Theo Todman's Web Page - Notes Pages
Website Documentation
Website Generator Documentation - Functional Overview
(Text as at 14/07/2019 20:29:46)
The Functional Overview, which appears below, ought to be updated regularly, but – whatever the dates may say – hasn’t been updated since end September 2009, so it is somewhat out of date. I intend to make a major update annually, on change of “Academic Year”, but have not done so.
- MS Access database built and substantially populated for the following objects, lists of which (catalogued by author or title) are available on the web:-
- Books
- Papers
- Abstracts
- Notes
- Essays
- Precis
- Website-generation routines built in MS Access VBA. Basically, web-page templates are held in the database, and are used to format documents, also held in the database, and create all the interlinking between them. See this picture for the front screen (hopefully, if you click on the image it’ll expand so you can read the text on the controls!).
- The publishing of the website to the commercially-hosted domain is via AceFTP. In practice, I use a local copy of the web-site when at home (though the performance of the web-based copy is excellent with 2mb broadband), and republish the site to the Web once a week. Updated pages are automatically copied to a Transfer directory as they are regenerated. This directory is then moved to the public website (hence is self-deleting). That means AceFTP is perfectly adequate for maintaining the website.
- Some attention has been paid to usability on mobile hand-held devices, with alternative “cut down” lists for easy hand-held access.
- I have developed some rudimentary document formatting capabilities.
- Automated hyperlinks.
- Bulleted lists.
- Blank lines.
- Embedded HTML tags have to be used for other functions like emboldening and underlining.
- There is document versioning in place:
- to protect against accidental overwriting of the various objects, and
- for performance reasons (so that only changed web-pages are regenerated).
- So that the development of thought can be followed through.
- My pride and joy is the two-way hyper-linking within the Notes arena, and between the Notes and the Books / Papers / Abstracts database, which was the original motivation for the whole project. The ID of the linked document is keyed into the text and the website generator maintains the superscripts, document sectioning and the forward and backward hyperlinks.
- Directly printable Notes are automatically generated using recursive procedure calls (with a parameter to fix the depth of scan), with subtle tweaks to ensure that footnotes are only printed once and that they are printed in a sensible order (rather than when first referred to: there are references forward and backward in the document). Also, only the major Note (rather than all its footnotes) is printed if an “out of patch” reference occurs (ie. a reference to a Note in a different Note Group). Other features for printable Notes are:
- For Notes with the "link to the printed version" embedded in the Note itself, I archive the webpage for the printable version, together with the linkage to it, when the Note itself is archived (ie. as the result of amendment). Thus "printable versions" should always display the appropriate versions of all links, even when triggered from archived versions ("Previous Published Version") of the Notes.
- Printed Notes have appended to them a list of (and links to the Summaries of) all Papers and Books either Referenced by the Sub-Topic associated with the Note's title, or directly cited. Also included are all similar references in all footnotes within the depth of scan (while ensuring no duplication).
- There are "mix and match" options of printing all footnote references (including the "forwarding items") and printing the reading list.
- For Printable Notes where further footnotes are to be suppressed (either because outside the depth of scan, or because the referenced Note is "out of patch", or where referencing/forwarding of repeat footnotes is suppressed), the sub/superscripting which would otherwise encourage the reader to look for a non-existent Footnote is suppressed.
- A page explains what's going on with printable Notes!
- A Blog and an Animadversions pages are produced, using the Notes technology, together with corresponding Jump Tables. Colour conventions have been adopted to distinguish my thoughts from those of correspondents.
- “Private” Notes that aren’t ready to be published (or are never intended for publication) are only visible on my local site, with a polite notice appearing on the public site.
- A “Temp” status allows the format / content of Notes to be iterated without burdening the archive or the public; the previously-published Note remains published until the Temp status of the Note is removed.
- A master "all by category" Jump Table shows the numbers of notes by category, and hyperlinks to the categorised Jump Tables.
- Jump Tables show the number of Notes by category that have changed in the last 1, 2 or 4 weeks, together with links to the next level jump-tables that provide a convenient route to the changed Notes.
- I have added a password-protected area to the website (initially for MPhil/PhD Supervision material). This involved some careful programming to ensure the intra-website hyperlinks in and out of this area still worked.
- Lists created of web-sites relevant to Personal Identity research and of the location and associated content-range of electronic journals.
Summary of Notes Citing This Note
To access information, click on one of the links in the table above.
Authors, Books & Papers Citing this Note
| Author |
Title |
Medium |
Extra Links |
Read? |
| Todman (Theo) |
Thesis - The Form of the Argument |
Paper  |
|
Yes |
Text Colour Conventions
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025