Vector on the Internet

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 15

In the last issue of Vector, I stated what I was hoping to do with Vector’s web site (http://www.vector.org.uk) in particular the product guide. I’ll now tell you what has been achieved.

(As before, I will call the printed edition Vector and the web version vector.org.)

Product Guide¶

At the top level is the product guide menu:

http://www.vector.org.uk/product.html

This allows you to select the section of the product guide you are interested in via a sub-index. In addition there is a full listing of all companies, and a BOOKMARK page.

The bookmark page contains all the (fully qualified) links to each individual product guide entry plus any additional link or e-mail address. I keep a copy of the BOOKMARK page locally on my hard disk. This gives me very fast access to every item in the guide. I used the e-mail entries in the bookmark page to create an (albeit incomplete) product guide mailing list.

Each sub-index page consists of a "quick index" and an alphabetical list of company/organisation with links to the product guide entry.

Within a product guide entry, the web page is normally divided into three or more areas. The first area is the "contact" section. Here are listed (when known/applicable) the company’s name, address, contact name, phone number, fax number, web address, and FTP site.

Subsequent areas contain individual product entries much as in Vector. The last area contains the usual return links, disclaimer, minder robot notification link (see below), copyright notice, etc. There is also an button marked "update".

This button will, when activated, redisplay the web page but with an "update" button in each section. Pressing a section’s update button will create a new web page containing a dynamically built form with this section’s details pre-filled. This form will allow the owner to modify the section entry and then submit it to me to so that I can update the original web page (and pass it on to Gill to update the printed Vector entry). Please feel free to try this out (just put "Testing" in the authorisation field if you don’t want the section updated).

The complete "UPDATE" facility is driven by some programs I have written in PERL, using the CGI facilities. Please let me know of any problems with them.

Minder Robot¶

Many of the vector.org pages now have a section which allows the viewer to set up a "minder robot" which will notify the user whenever the web page is modified. To activate this service, you need to give the "robot" your e-mail address. "Minder Robot" is a free service not connected to Vector or the BAA in any way. This service can be activated to report on ANY page on the web, not just those with links to it. Currently the robot will visit each site it is minding about once a week to check for changes. I find it very useful.

Things to come¶

At present, neither the complete index to Vector nor the Product Guide within vector.org has a search engine. I am planning to implement one in Perl when I get time. (I am also looking at JavaScript, but currently this is not supported widely enough to be useful; for example it works with Netscape Navigator but not (correctly) with Microsoft Internet Explorer.)

The "last modified date" facility is working on all pages in the root directory of the Vector web site. However, it currently does not work on the product guide entries (which are located in a sub-directory). I hope to be able to find (and fix) the cause of this error.

And Finally…¶

If you have any suggestions to what you would like to see (or not see) in vector.org (or in Vector for that matter), please let us know. One request was for the whole of the product guide to be a single page so it could be easily searched, or downloaded. Do you want to be able to put your CV up in vector.org? Do you want more graphics? I have NOT used any in the past to keep transfer times down to a minimum, but it makes the pages look very dull compared to Vector’s bright covers!

And finally, can I thank all those of you who have already sent in suggestions and feedback.