MAGAZINES CAN EXPLOIT the World Wide Web, providing material that expands on traditional printed information. Suck, a new daily commentary and review site, breaks the mold of print publications, with a thoughtful design and wry criticism of on- and off-line media.
The content of Suck changes daily. The main piece runs in one long scrolling column. Noteworthy is the site's immediacy. When you enter Suck, you see the title and simple graphics; there is no introduction page or other extraneous material to get in the way of the content. Hyperlinks peppered throughout the text take you to the sites being criticized and to related material. Suck is run by the self-styled Society of Sucksters, which includes Carl Steadman, Joey Anuff, Heather Havrilesky, and other contributors.
No Web site would be complete without graphics. Suck uses Adobe Photoshop to create or process many of its visuals and outputs them for the Web by using BoxTop Software's PhotoGIF plug-in. Moving the graphics to a non-Mac server is a snap with the Fetch FTP client. Suck's server is Windows NT-based, mainly to handle the browser-aware scripts.
Some of the material is suitable only for audiences aged 17 and older. The raw language shows why the Internet as a publishing medium for the masses will evolve from the fringe to the center and not the other way around.
What:
Suck, "the last word on the net."
Company:
Suck, http://www.suck.com (a wholly owned publication of Hotwired).
Tools:
Http server, Apache (running on a Pentium-based Windows NT server); Adobe Photoshop; BoxTop Software's PhotoGIF; Bare Bones Software's BBEdit; Qualcomm's Eudora; Jim Matthews' Fetch.
1. Navigation. Graphics along the left-hand side of the
text column are links to other material in the site. Clicking on
the fish takes you to the virtual masthead for Suck. Past issues
of Suck can be found under the barrel icon, and you can get a
random issue of Suck through the smoking gun.
2. The Body. The Navigator-based publication appears in a
table format that lets the text column flow on the right while
navigational graphics appear on the left. The text is set in a
bold, monospaced font, with only a few words to a line. Line
breaks at the end of each line keep the material in a single
column, no matter which browser is used. Graphics related to the
content appear within the column and are usually links to other
sites -- everything from the Butterball turkey site to the
occasional personal home page.
3. Title. Unlike what you'd find in a print publication,
Suck's headline is a catchy animation. The title literally gets
sucked into the period. The animation is viewable only in
Netscape Navigator, however. That's because to create the
animation, the server sends a stream of images (called a server
push) that only Navigator accepts. The Suck publishers have
created three less complex layouts with static titles for less
