links to 3 "local companies". These local companies provide equipement (battledress and a med kit), robots and stuff, and starships (which appear to be High Guard and include some hand drawn deck plans).
The fourth subsection, "Tavonni World Views", contains just a link to the Tavonni RICE paper ... which is extensive enough to be a TML Landgrab entry in its own right. Given that this subsection is called "-Views" (plural) I'd expect some other articles to be included.
The "Delphi Project" subsection is a secondary website. It describes itself as "the development of the Delphi Sector by members of JTAS". A few interesting ideas, but still rather thin on content ... so far.
The "Library Data" subsection is also a secondary website. An alternate frameset provides an extensive library data section, all nicely indexed.
"Traveller & Other Tag Lines" is the seventh, and last, subsection. And just as it says on the box this is a collection of email tag lines (some very funny). My favourite is still "For old fans: <-*-o-*-o-*-o-*-o-*--- Tribble and onion kebab".
In summary: The varied subsections of "The Tavonni System" mark this site as one of the stars of Traveller's web presence ... a mix of resources *and* a good jumping-off point to the rest of Traveller on the net.
Improvements: Apart from the always redundant "add more content" advice there are 3 areas that need tightening up. First, the main menu frame seems a bit too large at 30%, I would say menu frames should be a *max* of 25% and ideally should be 20% (this may require some experimentation with the graphics. Second, the 'cheap' speckled star background used on some of the pages doesn't work very well (especially for the Library Data) ... there are better speckled star backgrounds out there on the net. Third, be careful not to get sloppy (something isn't "new!" after 4.5 months on the net, my site isn't primarily a TNE site, and some of the links are dead).