Efficient use of the archive

If you've read the about page you'll know that most of the archive's articles are stored on Deja News. Deja News is a search engine that lets you search through newsgroups for articles, just like a regular search engine lets you search through web-pages. One neat feature of Deja News is the ability to fetch single articles through a URL, something which this archive makes good use of. There's one drawback though. The articles are now stored on an external server, and I cannot change content there. To help you out a little I'll write a bit about three different scenarios I see for efficient navigation of the archive.

A single browser window

Many people prefer to browse using a single browser window, or they have a browser that doesn't let you open multiple windows. To make navigation back to the archive easy each article on Deja News has a link back which says "Return to the rollout archive". That link always takes you back to the archive itself.

There's of course nothing wrong with using your browser's history-functions. The back button as well as direct history navigation will eventually take you back here. You may find it a bit inconvenient though, so look out for that return-link.

Multiple browser windows

Quite a lot of browsers let you open multiple windows so you can navigate more than one site at a time. If you're using a mouse right-clicking a link often gives you a menu where one choice is "Open link in new window" (or something to the equivalent of that). This will in turn give you a new browser window in which the linked document is loaded.

But, having one browser window for each document in the archive will soon give you a bit too many windows up. Therefore you might want to try out your browser's ability to use drag & drop. Click on a link with your left mouse-button, hold it down while dragging the link into the other browser window. You should then get the linked document opened in the other browser window and not the first. This way you can have one window with the archive and one window for the articles on Deja News.

The remote control

And then there's the remote control. If you have a JavaScript-enabled browser with support for cookies the remote control can be used to make navigation even easier. The remote control is a little window specifically tailored to make navigation of my backgammon site easy. It gives you links to each of the main parts of the site, as well as context-senstive information regarding each part.

Of course the remote control is adapted so it works well with the archive. With it you'll have direct links to the four parts of the archive. Since the reomte control is a little window you can dock it next to your man browser window and that way always have easy access directly back to the archive.

To try it out you need to envoke the launch-function. If you're curious about the remote control you can read the about-pages.


Morten Wang <warnckew@online.no>
Last modified 1999-03-31 21:01