Drop by for a visit

By Shawn P McCarthy -- Logistics Management, 1/1/1998

We hope that you can pay a visit this month to www.logisticsmgmt.com. On our Web site, you'll find a new streamlined user interface that we feel is the shape of things to come for Internet-based logistics information services. This redesign is the first of several online logistics database products that this magazine and Cahners Publishing Co. will roll out in the year ahead.

The biggest improvement is a daily news feed that appears right on the front page. Our editors update this page every morning with new stories from the Lexis-Nexis news service. There also are selections from our own magazines and our database of trade shows. It's our way of making sure you start the day with a fresh outlook on the things that affect your business.

The left side of the screen contains a navigation frame with buttons to help you quickly find what you need. One button lets you search a huge database of new products and services. Another button leads you to a calendar of upcoming events. Look for the "Web Exclusive" button to follow trends and situations that can't always be covered in a monthly magazine. Starting this month, editors and writers at this magazine are developing exclusive stories that are only available on our Web site. You still can visit the site to see all articles from each month's magazine, with a story archive that goes back to 1995. You can view each month's table of contents or view a list of stories by subject, such as trucking, intermodal, logistics technologies, or international logistics.

Another frame at the top of the page lets you jump to Manufacturing Marketplace, our parent Web site. MM is a Web super site that hosts 14 magazines and a searchable directory with more than 30,000 company listings for thousands of products. There's also a "Your Page" feature that lets you select from lists of industry and product categories to create a customized news view that changes every day.

The news pages on the Logistics Management & Distribution Report site are generated using a powerful tool we call our "editor's workstation." The tool was developed in-house by our own programmers. Editors can use the editor's workstation to execute news searches, rank stories, and build pages on the fly. If you've ever created your own Web sites using the hypertext markup language, you can appreciate the convenience of working on a system that lets an editor create pages just by filling out forms and pushing a button. All management tasks are controlled by a special set of common gateway interface (CGI) scripts and special calls to the Verity search engine that runs on our site. This special tool allows editors to spend more time researching stories and less time worrying about the mechanics of Web page construction.

The new Logistics Management & Distribution Report Web site is a place where the latest Web technology is used to bring you the latest industry news. We think it's a powerful combination and hope you'll feel the same way. Just use the feedback pointers that are spread throughout the site to tell us what you think.

Tip of the Month

There are a number of ways to search the Logistics Management & Distribution Report Web site. My favorite is to execute a full search that cuts across not only the magazine but the full Manufacturing Marketplace super site. Visit http://www.manufacturing.net/search/searcher.html and enter a term. The search results will list all hits by category, including magazine articles, association listings, trade shows, new product entries, Lexis-Nexis news, and Internet UseNet news groups.

Pointers

When you visit www.logisticsmgmt.com, here are some of the services you can use:

* To search just magazine articles by keyword or subject, visit www.manufacturing.net/ magazine/logistic/depts/default.htm

* To create your own customized news page, visit www.manufacturing.net/cgi-bin/reg/ yourpage/yourpagesearch. You will have to register to get free access to this area.

* To search for a product or service, visit www.manufacturing.net/products/

* To search the database of tradeshows, visit www.manufacturing.net/products/