Anatomy of a Magazine Web

If you haven't gotten around to the Internet World Wide Web, you're missing a million excellent reasons to do so. OK, well, a million is a bit much, but there are sites a plenty to offer information and opinion about a wide variety of history and miniature-related topics. Most of these are created by individuals armed with a computer, some HTML coding knowledge, FTP software, a modem, and a no-cost server they can use. It is, as yet, a virtually unrestricted medium, and hopefully, will remain so.

For the gamer, there are plenty of these "free" sites, available to anyone who can punch in the URL (articles in past MWANs have covered those). It's a lot like television. Get a TV with antenna and you can pull in "free" TV. Of course, you know that the best stuff is on cable, and you have to pay for cable (including basic cable). And if you want targeted, special-interest content like a history channel, that premium channel costs even more.

It is that analogy, or so I believe, that propels the Web into the commercial realm. The shift is starting for large media companies like Dow Jones (The Wall Street Journal) as well as small ones like Coalition Web (Magazine Web). Everyone knows the former, but miniature gamers will be more interested in the latter.

You see, it is certainly not an easy undertaking--you need a big server, specialized communications hardware, server software, and a big telecommunications line. Then, if you put articles up, say, from a magazine, the publisher wants to get paid for that content--after all, he sells it in printed form. That doesn't even begin to address the time-intensive work of actually converting and coding the issues in HTML so they can appear on the Web.

Thus, to post the content for "free," you need a huge company backing a Web site and willing to pay the costs. For example, the Web site run by the Discovery Channel has 30, count 'em, 30 full-time employees just for the site. It's "cool," very graphical, and gets new stuff uploaded daily. As for that big-name advertising you see on some sites, like Pathfinder, it doesn't even come close to paying the costs. So, if you want to see MWAN and other miniatures and history magazines online, you're going to have to "go cable" to pay for it. Yet a recent survey noted that only 1/3 of the people who use the Internet would pay for content.

Before I go on, let me make a disclaimer. Coalition Web, Inc. (MagWeb) was created by a history buff, armchair general, and gamer named Russ Lockwood (hey! that's me), whose background in computers, magazines, editorial, and positively brilliant ideas (I told you this was a disclaimer) brought to fruition this idea of putting all the history and gaming magazines together into one Web site. It's called MagWeb (short for Magazine Web, and with a score of magazines, I believe MagWeb is the greatest collection of expertise and insight into military history and gaming in one site anywhere on the Web. It's getting bigger and it's packed with value.

If MagWeb's So Great...Why Isn't MWAN On It?

Actually, MWAN is on MagWeb. That's right, MagWeb contains the full text and graphics of the articles (not the advertisements) of a score of magazines, and MWAN is one of those available.

The magazines agreed to join the coalition because it gives them a superb opportunity to show the magazine--the whole magazine--online and convince people to subscribe. Certainly, most people can't subscribe to every magazine in printed form, but you might subscribe to one of the magazines you never knew existed, or one that impresses you with its articles. And of course, the magazines get royalty payments on its articles. This means they don't give away their valuable expertise.

MagWeb charges a fee: $9.95 for a one-month "Take a Look", $24.95 for three-month membership (equivalent to $8.32 a month), $39.95 for six-month membership (equivalent to $6.65 a month), and the best value: $59.95 for a one-year membership (equivalent to $4.99 a month). A membership provides unlimited reading of every current and back issue available in MagWeb. That's right, read as much as you want from as many magazines as you want. Secure, encrypted credit card transactions are available in MagWeb so you can sign up and go right in. Considering the price of any single issue, that's incredible value--and it was meant to be that way.

But check it out for yourself. The URL is http://www.magweb.com and contains "free" sample articles from each publication. naturally, sample articles aren't as impressive as seeing entire issues before you, but it will give you the an idea of how an individual article is presented. In addition to MWAN, other magazines include The Courier, Napoleon, Lone Warrior, El Dorado, First Empire, The Zouave, Saga, Empires Eagles and Lions, a variety of British publicatons, and more. Indeed, the company's goal is 50-60 magazines in 1997 and it's working steadily towards it.

The downside? Not every issue is available. I mean, there's 25 years of The Courier, 10 years plus of MWAN (and these last few issues pack a whopping 192-pages!), 10 years of The Zouave, 10 of Saga, 5 of First Empire, etc., etc., etc. That's going to take a while (shorter if MagWeb gains lots of members, longer if it doesn't), especially since most of those were not done on a computer and have to be manually scanned and entered. But right now, MagWeb covers every period in history and offers more than enough to keep you reading. But as the site says, we're lining up new magazines and coding issues as fast as we can. Now, if I could pay a staff of 30...

And of course you need a computer, modem, browser software, and a connection to the Internet World Wide Web. Most ISPs (Internet Service Providers) will charge about $20 per month for unlimited access to the Web (plus a $25 or so initial setup fee), and that includes e-mail. The ISPs usually throw in some software to get you started. Companies like America OnLine (AOL), CompuServe, and Prodigy offer Internet access as well, and usually charge $10 a month for five hours a month included and then about $2.50 per hour thereafter. That's not as economical as an ISP, but AOL, CIS, and P have other appeals.

If you have AT&T or MCI as your long distance phone company, they were advertising 5 free hours per month, with $2.50 an hour after that. AT&T was providing software, which included the Netscape Navigator browser.

Make sure you have a local phone number to call, otherwise, you'll run up your local phone bill. If not, some RBOCs (Bell Atlantic is one) offer a special calling plan where you can call can make unlimited calls to one exchange (the three digit prefix) for a modest fee (about $3 a month).

