IANN Irwin Allen Productions Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea Lost in Space Time Tunnel Land of the Giants Blog Contact ☰
Irwin Allen News Network

HOW TO USE THE IANN SITE

Site History

The Irwin Allen News Network (IANN) website had very humble beginnings with some pages on CompuServe in the mid-nineties, followed by a spell on Cable & Wireless pages, all hand coded in the HTML of the day. Prior to this, IANN and Giants Log were solely newsletter based. Pictures had to be very small in size and thus looked pixelated to cater for the very slow (dial-up) internet on offer at that time.

With this very basic start in life, you may still find some antiquated elements on the IANN site, not helped by the fact that web design technologies have come and gone during the timespan covered by the website. For this we can only apologise, as we wade through the tens of thousands of pages on the site to modernise them.

As more and more people now use their mobiles and tablets for their news and browsing activities, our sites have had to adapt and this has necessitated the biggest overhaul yet. The bulk of the site has now been made responsive, which has been a major endeavour given the age of the site. We still have many galleries to rebuild or redesign so that they can adapt to the size of the device visitors are using. Please note that a research based site such as ours is still best viewed on a computer/laptop. For content heavy sites like ours with thousands of pages of text and images, there are some limitations to the design we can adopt without destroying the organisation and familiarity of the site.

Below are some tips on how to use the site and how to fix issues arising from our frequent design updates to pages.

Site Organisation

Given the age of our site, some of the organisation is fixed to maintain continuity so that returning visitors know where to find the materials of interest.

Main Sections

The IANN site is divided up into 6 main sections, with much focus given to the 1960's science fiction quartet that a significant majority visit the site for. We have kept the folder names of these sections as they have been for most of the past 3 decades so that they are easy to return to and so that external links to them don't break on other people's sites. Each of these sections can be accessed at the top of most web pages on the site.

Lefthand Navigation Menu on Mobile Devices

Within each of these sections, we delve deeper into the subject matter through links which you will find down the left side of the browser window. However, this longtime design feature of the lefthand navigation panel would take up too much room on the screen of a mobile device. So, when you visit the IANN site on a mobile phone, the left panel is hidden and you will see a Toggle Sidebar button which you can click on to make the left navigation panel visible and you can toggle again to hide it.

Additional Sites

We have a number of additional websites where we are able to try out different methods of presentation for our research and library of materials.

News

If we can't get to our computer when there's important news to tell you, we will mention the news item first on our Irwin Allen News Twitter/X page.

News items will then appear on the main IANN home page, plus on any sub-sections related to the news item. Old news items will eventually be moved to the IANN News Archive section which is presented in decending date order.

Site Navigation

Menus and Galleries

To ensure you can view all the menus, videos and slideshows throughout this site, it is worth checking that your browser is set to allow the use of the following:

  • Javascript (used for menus and galleries)

Galleries

We are continually experimenting with the presentation of our galleries and have tried several technologies. Some of our galleries do cater for mobile devices with the ability to swipe images to the left and right, for example our Irwin Allen Vault gallery in collaboration with MPTV. However, swipeable galleries are not so good when we need to accompany images with a significant amount of text which is the case with the bulk of our galleries. Some galleries also offer slideshows, but again this is limited to galleries with little text.

Browser Notes

We recommend upgrading to the latest version of the browser you use. We do test our site on a variety of browsers and devices, but we may still miss some issues. So, please do let us know if you are encountering major issues accessing our site.

Internet Speed/Bandwidth

Now that a significant number of us have the luxury of broadband internet access, we do make use of larger images, longer pages etc. than back in the dial-up internet days. However, we are concious that larger images or videos may slow down delivery of our pages. We do try and keep images sizes manageable while wanting to present as much detail to visitors as we can. It can be a fine balance.

Links

We include many links around this site to websites related to Irwin Allen, his performers, crew and fans which we think would be of interest to visitors of this site. Please let us know if any sites linked to change or disappear. The site includes links to YouTube videos of interest so please ensure your browser settings allow for whatever video method YouTube is using at the current time (eg. HTML5).

Affiliate Links

We sometimes include affiliate links to Irwin Allen related DVDs, books, and collectibles on Amazon. These are identified with the text '#ad'. We will receive a small amount of compensation if you purchase directly from an Amazon link and any such funds are used towards providing our free membership pack for regular contributors.

Cookies

We ourselves do not add any cookies on the IANN website. However, sites which we link and embed to such as YouTube, Getty Images, and Amazon, will likely use cookies to track usage of their facilities.

External Elements

As our site does employ external elements such as YouTube videos, fonts etc., it is possible that if these sites go offline, break, or if they make changes to their technology, that this will impact our site too. We will usually spot these eventually and find fixes for the issues that arise.

IANN Website Updates and Fixes

As mentioned before, the Irwin Allen News Network (iann.net) website is undergoing some major changes "under the hood" at the moment. You may find that old versions of pages are cached in your browser and thus cause the site to appear broken. To fix this, it is worth trying several refreshes of pages in your browser to see the latest version. Clearing the browser History cache should fix any major issues (in Firefox top menu, History - Clear Recent History - Cache).

The IANN site is continually under development and we still have several sections to populate and improve from the good old days. We also like to experiment with new ideas which may or may not work, so we can occasionally break the site ourselves. So you may find that clearing the cache as mentioned above will help if a page is having a problem.

Notes

If you spot any major issues on the site, please do let us know. You can email us by clicking the email button below.