| Some notes on using the News pages |
March 7, 2006  |
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Here are a couple of notes on using the News pages. We hope you find them helpful. The index page The main news index page is the list of all the current news stories and the hub of all the news pages. At the moment we are working on the basis that the whole of one year is current but we may need to split it again if the page gets unwieldy. The stories are presented, in order of the date of posting, with the most recent at the top. You can scroll down and pick a story that interests you (each clickable title is followed by a very brief summary of the story content) and click Back or choose "News Index" in the header to return to the index page. Red dots • indicate updated stories A red dot like the one above, beside the date of a story, means that it has been substantially updated since it was first posted. This would mean new or significantly changed material, not just minor spelling corrections and the like. In some cases we are also listing these changed pages on the index page, so that readers can easily find their way back to the story. Story navigation Once you have gone into a story you can browse through more stories - again in reverse date order of posting - using the Previous and Next navigation links in the header of each story. You can get back up to the index page at any time by selecting the "News Index" link from this header (in older stories this is known as Headlines but it works just the same). Previous and Next The "Previous" and "Next" links can seem a little counterintuitive until you remember that they are the next and previous stories in a list which is in reverse date order, newest story at the top. The next story is further down the list and the previous one is further up the list. I worried about this for while then looked at a lot of email and newsreader programs which have a similar interface - a newest-at-the-top list - and realized that it's pretty standard. External web links Where possible, online stories are enhanced by adding a link to an external site of interest. In general, we try to link these so they open in the same browser window, as I find this more user-friendly, and your "Back" button will still work. However, where we know that the external site uses an immediate divert, and will prevent you from getting back easily, we try to avoid this problem by opening it in a new window. If possible we don't give email addresses in stories: we prefer to send readers on to external web sites (where they exist) to get contact information. However, if there's no alternative means of contact then we do use the email address. From February 2006 we have been trying an email obfuscator to hide the email address so that robots, collecting addresses to send spam to, do not see it. Where we have done this you will see that there is no "@" symbol, but rather the word "at" - so news@trumpetguild.org would be shown as news at trumpetguild.org. If you need to type the address in by hand then just replace " at " with "@"; but if you click the link it will work fine for most people. Try it now with that one to me, if you like. Naturally, if the address is used in print in the ITG Journal then we'd go back to the normal "@" form of it. We hope this is helpful and works alright for you. If you want to read more about it, please see the note in our Editorial Musings. If you get into problems with it and just want to be sent the email address in plain text, just let us know. Contact info is at the bottom of this page. Archives
There are superb news archives on the site going back to 1998 and beyond. Well worth a look, they need a tiny bit of attention giving to their navigation, something which I hope to look at later in the year, along with more access to older stories. The principal issue you should note is that at the moment clicking "Headlines" from any archived story takes you back to the current news index page, not, as you might think, the news index for the archive you are in. This is a byproduct of the archiving process and can be fixed. (The archived pages for 2003 and later now work as you would expect.) Having noted this minor flaw, please take a look around in them as they contain some great stuff. Comments If you have any comments on the news pages, or questions about their use, I would love to hear from you. My full contact details are on the news index page, or just email me at: news@trumpetguild.org Neville Young followed by Mark Boren and Amanda Pepping
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