What you need for the site, and how to get the best from your visit:

Finding your way around the site

Navigation between pages on this site can be done in more than one way. Firstly, the side menu gives you a quick link to the top hierarchy of "zones:" travel zone, gallery zone and so on. Within each of these may be several other zones which share the same topical content. For example, sheltering within the port of the travel zone are the tips zone, the DIY zone, the travel CV zone and others. Most pages have a "Jump to:" drop-down menu at the bottom:


which has more choices for jumping between zones. Just click on the arrow next to the menu, then click "Go!" to navigate to that page. Finally, some zones spread over more than one page (the online zone is one which does this) and have sub-menus allowing navigation within the zone itself. It probably sounds a lot more complicated than it is - just click around and you'll find your way. Should you want a simplified overview of the site to see what's on offer, take a look at the site map in the cryptically-named site-map zone.

Browsers and screen resolution

The tokezone supports "any damn browser." The site has been tested on four different browsers in Windows - Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Mozilla 1. I'll just run the version numbers past you in case they are important: IE 6 and 7, Opera 8 and 9, Firefox 1.5 to 3.0, and SeaMonkey 1.1.12. As Firefox/Mozilla approach the old Netscape 4 in their rendering of sites, I think Netscape users won't find any startling problems. It also looks quite good on Firefox 2.0 to 3.0, SeaMonkey 1.1.9, Mozilla 1.7 and Konquerer 3.5 in Linux, and is fully functional for navigation and site searching running from that OS. No testing in the Macintosh OS with either Camino or Safari yet: does anybody want to send me a report?

IE and most other browsers shows the rollover colours and buttons correctly; only IE, Opera and Konquerer (of the browsers I've tested the site with) show styled colours in the scroll bars. (When I say IE, I mean both Microsoft's Internet Explorer and browsers such as Maxthon and Avant Browser which use Internet Explorer as the rendering engine.)

Although 800 x 600 screen resolution will work on the tokezone, 1024 x 768 will mean freedom from horizontal scrolling. I used to have the option to allow visitors to remove the side menu and gain a little more screen real-estate, but I have so much hot-linking to individual pages without the side menu (chiefly from how the tokezone is indexed in search engines like Yahoo! and Google) that I removed that option. As only around 15% of visitors have monitors with an 800x600 pixel resolution, I thought it was time to optimise the site for the majority. High colour (thousands of colours) is OK for the photo gallery, and you'll probably get by with 256 colours on the rest of the site, although it will look rather grainy.


Social bookmarks and "send to a friend" buttons





Social bookmarking icons (2) and the "Send to a friend" button (1)

"Social bookmarking" icons can be found on many tokezone pages. These bookmarking sites easily let you store, tag and share links across the Internet. You can share these links both with friends and people with similar interests. You can also access your links from any computer you happen to be using. When you have read a page that you want to save for future reference or share with other people, click on one of these icons, which offer some of the most popular sites. If you are not sure which bookmarking site the icon represents, hover your mouse pointer over it.

Some brief information about the bookmarking sites:

del.icio.us is one of the most popular social bookmarking sites. It allows you to keep track of what you read online, but also to share those bookmarks with other users, letting others find the stories you like. You can add short descriptions and keyword tags to each article you bookmark – making it easier for you to find them again, for others to find them, and for you to find other websites that might interest you. Digg is another of the most popular community news sites on the web. Users add articles to it and every user who then reads and likes that article can vote for it ('digg' it). The most voted for articles then climb the rankings of the most popular articles on the site. Reddit is a site where every vote and recommendation you give trains the site to know what you like and dislike – so it can recommend other sites and stories that it thinks you will like. You can submit sites, vote on ones submitted by other users, and explore sites recommended by the site and other users. Newsvine is a news site where the prominence of stories is decided by what users think is most important, rather than by an editorial team. Like Digg, you can submit articles, which will rise up the site's ranks the more votes they get. Additionally, with Newsvine you can also write your own articles and comment on articles by others. StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles. Web pages are presented when the user clicks the "Stumble!" button on the browser's toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which Web page to display based on the user's ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests.

All of these bookmarking sites are free to use, but require you to register. Once you have registered you can begin bookmarking. As you can see, each of the sites works slightly differently, so have a look at more than one if you are just starting in your bookmark collection, and find out which service offers what you need. You can read more about social bookmarking on the Wikipedia.

The "Send to a friend" page

Another way to let people know about the page you saw is to use the "Send this page to a friend" button. Clicking on this allows you to send an email to a single friend (including perhaps a short, personal message) with a link from the page you just visited. This is a faster and simpler way if you want to notify just one person about the page. Any email addresses you enter on the form will remain private - this site is a spam-free zone!


Downloads and formats

You can download documents from this site in Microsoft Word (doc and rtf), Adobe Acrobat (pdf) and Microsoft compiled HTML help (chm) formats. The doc format is probably most suited to those running Windows computers, although you may have a compatible word-processing program such as Open Office which will read this proprietary Microsoft format in Linux or Macintosh. The rtf format is readable in either a browser or a word-processing program. Adobe Acrobat's pdf is a universal format for documents, so irrespective of your operating system (Windows, Linux, Macintosh) you'll almost certainly find something on your computer to read it with.

