quake/articles/1996/art-788

Path: mantis!not-for-mail

From: Joost Schuur

Newsgroups: rec.games.computer.quake.announce,rec.games.computer.quake.misc

Subject: ANNOUNCEMENT: Slipgate Central launches

Date: 6 Dec 1996 18:35:33 -0000

Organization: Online Magic Ltd.

Lines: 69

Sender: tony@jobstream.co.uk

Approved: quake@mantis.co.uk

Message-ID: <32A18058.221C@onlinemagic.com>

Reply-To: jschuur@onlinemagic.com

S L I P G A T E C E N T R A L

The Definitive Quake Web Site Listing Launches

DECEMBER 1ST, LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - After almost 2 months in the

making,

Slipgate Central, a hierarchical Quake web site listing with

descriptions

and ratings of all major Quake web sites on the Net is launched by Joost

Schuur at http://www.nuqneH.org/slipgates/.

The search for that Quake web site out there on the Net with the exact

info

that you want finally has an end. Slipgate Central opens up with a

listing

of its main 8 categories 'Sites', 'Addons', 'Deathmatch', 'Utilities',

'Information', 'International', 'Commercial' and 'Misc' which have

dozens

of sub categories making it easy to find the type of site you're looking

for

amongst over 600 links listed.

Furthermore, you can easily search for keywords appearing throughout the

site's listings with the handy search engine, keep track of new sites on

the 'Latest additions' page or just browse a random site from the entire

database. A 'Site of the Week' section offers an in depth look at a

truly

exceptional Quake web site.

Slipgate Central's pages are dynamically created from a plain text file

database, making it easy to maintain from an administrative point of

view.

The scripting language Perl is used throughout the site to automate as

many day to day tasks as possible, allowing for a single person to

easily

update this site on a daily basis.

The site is by no means complete yet. Many of the listed sites still

need to be rated and described, and many of the literally hundreds of

Quake

clans haven't been listed yet. Nevertheless, the several dozen people

that had

the opportunity to preview it prior to its launch were all amazed by its

comprehensiveness. A big hearty 'thank you' goes out to all the people

who

took the time to test it out and give feedback.

A series of yet unrevealed planned features promise to make the site

even

more powerful in the near future.

Joost Schuur is widely known in the Quake Internet community for his now

defunct Quake web site 'Aftershock', which dominated the Quake web site

scene around Quake's release, maintaining the idgames2 archive of

Walnut Creek's ftp.cdrom.com and even freelancing as id Software's

FTP/WWW

admin for a while.

He just turned 25 and currently lives in London, England, where he works

as

a software engineer for Online Magic (http://www.onlinemagic.com/), a

web

authoring company with offices in London and New York.

For more information on Slipgate Central, refer to the FAQ at

http://www.nuqneH.org/slipgates/about.html#faq or email the author

at jschuur@onlinemagic.com.