By A. Bradley Dongas III DesertNet, the Tucson Weekly's alter ego in cyberspace, has a new look and some spiffy new features we'd like to tell you about. Hey, if those nerds at The Arizona Daily Star can waste all that ink and newsprint day after day in an endless, boring infomercial for their sorry-ass StarNet, aren't we entitled to a short blatt now and then? Besides, the new, improved DesertNet is simply better than StarNet. Here's why: First, we've got some new navigational enhancements which break The Weekly into sections (Currents, City Week, Music, Review, Cinema and the ever-quirky Back Page). This allows you, the cybercruiser, to focus on your own areas of interest more quickly, thus avoiding the standard linear approach of printed publications. In other words, you get to bypass the self-serving crap you're reading right now and go straight to, say, City Week. Of course, for those of you who gum your food, we've thoughtfully preserved the ancient page-back and page-forward feature, allowing you to "thumb" through an issue of The Weekly in the old-fashioned manner. However, in addition, through the magic of programming, you can also follow a column or section week by week. Yes, it's now possible to trace the deterioration of Jeff Smith's mind over the course of slightly more than a year--that's how many of our issues are available electronically--simply by clicking a mouse. Awesome, no? In fact, no other publication on the World Wide Web gives you so many navigational options and features. Options that make cruising DesertNet feel like a cross between reading and driving a Ferrari! Well, okay, maybe that's a lousy simile. Let's just say it's like driving a Ferrari while you're pleasantly drunk, uh, on knowledge. And did we mention the engine in this baby? Search engine, that is. Powerful, full-text. It allows you to varooom through every major area on DesertNet. You can also narrow your search to specific sections or topics, like check out those chicks in music and film, dude. What's more, the entire Web-based Weekly has been fully optimized for speed, so that it's now nearly 100 percent faster than our previous electronic version. Wheee! What else? Oh, yeah--our Film Vault, one of the most extensive movie sites on the Web, offers a new Netscape-enhanced "framed" view along with the standard layout. But you'd have to be a real Web head to understand what we're talking about there, so never mind. Suffice it to say the Film Vault contains its own search engine and even more cinema links, pointers to national and local film times. Wanna catch a movie in New Orleans next week? We can provide the times, no problem. This puppy is so cool it's been selected as a featured site in an upcoming book about cinema on the Internet. All this and more than 400 links to dynamite sites around the world in every issue of the electronic Tucson Weekly. And you can find it all on DesertNet, which is acquring hundreds of pages of content and thousands of links every month. Yes, all of you attractive, intelligent Weekly readers out there, when it comes to print, the year 2000 has already arrived--the future of print media is just a click away! Assuming, of course, that damn StarNet connection is working this time....

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