How MagWeb Works

MagWeb is a simple password-based service. Once you pay your membership fee, you'll get a username and password. You enter them to get to the "premium" area, and then pick a magazine, jump into an issue, and pick an article from the table of contents. It's fast, straightfoward, and looks good. Multi-part articles over several issues are linked for speed. Individual reviews are usually a single file, unless it is part of a short column.

The text and graphics are optimized for the Web, which means we must reduce the dimensions of illustrations and crop when needed, to speed up the transmission--nothing worse than waiting forever because of some fancy graphics. As with any Web site, you have to balance the "glitz" of graphics with the speed of text. MagWeb strikes the right balance.

According to a recent survey, approximately 2/3 of the Web access is via 14.4Kbps modems, a small percentage via business T-1 lines, and the rest by 28.8Kbps modems. The rule of thumb is 1K takes 1 second, more or less depending on Web traffic, your connection, and other telecommunications factors. Most articles will appear in 30 seconds or less, just about all under a minute, and a very few (especially those with big maps), can take a minute and a half. Cut those times in half if you have a 28.8 modem (although the best "28.8" connection I ever mustered was around 26, and I routinely go no faster than 21.6!).

Hence, a magazine in MagWeb is not a one-for-one page turning of the printed magazine--and never will be until we can get much faster transmission speeds into the home and large monitors. For example, a 8.5x11" full color illustration (say, a cover to a magazine) is about 20MB or so when scanned at 300 dots per inch. That's a few hours at 14.4, less at 28.8. Now, if everybody had a dedicated high-speed T-1 telecommunications line, which is 1.5MBbps (or about a 100 times faster than 14.4), that's another story. However, the MagWeb server is connected via T-1 line and it costs just under $2,000 per month for the line. That's a heckuva phone bill to pay for fast miniatures!

And if you think about it, magazine pages are, so to speak, "vertical rectangles" while your monitor is a "horizontal rectangle." The HTML code is not a desktop publishing program, although you can perform a number of tricks to make it close to a layout program. In designing and coding pages, you have to think about how to best display the information, make it look good, and make it fast. If you've coded your own Web site, you know what I mean. It's a lot of tradeoffs.

And not all browsers work the same. The Netscape browser is the best on the market, and represents something like 2/3 to 3/4 of all browsers. the rest consists of a highly fragmented group, with Microsoft Explorer pulling ahead. The AOL browser is capable, but even AOL struck deals with Netscape and Microsoft to make those browsers available to their members. Of course, part of MagWeb's job is to make it all look simple and elegant, regardless of browser, monitor resolution, modem, or other hardware and software.

Current and Future Plans

Naturally, the articles and other information from so many publications are what draw people to MagWeb. But you want to be able to do more than read online, you want to use the information.

You can print out a particular article, cut and paste text to your word processor, and save the illustrations to a file on your hard drive. Netscape is particularly good at this. So the next time you host a scenario, you can save the map to your hard drive and maniuplate it (nothing like a little map tinkering to introduce some fog of war into a battle!), or just print it out straight. Ditto for the Order of Battle. Or, if you want, you can grab a commander's photo/illustration off MagWeb and paste it on your OOB for a personalized touch. It's up to you.

The idea is that not only is there a tremendous amount of information, but that it is flexible when in electronic format (as long as you are at a computer--tough to bring that monitor on a plane or in a bathroom unless you've got a laptop computer with cellular modem). Common sense (and copyright law) still apply, but for personal use, go wild!

MagWeb opened for business on July 16, 1996 and has been steadily adding more articles to both the "free" part and especially the "premium" (members) part. Its supplementing the magazine articles with special bonus selections, such as posting introductory chapters to rules and books, and in some cases posting entire rule sets. For example, at Halloween, MagWeb worked an agreement with White Wolf Publishing and posted the introductory chapters from a quartet of horror role-playing rules sets, plus independent reviews of the four games. And there is more to come.

By the time you read this, MagWeb should have a search engine installed and will be working on MagWeb-only member discussions and chat. these will be for members only--to add value to the membership.

The theory behind the search engine is to allow you to type in a word or phrase and pull up all the articles matching said word/phrase from all the magazines. Thus, if you want to find an article on Talavera, you type in Talavera, and poof, out comes a list of all articles on Talevera. At this time, the details on implementing that engine remain vague (the fate of computers, in a sense), but that's the theory.

The discussions will be similar to Newsgroups, only obviously restricted to paying members. Chat is "live" discussion between members. The idea is to line up experts and allow members to ask questions and get answers. For example, back when I ran a Ziff-Davis forum on CompuServe, I ran a 50th anniversary of D-Day online conference. I had two US Army historians, the producer from the Discovery Channel "Normandy" CD-ROM, and designers/programmers from a trio of computer wargame companies with D-Day games in a quick four-day conference. We traded Q&A on historical and gaming aspects, and folks dropped in once per day to read and ask. That's the sort of thing we intend to offer.

There are other plans, but MagWeb will concentrate on the search engine first, discussions and chat second. And of course, continue attracting more magazines and posting more articles.

Worth a Try?

It's certainly worth a look. Sample articles from each of the magazines are "free" and available to all at the HTTP://WWW.MAGWEB.COM address. Once there, buttons will direct you to the sample articles, what's new, and bonus articles. MagWeb is unique, for we've convinced top-of-the-line magazines to join together in a coalition, created with the idea and drive that their information is truly a premium service worth the price of admission.

On a personal level, I am committed to expanding MagWeb and making it even better and more valuable as time goes by. You see, Coalition Web is my day job and the only job I do. There's so much I want to do, but even at more than full time, you have to take it step by step. Our current members appreciate that step, and I hope you will too.

This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com