Cruising Logs

Website editor's note:

Those articles above which are more than about three years old have been extracted more or less directly from our club magazine. Since this is a low budget paper publication these articles include few or no pictures.

I do realise that people like pictures on websites so in the more recent articles I have increased the ratio of pictures to text. Indeed I am finding that a way to produce this kind of article is to start by selecting the nicest pictures available, place them on a web page then fit in the minimum text necessary to enable the pictures to tell a story.

The disadvantage of including lots of pictures in a web page is of course download time, particularly for readers using a telephone modem, as I do. A picture may tell a thousand words but it can sure use a lot more kilobytes than a thousand words would. For this reason the latest article here is a 1mb download which will take minutes to load on a really slow modem.

Many web editors would use thumbnail pictures linked to larger files but to my mind if the pictures are important to the story it should be possible to see them immediately and without a whole lot of extra mouse clicks and a lot of waiting periods for the selected pictures to download individualy.

Another possibility is for the editor to split a long article into several chapters which can be downloaded separately but I think my preference is to keep it as one long download while warning the reader that it may take time, at least that way the reader can go and put the kettle on and of course it is possible to start reading the text without waiting for all the pictures to appear. However I would be interested to hear other peoples thoughts on this, is 1meg+ too much? would it be better to use thumbnail pictures? would it be better as separate chapters?