Exhibiting Digitally (1)
Wobbe Vegter, South African Philatelist
When I started exhibiting more than 10 years ago, I soon got in contact with a number of other philatelists and exhibitors worldwide addicted to the same subject. Having been in IT since the mid sixties – when it was still called Data Processing – it won’t come as a surprise that my theme or topic is “computers”. After my first national exhibit “From Abacus to Internet” was awarded a Silver medal (2001) I started receiving a number of requests from my fellow computer-collectors like “Can you send me a copy?” Rather than copying 75 pages in disappointing B&W and spending large amounts on postage to overseas friends, I quickly realized all of this would be solved if I put the complete exhibit on the web with free access to everyone interested. It seemed an interesting and challenging project.
What would I need?
I already had a PC, a color printer and a scanner. What I didn’t know was how to put an exhibit on the web. Where would I host it? Would I be able to build and maintain the site myself? The last program I wrote was in Cobol in the sixties and seventies and since then I had been involved in management within IT. Could I adapt my dormant programming skills easily to whatever language I needed to maintain my own website?
Working as a manager in a 300+ strong IT department had some advantages and I started talking to a few colleagues. I was advised to find a suitable hosting site which would not charge me an arm and a leg. Using some other contacts I managed to find a hosting site which allowed me to do my own maintenance. I also needed the FTP software to upload the contents of my site. At the moment I use FileZilla for that purpose as it’s easy to use and it’s free. It goes without saying that I rather spent my money on stamps than on running a personal website – so far I’ve spent a minimum of funds on the whole project.
I started looking at many philatelic sites in order to get a good idea of what I liked and what I disliked. What format should my site have? Having already years of experience on the web I knew that user-friendliness and response times were important.
I bought a few CDs containing a “Teach Yourself html” course. I found it surprisingly easy to pick it up. I realized I needed to define a style sheet in order to give all the pages the same look & feel. Having access to some programmers ensured the necessary advice to get started. Although I’m not a fundi on html, today I know enough to maintain my own website and to add new elements if and when necessary. Having retired in 2006 I now simply google for the answers if I get stuck.
Computers and the Internet on Stamps
Before building my website, I prepared one page where I experimented with scans with different resolution, with the physical size of the pictures varying from a single stamp to a complete A4-page. I also needed to structure the layout of my site and I needed to define what I wanted to show on my home-page. Having done all that, I started to write the html for the home-page and the first two pages of my exhibit. I scanned these two pages (I had decided to upload full A4-pages scanned at 96 dpi with reduced size thumbnails). After that I tested the results and made the necessary adjustments.
When I was satisfied with the whole set-up I wrote the html for all sections in my exhibit showing thumbnails for the individual pages which would enlarge when clicked upon. I scanned all pages at 96 dpi and reduced them to fixed size thumbnails. The thumbnail pictures of the individual pages are about 20Kb in size and load fairly rapidly. The larger full-size pages are about 200Kb and take a few seconds to download. This ensured that the full-size page was readable and printable. I’ve had very few complaints about download times so apparently this was satisfactorily. I would advise every would-be digital exhibitor to follow a similar process – start with one or two pages and test everything thoroughly before you expand. 
(continuation of this article Exhibiting Digitally Part 2)
