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The Fairfax Experience

By Nick Hodge | November 30, 2001

[951] Fairfax at Atlanta

Back­ground

In June 1996 Apple Com­puter Aus­tralia, Fair­fax Pub­lic­a­tions, Brain­waave Com­mu­nic­a­tions, IBM, Comtech, Nets­cape began the Fairfax@Atlanta (1996) project.

In Aus­tralia, sport is a national pas­time. Our sport­ing her­oes are more revered than movie stars or rock musi­cians. There­fore, the Olympics is a 4 year feast to all sporting-mad Aus­trali­ans. Box­ing, Cyc­ling, Diving — and the list goes on — present a smor­gas­board of view­ing to the sports fan.

Fair­fax Pub­lic­a­tions, one of the com­pan­ies in the Fair­fax empire (which includes The Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald, Fin­an­cial Review, The Age, Sunday Age and the Sun Her­ald), decided to marry the Inter­net with the Olympics.

Fairfax@Atlanta

was one of four Australian-team focused web sites. The nearest com­pet­itor was Inside Atlanta run by News Inter­act­ive, a com­pany in the Mur­doch News Corp empire. Other web sites were much smal­ler, and usu­ally later with the news and inform­a­tion. Basic­ally, it was a two horse race. As repor­ted in Aus­tralian PCWEEK, Fairfax@Atlanta (1996) won gold for the Aus­tralian Olympic site.

Apple’s role and pos­i­tion­ing was to gain exper­i­ence with web-publishing on a grand scale; that is, out­side of the PageMill/SiteMill level. Apple sponsored the site with my time (Nick Hodge) over a 5 week period; along with a bevy of hard­ware and soft­ware technology.

Ini­tial ana­lysis of the require­ments of a “web pub­lish­ing sys­tem” –and the inten­ded volumes scared the hell out of me. No off-the-shelf tools exist for web pub­lish­ing in this volume within this time scale.

Stat­ist­ic­ally, we fin­ished up pub­lish­ing 1,300 doc­u­ments and 700+ pic­tures. On our peak days we began at 4:00am and com­pleted work at about 2:00pm. Within this period, about 100 text items and 20 pic­tures were pos­ted to the site. All links and struc­ture were auto­mat­ic­ally gen­er­ated as part of the pub­lish­ing process.

Topics: mungenet | 1 Comment »

One Response to “The Fairfax Experience”

  1. Of Historical Interest Only… | nickhodge.com Says:
    September 5th, 2007 at 6:43 pm

    […] The Fair­fax Experience […]

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