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Fig.1: the browser, where you can see the cover of each issue of the magazine from the present back to January 2004 and click on it to open and read. A preview of the contents is displayed if you let the mouse linger over an issue, as shown here. Clicking on an issue gives you full access if you have purchased the online edition or gained access via a subscription. Otherwise you get a preview of the contents and you can view some of the pages in the issue. At long last! The Revamped S ILICON CHIP Website is here! After more than 18 months of development, our new website is on-line. It offers page-turning versions of over 100 SILICON CHIP issues, a unified shop with full security and encryption for subscriptions, back issues, PCBs, microcontrollers, books and more, plus the ability to check and update your subscription status at any time. By NICHOLAS VINEN O UR WEBSITE has been totally re-built from scratch to add many new features (and improve on old ones). The most important change is that on-line issues are now viewed in a “page-turning” format which means that the magazine appears on-screen exactly as it looks in the printed issue. You now get the full content of each magazine including all the advertisements and you can see all the photos, diagrams and other formatting that we 20  Silicon Chip put so much effort into each month. As well as re-designing the website, we have also taken over its operation and that means we can offer a new range of products and services. For example, current print subscribers can now get on-line access to the same issues by paying a small premium. Our subscribers have been asking for this service for several years and now we can finally provide it. It means you can keep your printed issues at home but get access to them from your office or anywhere in the world, if you want. Another important benefit of the new website is our integrated shop. The shop includes subscriptions (printed, online and combined), printed and online back issues, PCBs, programmed microcontrollers, binders and some specialised electronic component associated with some of our projects. You can even renew your subscription and purchase items from siliconchip.com.au Fig.2: when reading an issue, the contents appear in a bar down the left side of the screen while the issue appears on the right. You can turn the page by grabbing a corner with the mouse cursor and you can also click on an entry in the contents to jump straight to that article. Any shop items or downloads relevant to the article currently on screen are shown below the contents with direct links. the shop at the same time (and in most cases, that means you will get the 10% subscriber discount on those items immediately). We should point out that our existing 10% discount to subscribers for back issues, PCBs and so on now applies to active online subscribers as well. Subscriptions, online payments & shop You can log in to your online account and check your online and print subscription status at any time. When you renew, extend or upgrade your subscription, the results are immediate. Online issues and online subscriptions purchased using a Visa, Mastercard or PayPal are processed and access is granted straight away. Credit card transactions are processed using SecurePay over encrypted connections and we don’t store card numbers for added security. We also have an online shop, linked to the subscription system, where readers can purchase back issues, on-line issues, PCBs, programmed microconsiliconchip.com.au trollers, books, binders, a limited assortment of difficult-to-get parts and anything else we may sell in future. Active subscribers get a discount on most items and in most cases, we indicate whether we have an item in stock before you purchase it (or if not, how long you can expect to wait until we get more). Some items, such as printed back-issues, include postage. For other items, in most cases we have a flat rate per order postage charge via Australia Post (airmail for overseas orders). The main exception is books where a per-book fee is charged due to the extra weight. Getting a log in If you are an active print subscriber but have never logged in to our website, as long as we have your email address on file, you can set up your account in a minute or so. Simply visit the website (siliconchip.com.au) and click on the “Log in” button in the upper-right corner. You should then see some text under the login fields which reads: “If you are an existing print subscriber and don’t have a password, click here.” Click on the “here” and input your subscriber number (five digits, printed on the address sheet which arrives with your magazine each month) and your email address. Instructions will then be emailed to you to allow you to set up a login name and password. Once you’ve done that, you can view your subscription status (via the Account -> Manage My Account menu option) and renew at any time. If you aren’t a print subscriber and have never logged into our website (or have logged in to the old website but never purchased a subscription or online issues) then you can sign up for a free account on our new site. It’s easy; go to the login screen as above but click on the “sign up” link. Once you have an account you can then order items from the shop and consider getting a subscription. Reading the online issue Because the new page-turning format allows you to view the magazine in the same format as the printed verApril 2013  21 35-45MB