Founded back in 1997, Orange
Juice can be considered one of the pioneers of the net-based
demoscene. It is definitely the oldest scene portal of significance that
is still working today.
Scene Portals
Since 1996, the Internet has been the communication medium no.1 in the PC scene. By now most groups are present in the WWW with their own sites, and there is an indeterminate number of individual sceners who have their personal homepages. Yet the amount of group-independent scene-related sites of general, international interest remained little: There were the Hornet Archive and a few news sites, but that was all. Now, in the last ten months, this situation has radically changed. To the few already existing ones, a big number of newly opened scene portals has been added. These scene portals share the aim to provide a wide range of scene-interested people with extensive and up-to-date information on the scene. In this article I want to present the most interesting approaches.
Founded back in 1997, Orange
Juice can be considered one of the pioneers of the net-based
demoscene. It is definitely the oldest scene portal of significance that
is still working today.
Originally Orange Juice was designed by Chandra and Dr. Yes as an online magazine for the French demoscene. A few interviews and articles were published here, which you can still read at this site. However, the focus quickly changed to news, party-dates and people.
Today, Orange Juice is, apart from a few outdated relicts, fully in English language. It contains a large collection of personal information on all kinds of sceners, including a birthday list. All of this information was submitted by the sceners themselves, which shows that the site is visited and supported by a lot of people with familiar sounding names. Orange Juice is further appreciated for its party calendar, which is more complete than its counterparts on other scene sites and even includes information on who is planning to show at which party. But the most important part is the news section, daily updated. The number of new news items per day is irregular, and usually it is not as high as on other scene portals. The advantage of Orange Juice's news section is that you have to register in order to submit your news and wait until your submission is approved by the webmasters. In this way the authencity of the news is granted.
Registration and news submission can be done via forms processed by PHP3 scripts. Everybody can update their personal information in the same way. This is a major advantage of the planet-d.net server, onto which Orange Juice moved end of last year. In the past, it was necessary to submit everything via e-mail, which must have been a pain in the ass especially for the Orange Juice webmasters.
Recent gimmicks are also an FTP search engine, using which you can easily search for particular filenames at a dozen scene-related FTP servers, and the possibility to change the layout of the Orange Juice site by choosing a new skin. Currently four skins are available, the original one by Tonic of Tiny Toons plus designs by PL, Danube and Mairsil respectively. Public statistics show how many percent of the visitors use what skin.
Another nice feature of is the one-liners, evidently inspired by old scene BBS's. Even though it is not useful for reasonable discussions, it can be fun reading what was going through various sceners' heads when they were visiting the site. Finally, it's possible to read Orange Juice on mobile phones using WAP.
Scenet was founded in 1995 by Lord of Absolute as a list of e-mail addresses and homepages of Amiga sceners, kept in plain-text format with some fancy ascii illustrations. After it
had been taken over by Ghandy and Dire in 1998, it was extended to the
largest public database of scene-related Internet addresses for all
computer systems, with a large part concerning the PC demoscene. Scenet was also converted to
HTML and got its own domain.
Not long ago, a news section, a party calendar and a huge interview archive have been added to the Scenet website, thus making it more vibrating, more lively. Soon you will also find some articles here.
For more information on Scenet, read Ghandy's article "Scenet - The Scene Gateway" in the Demoscene Forum of Hugi #18.
Soon after the shutdown of his board, the Coders F/X BBS, Civax was
planning on installing a new forum for the Israeli demoscene on the Net.
At the end of 1999 his dream came true, but right from the beginning, it
was not only an Israeli, but a worldwide forum.
CFXweb is subtitled "Demo and game development", which shows very well what the potential visitor can expect from this site: not only demoscene related news, but news and knowledge regarding graphic programming in general, including a lot of information concerning professional game development. Hence, the site is interesting for all coders.
The main component is the news section, displayed in the center of the initial site. It is updated almost every day by Civax and the other staff members, and the news-per-day ratio is pretty high. Especially Civax himself is apparently very enthusiastic about sharing any interesting scene, coding or computer-technology related news he stumbles across with already several hundreds of regular visitors. But CFXweb offers more than just news, it also contains programming tutorials, web-based discussion forums, surveys plus, as extra gimmicks, a picture of the week and an MP3 of the week, which you can even subscribe to and get regularly delivered via e-mail. Of course links (plus public statistics) are also included.
"The scene has got a new hometown!", it says right at the opening page.
In fact Scene
City does not make much use of the town metaphore, but is more
like an online magazine, presented in an agreeable, a bit
oldskool-styled design. Apart from a couple of news and short reviews,
you can find interesting interviews and links here. There are also
sections for general articles, tutorials (code, pixel, music), party reports, competitions, etc. The site has been done by Anhk and Sacrilege.
Demoscene.org, which got online on January 1st, 2000, is presented in a sparse design: on the left, there is a table with links to recent information and releases, and on the right, there is a table with news. But the lack of optical finesse is compensated by a fast loading speed, a clear site structure and a lot of new information coming in per day. As the main man behind Demoscene.org, Jeroen, is a coder, you will find plenty of programming and tech-related news on this site apart from the demoscene stuff. All news is carefully edited and commented, which makes it easier for the visitor to decide what places to further visit in order to get what he is looking for.
Others
Another highly interesting portal is the website of the demogroup Defacto 2. It features a fertile link collection to a lot of sites related to various computer scenes, including the hacking, warez, ISO, ansi, RIP and music scenes, apart from the demoscene. The Doose Charts may be useful as well. They do not only contain top tens compiled by votes of more than 300 people but also links to everything mentioned in the charts. Very well-known is also GFXzone. This large and professional looking portal site focuses on scene graphics. Worth mentioning are also the somewhat innovatively designed review site Two-Headed Squirrel, the international and multilingual discussion forum Greenroom and Demonews express, which is basically a script written by Eggbird that allows to browse for news on various scene news sites quickly. Furthermore, the veteran Scene Central (also called Network) has been taken over by the group Padua and will probably re-open soon.