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By Jim Trageser
America Online has now converted its inhouse Digital City project -- large online areas dedicated to specific metro areas – to Web sites, opening up access to nonsubscribers (and opening up those nonsubscribers to AOL's advertisers, of course).
It is, in short, a hell of a site. The main drawback is that, for the life of me, I can't find a shortcut to the San Diego site – your first visit, you have to go to the generic national site, and click on San Diego from there. (At that point, bookmark so you don't have to do so again.)
There are links to everything in this town – bookstores, gyms, travel agency, city halls, child care, schools, churches. I don't if these various listings are free to the organizations or not, but regardless, the directories are fairly complete. And the search engines on Digital City are top-notch.
Given all that's on this site, I'll not even try to list it all. Do yourself a favor and visit Digital City for yourself.
This is a San Marcos-based online store that specializes in travel and history books, with an emphasis on the West. It's quite the low-tech site, with no graphics nor even a white background, but it does have a lot of information on the books available from the store. And there are thousands of books here – from Kenya to Anza Borrego. If you're a collector of such books, you'll want to visit. But there isn't much else for others.
Penguin Palace is run by a multimedia art studio – and it is certainly a visually oriented site (and sysop Pinguino was quoted at length in the May 30 column). Much of the site is devoted to the work of the studio, including Web design contract work. There are also two online zines here -- System Failure and Area Unknown. System Failure is still being built (although it looks as if they're pretty busy at adding stuff every few days); Area Unknown is dedicated to rave music, and is more fleshed out than System Failure. If you're at all into contemporary music (91X stuff) or zines, this site ought to be visited.