in medium resolution and 50-70MB in high resolution. Because the online issues are quite large, we have located our server on a fast internet link (in “the cloud”). If you have cable or DSL, most issues should load in 30-60 seconds. It may take slightly longer during times of high internet congestion. Because loading an issue takes a little while, if you’re going to re-visit it later, you will want your web browser to cache it. Some (such as Internet Explorer) should do this automatically while others (eg, Firefox) have size limits on the files they will cache that may interfere with caching online issues. In our FAQ (siliconchip.com. au/Help/FAQ), we explain how to increase the size of objects that Firefox will cache to solve this problem. Shop links Fig.3: you can find and purchase PCBs, programmed micros and some parts for SILICON CHIP projects in the online shop. You can also subscribe, renew a subscription, order a back issue or online issue and so on. Orders can be paid using Visa, Mastercard or PayPal. Active subscribers receive an automatic 10% discount on most items (subscriptions excluded). sion, for best results we recommend a high-resolution monitor. Best results will be achieved with a 20-inch or larger monitor with a resolution of 1920x1080 or higher (ideally, at least 1920x1200). For laptops, a 15-inch or larger full HD (1920x1080) display is best although smaller sizes may be acceptable as long as the resolution is still high. The issue is displayed as a doublepage spread (except for the front and rear covers). You can then flip to the next or previous spread by dragging or clicking the corner of the page. Alternatively, you can use the arrow keys or page up/page down on the keyboard. A list of articles appears in a sidebar to the left of the issue; clicking on an article will jump to its first page and the currently displayed article(s) are highlighted. Holding the mouse cursor over one of these article links shows a short summary of its content. When reading an online issue, you will get the best display in full screen mode. This can be enabled by clicking the button which appears in the 22  Silicon Chip lower-left corner of the screen. With some browsers, you may need to press the F11 key instead. This is especially important on smaller or lower resolution monitors but may be worthwhile for high-res monitors too. Zooming in For smaller or lower-resolution screens, it will be necessary to zoom in to comfortably read the text and view diagrams properly. This can be done easily using the mouse wheel or trackpad scroll bar/gesture, which zooms the page into the area the cursor is currently located over. You can then move the pointer towards the edges of the screen to scroll around the issue. Or you can zoom back out using the scroll wheel, then zoom in somewhere else. Each online issue is available in three resolutions: low, medium and high. The default is “low” because it loads the fastest but if you have a high-res display as recommended you will probably want to turn it up to “medium” or “high”. A typical issue is around 20-25MB in low resolution, One of the benefits of integrating the online issues and the shop onto the same site is that when you are reading an article that has one or more associated shop items (PCBs, programmed micros, etc), links to these items appear in the side-bar, below the issue contents. PCB patterns, front panel artwork and software is also kept in the shop (for the moment, these are all free) and so associated downloads also appear alongside the article. Also, when reading multi-part articles, we include links to the other parts of that article (in other issues) in the same location, ie, below the issue content links. That makes it easy to jump to another part; the required issue loads and then it opens to the first page of that article. Browser support Our website has been tested with the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari. We have also done our best to make it work in older browsers as some people are stuck with them. To view the online issues, you will also need the Adobe Flash plugin (which is built into some versions of Chrome). That currently rules out certain devices (but see below about upcoming features). However, for the moment, there is no valid alternative to Flash. Many sources recommend using HTML5 animation support instead of, or in addition to, Flash however currently, Adobe’s software does not support HTML5 fully; their page laysiliconchip.com.au out software, InDesign, has the ability to export to Flash flipbooks but not to HTML5 format. Also, HTML5 files are often much larger than the same content in Flash, up to twice the size, and that would mean our online issues could easily exceed 100MB. Printing While you can print the online issue, it doesn’t currently work terribly well. The problem is that the Flash flipbook treats each double-page spread as if it’s a single page. So unless you have an A3 printer, you will have to print in landscape mode and then the result will be two magazine pages on an A4 sheet, resulting in a printout that’s about 72.5% of normal size. That’s large enough to be legible but far from ideal. We are working on a better printing option which will hopefully give a full-size printout with one page per page and will release it to all users when it is ready. PDFs Some readers have asked for PDFs of issues and we have considered this but are reluctant to produce them. The reason is that there are already quite a few scanned PDFs of SILICON