bitsifter
friday, september 20

[sift this] A catagory sadly missing from this year's Cool Site of the Year nominees must be "Actual Useful Site of the Year". The catagory would feature well designed sites which actually provided useful information on a daily basis. Two nominees for this award would be:

1) ESPNET SportsZone: One of the first Sports sites on the web, ESPN features complete coverage all major US sporting events (Yes, even soccer) and even dedicates space to minor leagues. For the true sports enthusiast, ESPN features complete fantasy sports or advertiser supported play-off pools.

The reason I stuck with ESPN is that they never shy away from embrancing all the cutting edge features the browser market produces. The site was one of the first to sport a useful Java application (a real-time sports ticker) and have recently impressed with a Java-based real-time fantasy football application that, while definitely BETA, is a look at the future of collaborative web-based applications.

ESPNs only fault is their generous usage of tables as an organizational method. Anyone with a slow connection is aware that when viewing pages structured with tables all objects contained within the table need to be loaded completetly before the page will display -- this means much thumb twiddling on anything less than a ISDN line.

2) NEWS.COM: What used to be C|NETs news page recent received it's own domain and a face life which propelled it to the top of my bookmark list. C|NET was out of the gate early on-line news-zine market,but their content always seemed to lag 6-12 hours behind Infoworld and PCWeek. C|NET obviously tuned their bandwidth when the new site came on-line and also spruced up their original material.

As for layout, C|NET sticks with their traditional yellow-bar-down-the-side format, but continues to mature the over-all feel ofthe page by embracing the font-face tag and designing original art-work for the cover stories that make me wish for a wide-screen full color PDA I could curl up at home with.

Continued work on the Digest. As part of the process which generates the Bitsifter Index, we're now generating pointers to each week's column, the Bitsifter Archives. We use Paradox forWindows to story the data for both of these pages as well as ObjectPal to generate the HTML -- this is roughly equivalent to using a bulldozer to build a sandcastle.

As part of the move to the archives, we've cleaned up the table of contents frame. Work continues on a better metaphor than the multicolumn tag which has yet to be received with the proper ethusiasm. Suggestions would be appreciated.