Links
Most Quake sites have a section dedicated to "links." Typically, these links are either textual hyperlinks or graphical "buttons" that lead to other Quake site. Most do not provide any description of the site, just its name. Some will say "the coolest program for remote server administration" without defining the terms used in the description. As a result, such list of links are usually worthless to the new player unless he or she tries each one. Then the player will likely discover that the site that had been listed under "links" has moved to an unknown server or has been shut down. Thankfully, there is one exception to the "links" dilemma
Spotlight
Slipgate Central
Slipgate Central is a wonderful tool for the new player. This site is owned and maintained by Joost Schuur, and represents the ultimate collection of Quake-related links on the internet. Slipgate Central has a list of over 1,500 Quake related links, all of them current and separated into logical classifications. This site first opened to the public on December 1, 1996, after much development. The structure is patterned after the "Yahoo" search engine, and Slipgate Central has a similarly powerful search engine. A description is given for each link, as well as the e-mail address of the site's author. Many of the sites have been evaluated by Schuur. Joost freely admits that his rating system is fairly subjective since he is the only person reviewing the sites, but the evaluations can certainly help a new player sort through the sea of Quake links. The ratings are divided into three categories:
- Site Design rates how well the site layout looks and if it's easy to read and find the information a site aims to bring across. Appealing, consistent usage of graphics and HTML will bring a higher rating, an uncoordinated disarray of text, colours and incongruent graphics will pull the rating down.
- Content rates how well a site covers the sections it has. This means incomplete or outdated sections can bring a rating down, even if other parts of the site offer lots of info. Sections that cover all important aspects of a subject and leave little or no questions unanswered bring higher ratings.
- Newsworthiness only applies to sites that bring frequent regular updates. It's based on how many updates a site brings, if these are genuinely new news items or merely copied from other sites and how Quake related these news items are.
Additionally, Schuur has provided the public with the .html code necessary to implement the Slipgate Central search engine on any Quake site. Below is an example:
To use Slipgate Central from other sites, just type in your query and press "Go!" This will automatically connect to Slipgate Central, perform the search, and provide you with the search results.
The main categories in Slipgate Central are: Sites, Deathmatch, Information, Commercial, Unreal, Addons, Utilities, International, and Misc.
This page is maintained by Darren L. Tabor,
aka DaKoTa