(continued from the Getting started with SCIY article)

SCIY is a webzine (an online multimedia magazine), with many different Categories and subcategories ('Topics') being explored. For example, this article is posted within a subTopic called "Getting started," which is a "child" of a Topic called "HOW TO USE SCIY." And that Topic is a child of a Category called "INTRO TO SCIY," one of our 5 main Categories. This may sound a bit complex at first, but you'll soon find that it sounds more complicated than it actually is.

Here's how it works:

1) SCIY's content is organized into these 5 main 'Categories':

INTRO to SCIY
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (the "S" in SCIY)
CULTURE (the "C" in SCIY)
INTEGRAL YOGA (the IY in SCIY)
COMMUNITIES (we added this after we came up with the SCIY name)

2) Each of these main 'parent' Categories contains several 'child' subcategories ('Topics'). For example, "INTRO to SCIY" contains these 3 Topics:

HOW TO USE SCIY
AUM 2005
NOTABLE POSTINGS

3) And the HOW TO USE SCIY topic contains 3 subtopics:

- Getting started
- Tips re using SCIY
- ?'s & feedback

4) The text you're now reading is called an "Article," which are the actual postings to SCIY. Each article is posted within at least one topic or subtopic. You can see which topic/subtopic you're currently within by noting the path hierarchy located in the green horizontal bar at the top of each page. (Clicking on any of the topic links in the path will allow you to view the other articles contained within that topic.)

5) One difference from a normal print magazine is that, because there's no lack of column space in the virtual world, we can post the same article within several different topics &/or subtopics. This is convenient when an article's content relates to several different subjects and we want to provide access to it from each of its relevant topics or subtopics.

6) One of the main reasons why we do all this differentiation rather than just clumping the articles all together under one or another of our 5 main subject categories comes back to email notifications. We want to give our subscribers the ability to receive email notifications of new postings to just the specific topics and subtopics they're interested in.

7) A second reason for our detailed structure is to make it easier to simply peruse the subject areas you're interested in. We expect that many people won't bother with email notifications, but will simply login to SCIY on some regular basis to scan through the new postings on the Main Page or within particular topics or subtopics they're interested in. They can do this by either clicking around in the Category Tree itself, or bookmarking specific topics/subtopics.