6/3/2000

Web sites thrive on frequent updates and people like to register their opinions. Heck, the whole of usenes thrives on the human imperative to tell other people what you know (the best way to get an answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post an answer that isn't true).

The web also works by providing resources outside of one narrow focus. So the answer is to provide a page of links to the rest of the world. Good, solid links with a bit of context included.

The Journals Online links page does this by coupling the display of catgorized links with a form to allow users to add new links.

How it works
The reference /code/links looks like a directory. You would expect to fetch an index.html or default.asp page from the 'links' directory. Insteap, this is a 'cgi-less cgi.' The file 'links' is a perl script. The script checks to see if the user is passing the script a link, and if so The file containing the links is then read, and formatted into a variable in category order. A template file containing the 'add link' form is then read, and the drop down list of categories is updated from the link file. Then the whole mess is displayed to the user.