Technical Advice

What I should do to publish and electronic magazine on the Internet ?

There are many ways to publish medical information on the Internet, either as a newsletter, a magazine or a journal. The simplest approach is to send plain text by means of electronic mail (e-mail) to a list of subscribers. This is normally done through an Internet service called a mailing list. E-mail programs, such as Eudora, Netscape Mail, Pegasus Mail, Internet Explorer Mail, etc., have the capability of putting together relatively small mailing lists and sending a text to all the e-mail addresses on this list.

Another method of distributing texts via e-mail is the utilization of a special computer program which is available on the Internet Services Provider (ISP), and  is named a list processor (there are many types, such as listproc, listserv, majordomo, etc. This software manages automatically the whole process of subscribing to a mailing list and the distribution of e-mails. (please see the article on "Discussion Lists", in issue number 2 of Intermedic). You just send the complete text of the electronic newsletter to the list processing program, and it distributes it for all the subscribers. In this type of publication, one usually produce a plain text publication, only (the so-called ASCII format), without images or other resources, because the visualization capabilities on the reader's side are unknown. More complex e-mail publications are now possible when the e-mail client software is capable of displaying MIME (Multimedia Internet Mail Extensions) or HTML (hypertext) formats. Check it out on your e-mail program before subscribing to a list using these formats.

The prevalent form of Internet electronic publishing is the WWW (World Wide Web), which allows you to put complete, formatted texts, with images, sounds or even video clips, if you wish. In this case, the magazine is similar to a "site" or "home page". This electronic version of Intermedic gives a good idea on how an electronic magazine is planned and structured.

You will need the following to make a Web-based publication:

1. A number of software tools to help in the actual production of the publication. You will need at least a good HTML editor (Hypertext Markup Language), which is the formatting language used for the Web; a program for scanning and processing pictures and images in the GIF and JPG formats (which are the most used in the Internet), and a program for uploading (transference of files from your machine to the server), which is called FTP (File Transfer Program). There are many, many specific software packages to do all this in the market. We currently use Netscape Composer, PaintShop Pro and WS FTP LE, respectively, all of them for the Windows 95/98 environment, but there are many others, such as Microsoft FrontPage, HotDog, FlexEd, etc.
2. Access to a server (Internet "host") which is a computer permanently connected to Internet, and that makes available disk space and a WWW server software, so that you can make available ("webhosting") all the material you have developed. In this way, any person connected to WWW will be able to access your publication. Currently, there are many ISPs which provide space for commercial and non-commercial web sites, home pages and electronic publications. There is the possibility if having your own domain name (i.e., an address invented by you). The hosting fees are usually a fixed amount per month, regardless of the size of the publication. There are also many ISPs whic provide free space for home pages and e-mail accounts, such as www.geocities.com.

FlexEd, one of the programs used for HTML formatting of publications

The production itself is easy. You do all the formatting and testing in your local microcomputer. When the WWW publication is ready, transfer all files (texts and images) to the server, using the FTP program. You must be the "owner" of the corresponding computer directory to do this (in other words, your ISP must issue to you a login name and password which will give access to you for uploading capabilities. In case you need to alter the published information, or add to it, this can be done any time, using the same procedure. Afterwards you will only need to advertise the existence of your publication in several search mechanisms and on-line catalogs, such as Altavista, Yahoo!, etc. (see Technical Advice column on issue #1 de Intermedic).

An excellent collection of software packages and on-line courses on how to develop electronic publications on the Internet can be found at the following address: Most of the software packages used by a Web-based publisher can be found at TUCOWS (http://www.tucows.com). I also recommend the book "Electronic Publishing Unleashed", by Sams, which comes with a good CD-ROM full of software tools for the enterprising electronic publisher.
 

Published by:     Center for Biomedical Informatics  State University of Campinas, Brazil   © 1997 Renato M.E. Sabbatini

Sponsored by:     Searle   Brazil