This is only a preview of the April 2013 issue of Silicon Chip. You can view 22 of the 96 pages in the full issue, including the advertisments. For full access, purchase the issue for $10.00 or subscribe for access to the latest issues. Items relevant to "LED Ladybird: An Eye-Catching Electronic Beetle":
Items relevant to "High-Performance CLASSiC DAC; Pt.3":
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Fig.1: the browser, where you can see the cover of each
issue of the magazine from the present back to January
2004 and click on it to open and read. A preview of the
contents is displayed if you let the mouse linger over
an issue, as shown here. Clicking on an issue gives you
full access if you have purchased the online edition or
gained access via a subscription. Otherwise you get a
preview of the contents and you can view some of the
pages in the issue.
At long last! The Revamped
S ILICON CHIP Website is here!
After more than 18 months of development, our new website is on-line.
It offers page-turning versions of over 100 SILICON CHIP issues, a unified
shop with full security and encryption for subscriptions, back issues,
PCBs, microcontrollers, books and more, plus the ability to check and
update your subscription status at any time.
By NICHOLAS VINEN
O
UR WEBSITE has been totally
re-built from scratch to add many
new features (and improve on old
ones). The most important change is
that on-line issues are now viewed in
a “page-turning” format which means
that the magazine appears on-screen
exactly as it looks in the printed issue.
You now get the full content of each
magazine including all the advertisements and you can see all the photos,
diagrams and other formatting that we
20 Silicon Chip
put so much effort into each month.
As well as re-designing the website,
we have also taken over its operation
and that means we can offer a new
range of products and services. For
example, current print subscribers can
now get on-line access to the same issues by paying a small premium. Our
subscribers have been asking for this
service for several years and now we
can finally provide it. It means you can
keep your printed issues at home but
get access to them from your office or
anywhere in the world, if you want.
Another important benefit of the
new website is our integrated shop.
The shop includes subscriptions
(printed, online and combined), printed and online back issues, PCBs,
programmed microcontrollers, binders and some specialised electronic
component associated with some of
our projects. You can even renew your
subscription and purchase items from
siliconchip.com.au
Fig.2: when reading an issue, the contents appear in a bar down the left side of the screen while the issue appears on the
right. You can turn the page by grabbing a corner with the mouse cursor and you can also click on an entry in the contents
to jump straight to that article. Any shop items or downloads relevant to the article currently on screen are shown below
the contents with direct links.
the shop at the same time (and in most
cases, that means you will get the 10%
subscriber discount on those items
immediately).
We should point out that our existing 10% discount to subscribers
for back issues, PCBs and so on now
applies to active online subscribers
as well.
Subscriptions, online
payments & shop
You can log in to your online account and check your online and
print subscription status at any time.
When you renew, extend or upgrade
your subscription, the results are immediate. Online issues and online
subscriptions purchased using a Visa,
Mastercard or PayPal are processed
and access is granted straight away.
Credit card transactions are processed
using SecurePay over encrypted
connections and we don’t store card
numbers for added security.
We also have an online shop, linked
to the subscription system, where readers can purchase back issues, on-line
issues, PCBs, programmed microconsiliconchip.com.au
trollers, books, binders, a limited assortment of difficult-to-get parts and
anything else we may sell in future.
Active subscribers get a discount
on most items and in most cases,
we indicate whether we have an
item in stock before you purchase
it (or if not, how long you can expect to wait until we get more).
Some items, such as printed back-issues, include postage. For other items,
in most cases we have a flat rate per
order postage charge via Australia Post
(airmail for overseas orders).
The main exception is books where
a per-book fee is charged due to the
extra weight.
Getting a log in
If you are an active print subscriber
but have never logged in to our website, as long as we have your email
address on file, you can set up your
account in a minute or so. Simply visit
the website (siliconchip.com.au) and
click on the “Log in” button in the
upper-right corner. You should then
see some text under the login fields
which reads: “If you are an existing
print subscriber and don’t have a
password, click here.”
Click on the “here” and input your
subscriber number (five digits, printed
on the address sheet which arrives
with your magazine each month) and
your email address. Instructions will
then be emailed to you to allow you
to set up a login name and password.
Once you’ve done that, you can view
your subscription status (via the Account -> Manage My Account menu
option) and renew at any time.
If you aren’t a print subscriber and
have never logged into our website
(or have logged in to the old website
but never purchased a subscription or
online issues) then you can sign up for
a free account on our new site. It’s easy;
go to the login screen as above but click
on the “sign up” link. Once you have
an account you can then order items
from the shop and consider getting a
subscription.
