What's New in the Zone

We are now being hosted on the mammoth server of the American Arts and Letters Network, which means you won't be seeing any ads on these pages. Ever.

Because we just ported Enterzone from a Macintosh at Berkeley to a Unix box at Vassar (where AALN's network physically exists), we've been experiencing all kinds of technical difficulties lately, for which we apologize. Many of the problems are no more profound that differences in case-sensitivity between the two platforms. In plain English, this means that a link to "very.jpg" when the file is named very.JPG will no longer work for us, and we've fixed many such inconsistencies over the last few months.

We Have a New Address: ezone.org/ez

Still, why should you care where our machines are in the real world? You shouldn't. But we've also changed our address. Our days of nomad wandering are over now that we have our own domain name (ezone.org). Even if we move physically again in the future, you'll always be able to find Enterzone at http://ezone.org/ez.

Conceptually, there is now an experimental place on the net called ezone.org. Enterzone is a front door to that space, a way to enter the zone. To peek at what else we're cooking up in the greater zone, come visit http://ezone.org:1080.

We plan to start some "virtual reality" experiments in the zone in the near future. If you're interested in participating in this or helping out with some of the technical issues, send us some mail.

The old address will work until . . . well, until they pull the plug on our old server. Direct links into previous episodes will therefore still work but should ideally be updated. Any old link to http://enterzone.berkeley.edu/ez/anything can be replaced by http://ezone.org/ez/anything.

Design Evolution

If you've read Enterzone before now, you may have noticed that the design is evolving. The concept has not changed significantly, but we are slowly taking advantage of visual effects as they become close to universally accepted. With episode 7, we've started relying on tables for many of our layout effects. We've striven to lay out web pages that will look decent even in browsers that don't recognize tables (or background art or color text and backgrounds and so on). We use Lynx as one of our benchmarks. The current home page looks just about the same in Lynx as all the earlier ones did.

We're Still Behind in Our Linking Back

Maintaining an archive of links is a full-time job. So is putting out a zine. When in a crunch, we focus on the publishing and let the linking slide. But we're working on it. We've just caught our Other eZines we like page up as of three months ago, but we plan to resume updating it soon after this episode goes to bed.

We're also still working on revamping the classifieds, which look woefully out of date. Soon we will begin regular updates over there as well.

Administrivia: Deadline Changes

Episode 8 will be released on September 1, 1996. The deadline for that episode will be July 1, 1996 (not August 1, per our earlier submission schedule).

Episode 9 will be released on December 1, 1996. The deadline for that episode will be September 1, 1996 (not November 1, per our earlier schedule).