Yesterday, a major update was made to the AMICA (Automated Musical
Instrument Collectors' Association) web site, http://www.amica.org/
What's new?  The menu has been completely revised, primarily to provide
material of interest to newcomers to mechanical music and AMICA.

There are "corridors" devoted to each of five categories of
instruments: pianos, music boxes, organs, orchestrions and "exotic,"
which covers rarities like harps and violins.

Each corridor opens with an entrance page of text that briefly
describes what can be found in the corridor.  The entrance page links
to more specific topics, some of which feature thumbnail images of
instruments, and each thumbnail links to a larger version of the
picture.  Material explaining AMICA's purpose, organization, membership
and the like is also covered.

Some of the important changes are not readily visible.  Each page has
been coded in a manner intended to facilitate searching and
classification by web search engines and directories.  New file
organization has been implemented and all formatting is now done using
cascading style sheets.  These last two changes minimize the labor
required to maintain the site.  It is my hope that the hours (several
hundred of them) invested in developing this new structure will help me
to keep the site well-maintained and have time to devote to developing
new material in the future.

The use of cascading style sheets for formatting does have a drawback.
Those visitors who use certain older browsers (for example, Netscape
4.7) will not see all of the formatting that is displayed by newer
browsers, and the site won't look as nice as I'd like.

What will be missing?  Menus and some other text that should be
centered won't be.  Some headings that should have colored backgrounds
won't.  That's it.  Everyone will be able to see all the content and
everything will function properly otherwise.  I've checked the site in
several recent versions of browsers by Netscape, Microsoft (Internet
Explorer) and AOL.  The site looks nice, but not identical, in all of
the version 5 and higher browsers that I have tried.

What has yet to be completed for the first phase of this redevelopment?
Most important of all is sound, that may take quite a while.  Contact
information for chapters, officers and so on is largely missing or out
of date.  A couple of people are scouting at the AMICA convention for
updated information, but if you have current information for me, please
send it to <amica_webmaster@cometlink.com>.

Meta tag keywords (HTML code, not seen by site visitors, but used by
search engines) are on the way; I know some of you will be looking for
them.  Sections of the site devoted to history and care of instruments
are still bare.  Picture and sound files will be indexed.  And there
are still little blanks where some of the pictures should be.

Pages for all of this are already posted, but you will see that many of
them have text that says the page is not complete.  When all of these
pages are fleshed out, there will be further expansion, and you can
also expect to see the return of some material from the old site which
has been removed for the moment.

Many, many thanks to the MMD subscribers who have sent and are
continuing to send images for the site.  Your contributions have made
a world of difference.

Meta Brown
AMICA Webmaster

 [ Nice work, Meta.  Since "plagiarism is the most sincere form of
 [ flattery", I'm sure to copy your ideas for the MMD web site!  :-)
 [ -- Robbie