Reading the online issue
Because the new page-turning format allows you to view the magazine
in the same format as the printed verApril 2013 21
35-45MB in medium resolution and
50-70MB in high resolution.
Because the online issues are quite
large, we have located our server on
a fast internet link (in “the cloud”). If
you have cable or DSL, most issues
should load in 30-60 seconds. It may
take slightly longer during times of
high internet congestion.
Because loading an issue takes a little while, if you’re going to re-visit it
later, you will want your web browser
to cache it. Some (such as Internet
Explorer) should do this automatically while others (eg, Firefox) have
size limits on the files they will cache
that may interfere with caching online
issues. In our FAQ (siliconchip.com.
au/Help/FAQ), we explain how to increase the size of objects that Firefox
will cache to solve this problem.
Shop links
Fig.3: you can find and purchase PCBs, programmed micros and some parts
for SILICON CHIP projects in the online shop. You can also subscribe, renew a
subscription, order a back issue or online issue and so on. Orders can be paid
using Visa, Mastercard or PayPal. Active subscribers receive an automatic 10%
discount on most items (subscriptions excluded).
sion, for best results we recommend a
high-resolution monitor. Best results
will be achieved with a 20-inch or
larger monitor with a resolution of
1920x1080 or higher (ideally, at least
1920x1200). For laptops, a 15-inch or
larger full HD (1920x1080) display is
best although smaller sizes may be
acceptable as long as the resolution
is still high.
The issue is displayed as a doublepage spread (except for the front and
rear covers). You can then flip to the
next or previous spread by dragging or
clicking the corner of the page. Alternatively, you can use the arrow keys or
page up/page down on the keyboard.
A list of articles appears in a sidebar
to the left of the issue; clicking on an
article will jump to its first page and
the currently displayed article(s) are
highlighted. Holding the mouse cursor
over one of these article links shows a
short summary of its content.
When reading an online issue, you
will get the best display in full screen
mode. This can be enabled by clicking the button which appears in the
22 Silicon Chip
lower-left corner of the screen. With
some browsers, you may need to press
the F11 key instead. This is especially
important on smaller or lower resolution monitors but may be worthwhile
for high-res monitors too.
Zooming in
For smaller or lower-resolution
screens, it will be necessary to zoom
in to comfortably read the text and
view diagrams properly. This can be
done easily using the mouse wheel
or trackpad scroll bar/gesture, which
zooms the page into the area the cursor
is currently located over. You can then
move the pointer towards the edges of
the screen to scroll around the issue. Or
you can zoom back out using the scroll
wheel, then zoom in somewhere else.
Each online issue is available in
three resolutions: low, medium and
high. The default is “low” because
it loads the fastest but if you have a
high-res display as recommended you
will probably want to turn it up to
“medium” or “high”. A typical issue
is around 20-25MB in low resolution,
One of the benefits of integrating the
online issues and the shop onto the
same site is that when you are reading
an article that has one or more associated shop items (PCBs, programmed
micros, etc), links to these items appear in the side-bar, below the issue
contents. PCB patterns, front panel
artwork and software is also kept in
the shop (for the moment, these are all
free) and so associated downloads also
appear alongside the article.
Also, when reading multi-part articles, we include links to the other
parts of that article (in other issues)
in the same location, ie, below the issue content links. That makes it easy
to jump to another part; the required
issue loads and then it opens to the
first page of that article.
Browser support
Our website has been tested with
the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome,
Internet Explorer and Safari. We have
also done our best to make it work in
older browsers as some people are
stuck with them. To view the online
issues, you will also need the Adobe
Flash plugin (which is built into some
versions of Chrome). That currently
rules out certain devices (but see below
about upcoming features). However,
for the moment, there is no valid alternative to Flash.
Many sources recommend using
HTML5 animation support instead
of, or in addition to, Flash however
currently, Adobe’s software does not
support HTML5 fully; their page laysiliconchip.com.au
out software, InDesign, has the ability
to export to Flash flipbooks but not
to HTML5 format. Also, HTML5 files
are often much larger than the same
content in Flash, up to twice the size,
and that would mean our online issues
could easily exceed 100MB.
Printing
While you can print the online issue, it doesn’t currently work terribly
well. The problem is that the Flash flipbook treats each double-page spread as
if it’s a single page. So unless you have
an A3 printer, you will have to print
in landscape mode and then the result
will be two magazine pages on an A4
sheet, resulting in a printout that’s
about 72.5% of normal size.
