How to Use the Avonlea.hu Website
Requirements
This website was created for browsing with all the well-known and widespread browsers available nowadays nowadays if the visitor uses them with default settings. 99% of modern graphical browsers of these days know and support CSS2 standard, client side scripting language, JavaScript (JScript in some browsers), and cookie technology. Several browsers let their users to switch off these technologies if needed. However you need CSS2 and Javascript turned on if you would like to use website menu (see below) without any limitation. Menu works without technologies above but in a very limited way. You also need cookies permitted for saving customization settings and handling authenticated (logged in) visitors.
There are some theories which say using cookies is dangerous and can break the privacy of people. The Avonlea.hu webpage does not send any cookie to the browser which includes information contains personal information, sensitive data. So accepting cookies from this website is not dangerous. But without cookies some services, pages are not fully available. Therefore it is recommended to accept cookies.
This website was optimized for 1024x768 pixels. Using this or higher resolution provides the perfect experience. It is mostly enjoyable in lower resolution as well, but it is recommended to use higher resolution if it is available because some pages looks a little broken in lower resolution.
Due to spreading wide bandwidth technologies (ADSL, cabelnet), during planning website I paid more attention for nice-looking design, rich and high-quality content (images in high resolution, large videoclips) than before, because less and less visitors have problems with downloading some nice but larger design element, or downloading a little bigger videoclip which provides a greater view than a thumbnail. I hope visitors still using modem for connecting to Internet will not have serious problems with browsing the site. I apologize for pages loading accidentally slowlier and other stuff downloads.
New!
Previously you needed some kind of media player to play videofiles, videoclips available on this website.
But now you do not need any other application, all the videos are uploaded in flash format, so you
can watch them with your webbrowser.
Embedded images in full size
There are lots of images uploaded to this site. Most of them are available in higher resolution too not just embedded into page in low resolution
after clicking on its thumbnail. The higher resolution image is loading in a special way, it seems as it would open in a new window, while the other
parts of the website go dark. You can close this special window
by clicking on the X icon in the right lower corner. Or you can use your keyboard:
the ESC or the X key too.
If there are more enlargeable images on a page, you can navigate between them. Just drag your mouse over the enlarged image. If you click on the right side of the image, you can move forward, by clicking on the left side of the image you can move backward. Alternatively you can use your keyboard for navigation: the left arrow and the right arrow from the 4 arrow keys can help you in changing images. New! Moving the mouse to the bottom of the image is activating some kind of movie strip where you can find the images of the page in a smaller size. You can navigate with your mouse by moving it right or left between the images. Clicking on any image is loading it.
New!
SlideShow function: you can start the slideshow by clicking on the small arrow in the top left corner of the image window. So the images
are loading automatically one by one.
JavaScript is needed to use these functions and you should wait the entire page to load because it is needed to activate the script.
Navigating the website
The menu of Avonlea.hu is not my work, I paid license fee for Ultimate Drop Down Menu. However this website menu is usable for all browsers, including text-only browsers and screenreaders used by people with disabilities, for full experience you need Javascript and CSS2 support as I mentioned above.
Using the menu is very simple: just drag your mouse pointer above a menu item, and you can see submenu items in a drop down menu. You can reach a page belonging to a menu item by clicking on a menu item either in the main or in a submenu. The active page is signed in the menu by highlighting the appropriate menu item. With this new website menu you can reach almost every page (except for some very small pages) in one step (by only one click).
You can get back to the opening page of Avonlea.hu by clicking on The Golden Road to Avonlea
title on the top banner image.
Avonlea.hu newsletter
If you would like to get first hand information about news, events regarding the series, Avonlea or the website, it is highly
recommended to subscribe to Avonlea.hu newsletter. First, you should
register (if you have not registered yet), and you should
check the newsletter subscription checkbox. After registration you can modify your subscription through
My page (Modify personal data
). You can unsubscribe or subscribe any time.
Of course you need an e-mail address registered as well.
I send a newsletter if something is changed on this website, some event (an AvCon for example) happened or is under preparation or I get to know some important news about Avonlea. I send newsletters rarely and without any attachments enclosed, so I do not load your mailbox with spam. If you are a real Avonlea fan, you should register and subscribe to Avonlea.hu newsletter! You can find an archive from previous newsletters here I've sent so far.
Searching on the site
You can search the huge amount of information gathered up in years and the forum including 40 thousands comments with a professional search engine. I suggest everybody to use the search box (it is not my own work) which is available in the header of the website to search in the forum or in the webpages. It is very efficient and helpful in finding information. However many Internet search engines (E.g. Google) are indexing Avonlea.hu regularly, but they cannot access all the pages (for example indexing the forum pages are denied), so it is recommended to use my built-in search engine instead of other engines.
Language versions of the site
Thanks to a server side technology, handling addresses of English and Hungarian pages of the website is very simple: a page is accessible through the same link either it is the Hungarian or the English version of a page. The server decides on the basis of language settings of the browser which language version of a page to send back to the client (browser). For example when accessing http://avonlea.hu/home page with a Hungarian browser the server sends back the Hungarian version of the main page, while it sends back the English page if a browser with English language settings tries to access the URL above.
If you get some error message (Request Not Acceptable
) when you try to access a page of this website, you can do 2 things. The highly recommended solution
is setting proper language settings. Every browser has language settings. For example if you use Internet Explorer you can find this settings in Tools menu,
Internet Options menu item as Language preference. You have to add English language to the preference list. It can be after
your native language, but it should be in the list.
If someone has problems with settings language preference, there is one more solution. In this case you should start browsing the site from the opening page
with choosing English language. The website can modify the URLs automatically (it inserts an en
tag into the URL), so the example above will be:
http://avonlea.hu/en/home .
RSS feeds on Avonlea.hu
News and newsletters of Avonlea.hu are available through RSS feeds. RSS is an XML-based documentum, readable by RSS readers. With using RSS channels one can get the latest news from this website without visiting it with a webbrowser, because the RSS reader checks the source of the RSS channel automatically from time to time (you can set the period). RSS newschannel of Avonlea.hu is useful for those visitors who visit this website rarely, and newsletters RSS feed is useful for those people who do not like to register for some reason but would like to read newsletters with an RSS enabled mailer.
RSS is a similar content transmitter medium as web or e-mail. So readers of Avonlea.hu RSS feeds just get a new medium for getting some content from this site, but these channels do not serve additional information. The news of Avonlea.hu are still available on the web with a regular webbrowser, newsletters of the site are still sent to registered visitors and available under About/Newsletter archives menuitem as they were available as far as here.
News channel is available as live bookmark for Firefox browser and for other browsers support live bookmarks by clicking on the RSS-icon appears in the address bar. And you can subscribe for both channels with Thunderbird e-mail program. For this, just open an RSS News & Blogs account in Thunderbird, then subscribe the address (URL) of the channels. There are several RSS reader softwares available on the Net, these 2 one are just 2 simple examples for getting RSS content.
