On May 1, 1995, I put the first issue of the News Record online. The News Record is the University of Cincinnati's stucent paper, and Cincinnati's third largest daily. We were the first Cincinnati paper to publish on the web.

I designed, developed and produced the online version of the News Record. I also wrote Perl, AppleScript and Word Macros to automate the process of converting the Quark Xpress files into HTML, validating the HTML, ftp'ing the files to the server and updating the site.

Within a month, the online version had evolved from a text-only version to a content-rich site incorporating images, extended articles and cross-linking to enhance the reader's experience.

Unfortunately, this had increased the production time to 3-4 hours per issue. I began writing a series of Perl, AppleScript and macros to reduce the process of converting the files by hand, to a 20 -30 minute process nearly completely automated, requiring user intervention only at the start and end.

In June of '95, the News Record increased the added material available to its online readers by adding video clips to the format.

The two main design factors that governed the site were the reader should always know where they were. In order to facilitate this, I included a watermark on every page identifying the section they were reading. The other major design factor was the reader could reach every story within two clicks.