That’s large enough to be legible
but far from ideal. We are working on
a better printing option which will
hopefully give a full-size printout with
one page per page and will release it
to all users when it is ready.
PDFs
Some readers have asked for PDFs
of issues and we have considered this
but are reluctant to produce them. The
reason is that there are already quite a
few scanned PDFs of SILICON CHIP magazines being distributed on Internet
file-sharing sites and we’re concerned
that releasing online issues as PDFs
will only lead to a greater incidence
of this unauthorised redistribution and
other copyright breaches.
That’s a great pity because we know
that 99.9% of our readers are honest
and we understand that having PDF
issues can be convenient. So we will
continue to consider offering PDFs
based on reader feedback and may do
this in future.
Fig.4: once you have created an account on the website, you can subscribe or
renew. There are various subscriptions to choose from and if taking out a new
subscription, it is possible to select which issue you want to start with. We now
offer the ability to upgrade a print subscription to include online access for a
small extra fee. It is also possible to check your current subscription status via
the website.
Tablet/phone support
Currently our website is not designed to work on tablet computers
but we are planning to address this,
in part at least. The biggest challenge
is the small and in some cases lowresolution screens on these devices
– zooming in and panning around the
content will be virtually mandatory.
Also, many of these devices, including iPads and iPhones and some recent Android devices, do not support
Adobe Flash so we will want to come
up with an alternative way to view the
content. It probably won’t have quite
as many features as the Flash version
but we’d like to offer some sort of alsiliconchip.com.au
Fig.5: you can also order printed back issues from the online shop. Some older
issues are no longer available but in these cases, you can place an online order
for a photocopy of a specified article.
ternative viewer for people who can’t
view Flash content.
Once we manage to do that, we will
provide the option for readers to view
issues either way, to suit the device
they are using. It may even be possible
to automatically detect the type of
device viewing the website and select
the appropriate display method.
Article search
We offer two methods for searching
online issues, both of which may be
of help to readers who already have a
April 2013 23
Fig.6: the article content search facility can be used to find a SILICON CHIP article based on the title, author or key words in
the description field. This will search all issues back to January 2004 and the results contain links to the online versions
of those articles (preview only until the issue is purchased).
considerable catalog of printed issues.
Word search is the simplest. You
type in one or more words or phrases
and in response, get a list of articles
which contain these words, ranked
in order with the best matches first.
The results give you the year, month,
article name and a link to view the
online issue (or preview if you haven’t
already purchased it). The link takes
you straight to the article once the issue has loaded. You also get a list of
pages on which the words were found.
Content search is a bit more precise
but relies on you knowing some or all
of the details relevant to the article you
are looking for. You can select which
type of articles to search (feature, project, etc) and then enter one or more
words to look for in the name of the
article, description, authors and so on.
So for example, if you know who
the article is by but can’t remember
what it’s called, you can quickly call
up a list of all articles by that author
in order of date and then scan the list
to find the one you are looking for.
from under online subscribers who
were already used to the old HTML
format of the articles so we have preserved the website content up to the
date of the change-over (November
2012).
This website is located at http://
archive.siliconchip.com.au and allows pre-existing users to log in and
view content they have purchased.
Pre-existing users can also log in and
view the same content in the new format on the main website if they wish.
This can be done using the same login
name (email address) and password as
was used originally.
This does not apply for content prior
to 2004 as we will not be putting this
up in page-turning format.
Note though that the legacy site and
new website are separate; the legacy
site is a “time capsule”. So, for example, if you are a legacy user and change
your password on the new site, you
will still need to use the old password
to get into the legacy (archive) site.
Legacy site
We’ve already discussed future improvements to printing and to support
We didn’t want to pull the rug out
24 Silicon Chip
Future improvements
for browsing using tablets and mobile
phones. There are some other areas we
are hoping to make improvements to
later this year. Some of our ideas for
improvements include:
• The ability for searches to return
results from older issues which are
not available online;
• An option for readers to purchase
a year’s worth of online back-issues
at a discounted price (similar to the
subscription rate);
• Automatic email subscription renewal reminders and optional emails
to remind subscribers when a new
online issue is released; and
• An optional email newsletter which
we will send out from time to time
regarding upcoming projects and topical subjects
Any other suggestions or feedback
from readers are welcome.
Readers are also invited to take
a look at the website if you haven’t
already and consider activating your
account (or signing up if you are not
a subscriber) to take advantage of the
ability to check your subscription
status, renew online and order parts
SC
if you need any.
siliconchip.com.au
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