CHIP magazines being distributed on Internet file-sharing sites and we’re concerned that releasing online issues as PDFs will only lead to a greater incidence of this unauthorised redistribution and other copyright breaches. That’s a great pity because we know that 99.9% of our readers are honest and we understand that having PDF issues can be convenient. So we will continue to consider offering PDFs based on reader feedback and may do this in future. Fig.4: once you have created an account on the website, you can subscribe or renew. There are various subscriptions to choose from and if taking out a new subscription, it is possible to select which issue you want to start with. We now offer the ability to upgrade a print subscription to include online access for a small extra fee. It is also possible to check your current subscription status via the website. Tablet/phone support Currently our website is not designed to work on tablet computers but we are planning to address this, in part at least. The biggest challenge is the small and in some cases lowresolution screens on these devices – zooming in and panning around the content will be virtually mandatory. Also, many of these devices, including iPads and iPhones and some recent Android devices, do not support Adobe Flash so we will want to come up with an alternative way to view the content. It probably won’t have quite as many features as the Flash version but we’d like to offer some sort of alsiliconchip.com.au Fig.5: you can also order printed back issues from the online shop. Some older issues are no longer available but in these cases, you can place an online order for a photocopy of a specified article. ternative viewer for people who can’t view Flash content. Once we manage to do that, we will provide the option for readers to view issues either way, to suit the device they are using. It may even be possible to automatically detect the type of device viewing the website and select the appropriate display method. Article search We offer two methods for searching online issues, both of which may be of help to readers who already have a April 2013  23 Fig.6: the article content search facility can be used to find a SILICON CHIP article based on the title, author or key words in the description field. This will search all issues back to January 2004 and the results contain links to the online versions of those articles (preview only until the issue is purchased). considerable catalog of printed issues. Word search is the simplest. You type in one or more words or phrases and in response, get a list of articles which contain these words, ranked in order with the best matches first. The results give you the year, month, article name and a link to view the online issue (or preview if you haven’t already purchased it). The link takes you straight to the article once the issue has loaded. You also get a list of pages on which the words were found. Content search is a bit more precise but relies on you knowing some or all of the details relevant to the article you are looking for. You can select which type of articles to search (feature, project, etc) and then enter one or more words to look for in the name of the article, description, authors and so on. So for example, if you know who the article is by but can’t remember what it’s called, you can quickly call up a list of all articles by that author in order of date and then scan the list to find the one you are looking for. from under online subscribers who were already used to the old HTML format of the articles so we have preserved the website content up to the date of the change-over (November 2012). This website is located at http:// archive.siliconchip.com.au and allows pre-existing users to log in and view content they have purchased. Pre-existing users can also log in and view the same content in the new format on the main website if they wish. This can be done using the same login name (email address) and password as was used originally. This does not apply for content prior to 2004 as we will not be putting this up in page-turning format. Note though that the legacy site and new website are separate; the legacy site is a “time capsule”. So, for example, if you are a legacy user and change your password on the new site, you will still need to use the old password to get into the legacy (archive) site. Legacy site We’ve already discussed future improvements to printing and to support We didn’t want to pull the rug out 24  Silicon Chip Future improvements for browsing using tablets and mobile phones. There are some other areas we are hoping to make improvements to later this year. Some of our ideas for improvements include: • The ability for searches to return results from older issues which are not available online; • An option for readers to purchase a year’s worth of online back-issues at a discounted price (similar to the subscription rate); • Automatic email subscription renewal reminders and optional emails to remind subscribers when a new online issue is released; and • An optional email newsletter which we will send out from time to time regarding upcoming projects and topical subjects Any other suggestions or feedback from readers are welcome. Readers are also invited to take a look at the website if you haven’t already and consider activating your account (or signing up if you are not a subscriber) to take advantage of the ability to check your subscription status, renew online and order parts SC if you need any. siliconchip.com.au