Miscellaneous Papers (APHCA: 01/7)

A) Area-Wide Integration (AWI) of Crop-Livestock Activities
B) Information Communication Technology (APHCA Homepage)
C) Small-Scale Meat Processing House Model (Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand)

A) Area-Wide Integration (AWI) of Crop-Livestock Activities

(Oral Presentation was made it by H. Steinfeld., Chief Livestock Information, Sector Analysis and Policy Branch, Animal Production and Health Division FAO., ROME)

B) Information Communication Technology (APHCA Homepage)

Introduction

Homepage or WebPages became one of the most reasonable tools to many organizations, companies, institutions and people, which use this technology to distribute information to many people around the world. The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is an SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) application for marking up documents for inclusion in the World Wide Web, and allows you to:

• Publish documents to the Internet in a platform independent format
• Create links to related works from your document
• Include graphics and multimedia data with your document
• Link to non-World Wide Web information resources on the Internet

The first homepage for APHCA have been created and uploaded at a free Internet service provider call www.xoom.com and host by to www.hypermart.com with an address at http://aphca.hypermart.net. After that, APHCA have registered domain name with Network Solutions under a name of www.aphca.org or http://aphca.org. But APHCA homepage still used the free Internet provider with www.xoom.com until mid 2000.

APHCA decided to host a space with a private Internet service provider call ‘Tierranet put yourself on the web’ at www.tierranet.com. Tierranet helps APHCA to operate and run APHCA homepage for better quality and privately.

Problem Definition

The free Internet wed hosting provides a space for less then 50Mb per homepage and user need to log-in through http://www.hypermart.net/index.gsp webpage each time of upload information and edit information, there is an advantage and disadvantage with occurred during that service;

• Time consuming to upload, edit and manage website.
• The slow speed of transmitted at 28.8Kb per second and caused runtime error especially with a huge size of homepage.
• The free Internet service including many advertising within AHPCA homepage
• Created a delay when Internet viewers view and download information.
• However, there is not expended cost to run the homepage

Previously, APHCA homepage was written in a source code in a text programme and convert to html later. This implementation takes time for programmer to implement. Normally, source code for each homepage contains the code line more then 50 lines that cause problems for other programmer for future development.

The layout of homepage could make viewer confused, if size of icons too small. Colors and size of characters are important when display in difference background and difference Internet browsers.

Requirements

- Gathering extra information from other research institution, education department, member countries, outsider and FAO articles or magazines under a consideration of APHCA staffs.

- Encourage member countries and user of APHCA homepage to contact and exchange information via e-mail through APHCA homepage.

- Creating the new layout of APHCA homepage as simple as possible and setup structure chart of homepage for future development.

- Using application software to create the homepage for a fast process and programmer could see the visual layout of homepage in real time, which is easy to make any changes while implementing.

- The menu items need to reallocate and re-decide from the most interesting to the less interesting. Thus, cut down some links or information that not need (undertake by case study of statistic report from web hosting and staff suggestions) to keep the space free.

- Creating heading/highlight of information that interesting and link them to full story in separate session. Also includes function when the size of information too big such as Zip files or PDF format

Page Layout

The layout of homepage consists of information that needs to provide on the website such as pop up article, general information, Asian livestock and news flash. Color of background and color of character using black and white which, these colors are easy to read, well present and its can see from a distance.

Structure

The structure of homepage depends on information and always good to setup as prototype to use as pattern of homepage. Whereas each prototype can spilt into many branches and many forms of information. In the future development, each prototype can expended and links together as the whole system but base on the original creation.

Heading and Highlight

Heading/highlight make user to feel comfortable and user friendly within homepage. The location, color, size of heading should sport on eyes of viewer and meaningful.

Graphic

The graphic or image is making a page more interested when viewer brows the homepage. Putting image on the homepage has to be careful because each page contains difference information and the image should related to topic.

Size

Size of homepage depends upon information but the first page of the homepage should less than 30kb size because it will take longer time to download especially with a slow speed of Internet connection and a busy network. Also It is better to keep the size of each homepage as small as possible.

Tools of Implementation (Macromedia Dreamweaver 3.0)

Dreamweaver is a professional visual editor for creating and managing Web sites and pages. With Dreamweaver, it’s easy to create and edit cross-platform, cross-browser pages.

Dreamweaver provides advanced design and layout tools, as well as making it easy to use Dynamic HTML features such as animated layers and behaviors without writing a line of code. Browser-targeting checks your work for potential problems on all popular platforms and browsers. Macromedia’s Roundtrip HTML technology imports HTML documents without reformatting the code and you can set Dreamweaver to clean up and reformat HTML when you want to.

Dreamweaver is fully customizable. You can create your own objects and commands, modify menus and keyboard shortcuts, and even write JavaScript code to extend Dreamweaver with new behaviors and property inspectors

Object palette

The Object palette contains six panels by default: Characters, Common, Forms, Frames, Head, and Invisible. Use the pop-up menu at the top of the palette to switch between panels. You can modify any object in the palette or create your own objects

Property inspector

The Property inspector allows you to examine and edit properties for the currently selected page element. (A page element is an object or text.) You can select page elements in either the Document window or the HTML Source inspector

Launcher

The Launcher contains buttons for opening and closing various palettes, windows, and inspectors. For information on the default Launcher buttons are About the Site window, Library palette, Formatting text using HTML styles, CSS Style palette, Behavior inspector, About the History palette, or HTML Source inspector.

Conclusions

• One of key factors, contributing to the success in designing the APHCA homepage is responsiveness to Internet viewers. In the development of homepage, information is the major concern. Therefore, the homepage was designed to accommodate their specific need such as list of publications, APHCA paper, news and Asian livestock.
• Another factor of success is the simple created of the homepage layout because a lot of Internet players are not familiar with computer. In addition the simple layout can be display with small number of images and text.
• The analysis processes is the structure charts that useful for programmer because it provides more flexibility to edit information in the future developments.
• Menu bars help viewer to feel comfortable with a link to information that homepage provided and the meaningful of menu bar is also important to viewers to understand.
• Zip file and PDF file help to reduce time to download information and viewers don’t need to spend long time on the Internet.

C) Small-Scale Meat Processing House Model (Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand)

Small-scale Meat Processing House Model

• The project on pilot small-scale meat processing house was initiated in 1999 upon request made by the Royal Project staff through the Provincial Livestock Office of Mae Hong Son province, Thailand.
• The first allotment/seed money of US$5,000 was granted by the German Embassy in Bangkok through Dr. Gunter Heinz, ex-Regional Animal Production Officer of RAP. This amount was spent on landscaping and structural construction

Further construction was made, using funds from Department of Livestock Development (US$5,000).

This meat processing house was fully constructed and equipped with necessary equipment in early of year 2001 and is ready for official hand-over to Her Majesty the Queen of Thailand for use as a small-scale training center capable of accommodating around 20-25 trainees at a time.