The process of upgrading the Bitsifter site began when we began to tire of our simple "dice" logo. Incorporating the 1's and 0's associated with binary into a new logo was suggested.  Also recommended: addressing other bugs in the general layout.

Strangely enough, four logos later, you're looking at the new design of Bitsifter. Chilling isn't it?

As part of our redesign process, we threw the old logo into the batch of ideas we were running by two local graphic artists; one from H-P, one from Sun Microsystems. Call it a control, if you will. The end result was ironic as both artists preferred the old logo, commenting that it's simplicity and proper integration with the rest of the layout made for easier reading of the Digest. Oh, well.

Here is our work log for the new site:

-- The Bitsifter domain has now been registered by Pandora Productions, our parent company. Thanks to clever work by Webcom, the old domain (http://www.webcom.com/sifter) continues to work, but the preferred method of access is http://www.bitsifter.com.

-- The program we use to automatically generate our index and archives pages was partially rewritten to deal with the concept of a year. We continue to use Paradox for Windows to generate these pages which can be painful, hopefully the wizards at Corel who recently purchased the source rights to Paradox will ease our life in the future.

-- Much to our surprise, many visitors to Bitsifter continue to use browsers that lack support for frames. Until this revision, browsers received the following message when arriving at Bitsifter: "The Bitsifter page makes heavy use of Netscape 3.0+ features -- what are you waiting for??" Our new site now provides support for these browsers, but, people, come on. Get with it.

-- We briefly toyed with idea of sprucing up pages with JavaScript style controls, but our previous experience with browsers lacking frames lead us to believe that keeping the Digest layout on a least-common-denominator would lead to more readership. Plus, it makes us bandwidth friendly.

-- An About page has been added. Of particular interest: the Digest is now accepting submissions for publication. Please mail [email protected] for more information.

-- In terms of visable layout, very little has changed on the page. Some experiments using the FONT tag led to explorations with new fonts, but it appears Times Roman is here to stay. We've increased "in the gutter' width in the column format to provide narrower columns for better readability. Of course, Netscape is the only browser which currently supports this tag, but they're in good company.

The Bitsifter Digest generates 300-500 hits on an average weekday. Through better advertising we plan to increase hat hit rate to over 1000 per day before the end of the February. The addition of new writers will also increase the length of the articles as well as the richness of content.

Here's to a successful and productive 1997.

[sift this] The cult rage for the geeky teenager of the early 80's was the bulletin board system, BBS. Using the some of the first personal computers and requiring only a simple program, a modem, and a phone line, BBS systems erupted on the seen providing social misfits with the means to communicate with each other. The first BBS I ran was Metropolis of which I was "The Mayor".

This is the time before networks. BBS systems were islands of personalities that ignored the fact there were other islands in the ocean. They provided many of the same features as we've come to expect from the Internet: e-mail, newsgroups, and the occasional live chat with the system operator.

Today's Internet provides all the same features, but on a broader scale because all the computers are linked via the network. E-mail is global, real-time chat is giving way to free long distance calls, and newsgroups exist in Usenet with topics varying from the sane to the inane. It's Usenet that we'll focus on today.

Much the same discussions go on via Usenet that occurred on the primitive BBS system of the 80s. While a brave few struggle to maintain the topic of the group, a great majority exist to do nothing but argue about very little. That's the nature of Usenet, there is no easy way to get the last word in unless you just stop reading the newsgroup. Oddly enough, it isn't conversation which dominates much of the Usenet's bandwidth.

A cursory examination of the Usenet statistics show that the majority of bits which travel the Usenet aren't written words, but binary files. It turns out that the top three newsgroups by article size are alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc, alt.binaries.games, and alt.binaries.multimedia.erotic. What individuals are doing are breaking binary files (like programs or images) into an ASCII format and then distributing them via the Usenet. 45% of all the articles which pass through the Usenet have nothing to do with news, but exist as a poor mans file transfer system.

The decentralized nature of the Usenet enforces few rules on the content of these binary files, so it was only a matter of time before web sites appeared which took the time to organize the binary Usenet chaos into some of the more controversial sites on the Web.