The chm format is less universal, but still multi-platform. It is suitable for reading on your desktop, laptop or pocket computer, and is also readable by most tablet PCs and e-book readers. The full text is searchable. Windows users will already have an embedded help system from Microsoft for reading chm files, while the Firefox browser can read chm files with a simple add-on. Macintosh users have a choice of the open-source Chamonix for OS X or Chmox - both free.


Copyright

Content on this site is available for use under the Creative Commons non-derivative, non-commercial use with attribution licence. This means you can use the resources (pictures, text, downloaded files) here as long as you don't change them in any way, that you don't use them for commercial gain, and that you acknowledge this site as the source if you distribute them or post them on your own site or an Internet forum. If you want to copy the material here to somewhere else on the Internet, you must present it unmodified (quoting text verbatim, displaying pictures unchanged, offering files unaltered), not change any of the links within it, and you must provide a link back to the tokezone. Generally, a link to the site is the preferred way of offering your visitors a view of what's here - I update some information very regularly, and you wouldn't want to be quoting older material, nor would I like that to happen. For more information about the Creative Commons licence, click the button below.


 

Advertising

Aside from an occasional, obligatory "powered by..." notice at the bottom of some pages, this site is free of advertising. I pay for the costs of hosting the pages on the tokezone and for the domain name tokezone.net myself and ask for no donations to support them.


General issues

The "site news" feature launched from the front page works by launching a popup window. If you have an ad-blocker running on your system, you may not see it (try it now). I have retained the "news" feature as a regular page (accessed through the drop-down menu at the bottom of each major site page, and containing more information, such as site visitor statistics) to help such visitors.

Today's date is shown at the top of the column on the homepage; if it's wrong, don't blame me. The information comes from the date set on your own computer, read by a simple JavaScript then outputted as text to that place. So try and fix your computer's date and time using the Control Panel first!

Multimedia content (music on the toke-cards, video and audio clips) need the appropriate plug-in for your browser. The Firefox browser in particular can be fiddly when trying to configure a plug-in for the e-cards' music. Opera and IE nearly always play these cards without problem. You will need to have the Flash player and QuickTime player installed as an absolute minimum - if they are not detected, you should get a message of where to download from on the page in question.

I've tried to minimise my use of Flash and JavaScript for navigation (see my rant if you want more), but a little JS has been used to do things like site searching, downloading, bookmarking and sending e-cards. No major navigation needs JavaScript enabled, however. I'm aiming to have the entire site compatible with those who are sight-impaired and may use voice-synthesisers to read the "ALT" tags on images for site navigation. Javascript was unavoidable in the toke-cards, survey pages, coppermine gallery and blog as these are prewritten modules.

Site search is implemented through a search engine loaded at the server, so nothing needs to be downloaded to your computer before you can begin searches. The search engine has more options available for in-depth searching across the 800+ pages of this site. You can access these (and advice for successful searches) by clicking "Advanced Search" on the homepage, or the search zone button on the side menu from any page. This search tool searches the entire site except for the latest tokeblog (December 2007-March 2008). To search that blog, type your search term into the small box at the top-right corner of the blog page and hit <enter>.

Did you know you can return to the homepage from anywhere by clicking on the green "glass" button at the bottom of the L side menu?

Problems getting the download to load? Don't right-click on the link - the download link works indirectly through a script which loads your file. 

The only cookies sent to your browser from the tokezone site are "session" cookies from my hit counter or specific cookies to remember your e-card selection or photo favourite as you move through certain pages. These cookies normally expire once you leave the site. If you received a "long-lasting" cookie visiting here, it is because you used the shortcuts wakeup.to/ke or kickme.to/toke These shortcuts have their uses (and I'm surprised how many people continue to come here through them), but as well as cookies, you'll have advertising popups to fend off with these shortcuts. "Kickme.to" is particularly bad for this, sending popups and cookies on a timed basis. I've been unable to change the kickme.to/toke shortcut to the new site address, so you will land on the old hosting page for this site, quadranet.org, after being redirected. Use the main site URL and you will always reach the site:
http://www.tokezone.net
It's probably easiest to bookmark the tokezone directly here and now:

I'm always looking for feedback and suggestions on the site, so if you have a comment, please contact me here.
 

Compact rant:

Far too many sites which I visit are difficult to use. They require that I enable Javascript in my browser simply to go to another page, or click on a Macromedia Flash menu, or they try to launch photos or text in a tiny, popup window. All of these things could have been done with static html, but the attractions of complexity and pizzazz won the webmaster over, resulting in less usability for the average visitor. Certainly, Flash can perform wonderfully captivating magic on a website, and if the site presents itself as "art" then there's no reason it shouldn't sacrifice a little functionality to such style. However, a website where visitors simply want to obtain information and move on has no excuse for being obscure and overly zippy. Visitors who have Javascript disabled at the browser level in order to block advertisements and popup windows will probably never be able to access those sites which use JS for major navigation functions.

If Javascript is a mixed blessing, Flash is even more so. Both JS and Flash can be (and have been) used to launch attacks on the host computer, and Flash plugins require regular updating to stay ahead of current exploits. There was no update notification service for older versions of Flash (unlike, let's say, Firefox, or the Microsoft operating systems) so many users run their browsers with an outdated Flash Active-X control as full of holes as Swiss cheese and unaware of the risks they may face.

I've tried to make  Javascript perform non-core functions on the tokezone, and make Flash serve simply as window dressing. This means you'll be able to navigate the tokezone entirely using a browser which has Javascripting disabled, although you won't be able to do things such as searching the site or downloading files.