Improvements in the presentation of magazines

Broken link? Feature request? Anything related to the Spectrum Computing website here.
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PeterJ
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Improvements in the presentation of magazines

Post by PeterJ »

I wanted to share with you some improvements we have made to the presentation of magazines. This is still work in progress, but hopefully you will like it.

If we go to the page for 'Avalon'

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.php?cat=96&id=348

and scroll down to the 'Magazine References' section

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There are a number of links available on this page, and I will go through each of them in detail:

Magazine: This takes you to a page which shows all the issues published for that specific title. Some (such as Crash) include scans of the cover pages. The rest will have cover scans in due course. From this page you can jump to a specific issue of your choice.

Issue: This is where the magic starts! This page starts with a few selected scans from your chosen issue, then goes on to provide a page by page list of every title featured in that issue. From here you can click through to our page for that title, or to the publisher detail page. Further down the page you will see a similar table, which contains all the advertisements in that issue. You can also click on the page number to view a scan of that page, or in some cases where you see the word 'PDF' jump to the archive.org PDF Page viewer which allows you to flip pages if you like that sort of viewing experience.

Page: This offers the same functionality as mentioned above. You can click the page number to view a scan of the page, or in some cases jump to the PDF viewer.

The PDF view is very richly featured and lets you view thumbnails of the pages for the chosen issue:

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You can also download a PDF of that issue, by clicking on this button:

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Additionally there is support for screen readers zoom functionality and a nice information button which shows you details about that issue:

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My personal preference is to use the PDF viewer on Desktop, and the JPG Viewer (Thanks Ricardo for designing this!) on mobile and tablet.

All pages are decompressed on the fly from the archive.org website so you won't get the best speed. We would like to host locally in the future, but this would greatly increase our monthly hosting bill.

Its quite hard to explain these things in detail, so the best thing to do is dive straight in and let us know how you get on.
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PeterJ
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Location: Surrey, UK

Re: Improvements in the presentation of magazines

Post by PeterJ »

Just another update..

You can now search for magazines in the Quick Search. So for example if you search 'Sinclair User', at the bottom of the search results you will see a 'Magazine Results' Section:

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Select Sinclair User, and you go straight to the index of issues with nice cover images too.

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Juan F. Ramirez
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Re: Improvements in the presentation of magazines

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

A very cool feature!
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RMartins
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Re: Improvements in the presentation of magazines

Post by RMartins »

Looking good, a useful to search stuff on the existing magazine issues.
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