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The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

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Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#31

Post by themodelplumber »

pkorzeniewski wrote: post #26
chimeracoder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish I was a web developer in 1996! As someone who was actually developing websites in the years 1996-1999... no, you really, really don't. CSS1 was released in December 1996, just to give you an idea.

So you basically didn't give a shit about how the website looks and just focused on the content? Sounds cool :)

No, people gave twice as much of a care how the website looked, and the tools were basically tables. The bottom line for getting hired as a high-level web designer was "can this person look at 1000+ lines of table markup and be patient enough to figure out how to prevent our email address from going off the page in an 800px browser window".

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#32

Post by sotojuan »

marincounty wrote: post #27
lukasm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That awkward moment when website you made 20 years ago is better to read articles.

I wonder which big company will say, "Enough is enough. We are just irritating our readers/customers with all the lag time, and utter confusion." Right now, if I see a website winding up; I hit that X with the speed of a mouse hitting the stimulant lever. I don't think I'm alone.

None because the majority of users don't care and click those social links.

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#33

Post by mc32 »

epc wrote: post #24
mc32 wrote: post #7

My impression is the mercury news from san jose had an earlier, if paid, presence. Funny how the NYT wanted to charge nearly two dollars to allow you to print older articles. Asking people to pay for the own digitization.

I'm pulling this mostly from my decaying memory but nando.net (Raleigh? News and Observer) was neck-and-neck with the SJ Mercury with a web presence. Many of the early newspaper web sites were simply HTML variations on existing online presences (CI$, Prodigy, AOL, etc).

True and nando times had great sports information.

The merc used to include a PDF version of its front page, I believe.

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#34

Post by random_rr »

VeilEm wrote: post #13

I like to call the incognito window my nytimes reader. I paid for the nytimes for a bit but it costs more per week than a monthly netflix subscription and it feels stupid to pay for not knowing how to use the incognito window. It's like a "I don't know how to use software" tax.

That's cool if you like to get content for free - but why on earth would you brag about it? It's not very difficult, it just makes you look like a tool.

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#35

Post by honestcoyote »

epc wrote: post #24
mc32 wrote: post #7

My impression is the mercury news from san jose had an earlier, if paid, presence. Funny how the NYT wanted to charge nearly two dollars to allow you to print older articles. Asking people to pay for the own digitization.

I'm pulling this mostly from my decaying memory but nando.net (Raleigh? News and Observer) was neck-and-neck with the SJ Mercury with a web presence. Many of the early newspaper web sites were simply HTML variations on existing online presences (CI$, Prodigy, AOL, etc).

You're correct. News and Observer (nando.net I think) was a daily visit for me back in the mid 90's. It was the first one I found which provided a full newspaper without being hidden in a walled garden and without needing monthly fees. AP & Reuters were available online but locked behind a very expensive paywall.

Nando was the first time I read of breaking news online. The story on the Oklahoma City bombing jolted me awake one morning. Reading Nando over coffee on my tiny 12 inch screen of a Macintosh LC.

I've often wondered if they could have leveraged their very early lead into something else.

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#36

Post by dredmorbius »

criley2 wrote: post #29
lukasm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That awkward moment when website you made 20 years ago is better to read articles.

>"That awkward moment when website you made 20 years ago is better to read articles." Am I the only one who thinks that the whitespace heavy and well designed NYT modern site is better? Good line height, good type choice, very good readability. As opposed to times new roman at 1.0 line height, is that really the pinnacle of readability? Eight grade book report format?

I hit Reader Mode instantly for all articles. Too many distractions.

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#37

Post by ascagnel_ »

whyenot wrote: post #16
VeilEm wrote: post #13

I like to call the incognito window my nytimes reader. I paid for the nytimes for a bit but it costs more per week than a monthly netflix subscription and it feels stupid to pay for not knowing how to use the incognito window. It's like a "I don't know how to use software" tax.

For me, paying $3.75 a week (or in my case $1.88 since I have an .edu address) is worth it. It's about the same as a drink at Starbucks, and I do go to their website and also use their iPhone app every day.

My complaint is how they bundle the subscriptions: I'd like to have both the phone and tablet apps, but there's no discount given in accessing both. There's not so much extra effort in converting an article laid out for a phone to an article laid out for a tablet that it's worth an additional $5 a month.

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#38

Post by spyspy »

danso wrote: post #3

The oldest snapshot on Archive.org is from November 1996: http://web.archive.org/web/19961112181513/http://www.nytimes... Back then, they even had a low-bandwidth version of the site: http://web.archive.org/web/19990117023050/http://www.nytimes... The website included various tutorials on how to use it, including a guide that covers the different browsers. None of the browsers listed are actively developed today: htt…

Times Machine (http://timesmachine.nytimes.com) is great for browsing around old NYTimes articles.

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#39

Post by donretag »

morgante wrote: post #30

It's pretty impressive how good a job the NYT has done of maintaining historical articles. You can even find quite old articles from key historical times and they're presented just like articles today. For example, the famous Crittenden Compromise is at http://www.nytimes.com/1861/02/06/news/the-crittenden-compro...

The NYT had one of the first publicly known Hadoop clusters (for a major media company, not a tech company) which they used to process the historical articles.

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/the-new-york-times-...

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