LS Web Design

28 August 2008

sortable html table with widget

From: http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/index.html?showDownload=true&whichScript=table_widget

How to use

You create the table by use of plain HTML as shown in the textaera code for <BODY>. What's important is that you:

Have a parent div like this: <div class="widget_tableDiv">

Use a <THEAD> tag as parent of your header row.

Use <TD> and not <TH> as tags for your header content

Use a <TBODY> as parent of your table data rows(<TR>).

Look in the example for further help.

The last thing you have to do is to call the javascript function initTableWidget() which "converts" the table. Example:

The arguments you send to this function are:

'myTable' = The ID of your table. example: <TABLE id="myTable" ...

500 = Width of table widget

250 = Height of table widget

Array('S','N','S','N','S') = An array telling how the columns should be sorted. "S" = String, "N" = Numeric.
Use false(without quotes) instead of "S" and "N" if you have columns that shouldn't be sorted at all.

25 August 2008

Worldcat API

Worldcat API
August 18, 2008

The Worldcat API was released beyond the original trial group while I was away.The WorldCat Search API provides access to WorldCat bibliographic records and holdings using the FRBR concepts to pull together various editions of the same work. The API provides access to the WorldCat databases from clients that can send RESTful URI queries with either the OpenSearch or SRU protocols and can accept RSS, Atom, MARC XML or Dublin Core [WorldCat Search API [OCLC - Web and Data Services]] Technical details are here; eligible users described here....

23 July 2008

Reminder re: Jakob Nielsen alerts

I forget to look often enough at the studies done by or reviewed by Jakob Nielsen. I was reminded today when we discussed where to place links on the library website to our Research Guides (libguides).

From one of the more recent alerts:
How Little Do Users Read?
"On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

We've known since our first studies of how users read on the Web that they typically don't read very much. Scanning text is an extremely common behavior for higher-literacy users; our recent eyetracking studies further validate this finding....

Among other things, the authors found that the Back button is now only the 3rd most-used feature on the Web. Clicking hypertext links remains the most-used feature, but clicking buttons (on the page) has now overtaken Back to become the second-most used feature. The reason for this change is the increased prevalence of applications and feature-rich Web pages that require users to click page buttons to access their functionality. "

Oh, and the original reason for looking at Nielsen's site was to find the information about usability tester numbers. See
Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users

18 July 2008

Choose your own homepage look

Ellie sent this out and I really like this idea. Don't know if it is practical for us but something to think about.

http://www.librarybytes.com/2008/07/homepage-preferences.html

Quick jump to page she talks about. See Full and Simple tabs on the right.

Queens Public Libary

19 June 2008

Encore for Libraries

Just documenting this iii site:

http://www.encoreforlibraries.com/main.html

Has the information re: encore libraries, et.