Those of you with homepages in GeoCities may be familiar with the World Report, a monthly compilation of news and notes from the GeoCities staff about activities within the neighborhoods. You same folks may know of Yahoo's efforts to divest itself of many of the frills once available within GeoCities, such as community leaders, the neighborhood suburb structure, etc. As of this writing, April 17, there still has been no World Report sent out, so it's looking more and more like the WR may be getting the axe. This comes as a major blow to many of us in what was once GeoCities.

Something that our regular readers with homepages might want to consider doing is putting a link to the zine on their pages. You may either download the graphic above and put it on your page, or install the following code onto your site, if you don't want to put the graphic into your own directory. Yahoo doesn't allow "remote loading," linking to a graphic on one site from another site, and has been known to shut down pages for violating this rule. However, you can use the code below, which has the graphic stored on our Bravenet server, built especially for such a use.

<a href="http://www.oocities.org/viennaonline" target="_blank" ><img src="//www.photoloft.com/exportimage.asp?i=1196683&w=120&h=60" border=0></a>

You can put that code into a table to align it how you want, or just stick an ALIGN=RIGHT or LEFT into the img src tag and it will move. I will see if our graphics committee can come up with a few more graphics possibilities for you to use, but the above one is small and unobtrusive, and goes with just about any decor.

We face quite a battle to regain our numbers without the WR to remind people. Vienna Online had come to depend on the advertising made possible by the WR. Those monthly reminders got the news out to thousands of new potential readers, who might be hard-pressed to find us or know about us otherwise. Without that monthly shot in the arm, as one zine writer observed, we're doing all this work for our own amusement.

Perhaps the idea of the zine has run its course. Maybe we need to change drastically, provide some other sort of reason for more people to visit. We have tried to give a good account of ourselves, and to keep asking our readers to tell us what they want, what they think. So, either our direction is off, or our concept is obsolete.

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