5 November (Part 1) - Navigational aids
There should be some news about the next development in the Peter Craske saga
later today but meanwhile I’d like to remind some people about ways
of getting around this website.
Bonkers is quite often given a link from other websites which is good but often the quoted link
is not ideal. Over the weekend I noted that someone had taken a whole chunk of Bonkers to place
on another site. There’s nothing that can be done about that nor would I want to; if you
put something on the web, expect it to be nicked, everyone does it and few care but what I didn’t like seeing was
the accompanying comment. “BiB is a bit of a pain to navigate.”
Note: The following description was outdated by the rearrangements made on
23rd November 2012.
The problem arises when people quote or use the original domain name,
www.bexley-is-bonkers.co.uk,
which routes to the Home page when more often than not they should go to a particular blog entry. The
Home page has a link at both the top and the bottom which routes directly to the latest blog page but
it may be bypassed completely by going to
www.bexley-is-bonkers.info.
A minor variant is
www.bexley-is-bonkers.com
which goes to the most recent blog on the same page instead of the top of the page. (†)
Once there, a mouse click over any blog date (note the green upwards pointing
arrow) will take you to the top of the page and a mouse click over any blog
title (note the black anchor symbol) will put that blog entry at the top of the page.
At the same time it places the unique ‘anchor’ reference in the URL (address) area.
Copying that as a link will ensure that the wanted blog is found now and in the future.
It’s much the same with any fast moving blog and both the wordpress and blogspot
solutions suffer the same problem. If you don’t take steps to link to the
particular blog, the link will soon get out of date.
Possibly useful but not suitable for using as a link from elsewhere is the RSS feed at
www.bexley-is-bonkers.co.uk/rss/feed.xml.
It lists the most recent blogs and clicking on an entry should take you to it.
Different RSS readers can do slightly different things.
The top of each blog page carries a brief reminder of the foregoing but clearly no one reads
it. I’m not sure what else can be done to make Bonkers ‘less of a pain to navigate’ but
simply referring to www.bonkers.co.uk as a link is not usually very
helpful. All constructive ideas welcome.
Web browsers are not always helpful. Internet Explorer often needs two attempts
to find an anchor (bookmark) accurately. You click, it goes to the wrong place. You use
the back button and try again and it then goes to the right place. It’s another
Microsoft bug. Then at the end of each month when both www.bexley-is-bonkers.info
and www.bexley-is-bonkers.com switch to a new page the browser cache thinks it
knows better. Clearing the History fixes that. Maybe I should have a month called ‘current’
and do some renaming at the month end, that way the month would in effect never switch, but it’s
another thing that could go wrong.
† This only works if you set your browser to delete the History on exit, a
solution which fixes the month change problem too.