Proposed Grand Tour of the Space Sites on the Web

With the ASI tour program, we could create a grand tour of all the space sites who'd like to participate. Here are some more thoughts about these tours.

To do that, we'd need someone to volunteer to manage such a project. The tour manager would need to:

1. Get up the templates set up for other webmasters to use.

   The web team could help here. This will include some design work, and maybe creating some special graphics to create the common thread. We could use Shane's tour bus for the icons, but we might also want to create some imagery of a personable tour guide who will tell you about each site.

2. Make a list of space sites.

   A run through the Artemis Data Book looking for rews.html documents would probably find the great majority of space sites on the web. Many space organizations, government agencies, and aerospace corporations might want to participate in this tour.

   The grand tour manager might, as an option, consider a system of more specifically defined tours, all joined at a central space mission control center.

3. Get that list reviewed to make sure we're not inadvertently offering to endorse something that could hamper our progress to the moon.

4. Contact the webmasters of all those sites.

   Write a personal note to each webmaster; don't use a mass mailing.

5. Help the webmasters who want to participate to get a Tour Stop page set up on their sites.

   Webmasters might want to just link to the main entrance for their web sites; but as an alternative, they could create a web page where the tour guide tells you about the site at the tour stop before you go in. This extra Tour Stop page would be less disruptive to the design of some sites. They could just contain a link back to the Tour Stop page from their main entrance, so that a visitor can stop, look around, and then find the way back to the tour bus.

   The Tour Stop page could also include instructions from the tour guide to warn the visitor about the mechanical features of the site such as use of frames, JavaScript, Java, Shockwave, Quicktime, Acrobat, RealAudio, overly large screen layouts (docuemnts that require screen widths greater than 6 inches -- 432 pixels) or other oddities of the web.

6. Create and maintain a tutorial page about how to joining the grand tour.

7. Create and maintain the list of URL's for the grand tour.

   This would be something like /rings/grandtour.ring. You'd use WebSite Director to maintain this document; it's just plain text. See http://www.asi.org/ring/ring1.html for an example.

8. Create and maintain the tour stop for the Artemis Project stop on the grand tour.

   The grand tour manager should be the owner of this page because it will serve as an example for other other webmasters. We'd want to create such a page for the Artemis Project web site, and link to it from the "Tour" button.

   On the Artemis Project web site, the "Tour" button will link to the main Visitors Center for the Artemis Project; and we'll have one bus to shuttle people over to the entry point for the grand tour of all the space sites. So we'd link like this:

   
   http://www.asi.org
         |
   http://www.asi.org/adb/01/04/visitor-center.html
         |
   http://www.asi.org/adb/01/04/grand-tour-stop.html

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