D Finnigan

Today marks an entire year of Mac GUI Vault being online and accessible to
the masses of retro Apple computing enthusiasts. Launched on 09-09-09, Mac
GUI Vault is now the world's largest online archive of vintage Apple II and
Macintosh computing material, including software, photos, text files, Usenet
posts, and other resources.

Here are some quick facts about Mac GUI Vault:

- Mac GUI Vault contains roughly 23,000 software files in a searchable
index, and since February of 2010, over 12,000 files have been downloaded.

- Mac GUI Vault was the first archive site to offer hard-to-find software
such as:
- MacBASIC version 0.355, the earliest version of the never-released Mac
BASIC known in existence.
http://macgui.com/downloads/?file_id=17339

- The "Pepsi Caps" Window manager demo, by Andy Hertzfeld, possibly the
earliest-surviving Macintosh program ever.
http://macgui.com/downloads/?file_id=20125

- Consulair Mac C, by Bill Duvall, the first C compiler that was sold for
the Mac.
http://macgui.com/downloads/?file_id=24076

- Mac GUI Vault is the only Apple archive site to contain over a quarter of
a million Usenet posts from 1982 to mid-1991, with more planned to come.

- Mac GUI Vault was the first (and currently only) archive site to offer
full access to nearly 14,000 binary Usenet posts, from newsgroups including:
- comp.binaries.apple2
http://macgui.com/usenet/?group=105

- comp.binaries.mac
http://macgui.com/usenet/?group=17

- mod.mac.binaries
http://macgui.com/usenet/?group=109

- Mac GUI Vault has over 650 text and PDF files online and searchable, which
all together have been viewed nearly 20,000 times.


The Mac GUI Vault home page is located here:
http://macgui.com/vault/

A FAQ page for Vault is located here:
http://macgui.com/infobooth/faq/20/

Toinet

Congratulations, Sir, for your work. Your site is worth visiting.

Thank you,
antoine

D Finnigan

Toinet wrote:
> Congratulations, Sir, for your work. Your site is worth visiting.
>

Thanks, but it's certainly not perfect!

In my opinion, it has two major problems, one of which is probably
exclusive, and the second of which is a part of other archives of well.

The first problem which I've noticed from analyzing traffic logs, and
following specific site visitors, is that many people can't figure out how
to navigate the site. The site navigation needs to be redesigned. The
problem is that while the amount of hits I get from search engines is
substantial, many visitors only click to another page (if even that far) and
do not explore other areas of the site which may contain information
relating to their search query.

As an example, if a user searched for "XYZ," intending to get a link to
download the software, he might instead be directed to a Usenet article
discussing "XYZ." The article, of course, has no link to download. The user
gives up without clicking on any links, and presumably tries another site. I
see this quite often.

Two solutions that I have in mind are to:
a.) Redesign the site navigation such that it's more conventional, with a
list of major site areas at the top of each page.

b.) Show "related content" when in the Vault pages. To go on the Usenet
"XYZ" example, I could have a search be run on the download files and
knowledge base text articles for certain keywords. These links would be
presented in a side bar, and hopefully the visitor will take notice and be
inspired to click around the site.


The second problem, which is shared by other sites, is that many of the file
names are impenetrable. That is, it is nearly impossible to tell what a file
does just by looking at its name. This seems to be worse with the Apple II
files, which often have truncated, abbreviated file names.

Some examples of these file names:
- Bsw2c 1
- Stfc.2.1
- Ifs

What do these files do? Who knows? At least they are categorized, so we
would get some indication that the first file has something to do with text
processing, the second is a game, and the third file has to do with
graphics. Otherwise, that's it. It's up to the user to get the file into an
emulator and see what it does.

I've got some solutions for this problem as well, but they aren't as easy as
the first problem (navigation and related content). There are descriptions
and documentation for many files, but they're not "attached" to the file on
its download page. Some ASCII-encoded binary files have description and
comments at the top, and other files have docs in the Knowledge Base. I need
to write a script to scan files for comments, as well as link the KB text
files with the download files.


But at least we've got something. :-)