uga-archives.pl

There are two pieces to making a condensed listing of SAS-L archives. A perl program and an html page containing javascript. The condensed listing has been tested and found to work with Netscape Navigator 4.7x and Internet Explorer 5.

The perl program extracts a long list of SAS-L archive URLs from the The University of Georgia's Archives of SAS-L web site. The html page uses javascript to dynamically create an HTML table crossing year and month. Each cell in the table shows number indicating the number of weeks of archives that are available for a given month. When the mouse is moved over a table cell, a fly over menu of links appears, letting you select which week to jump to at the UGA site. The table effectively condenses the original long list of weeks into a manageable matrix of months.

The information used to create the HTML table is encoded in a javascript array. The perl cgi program replaces the default array with an array that represents the current archives list. Perl is required due to client side javascript being restricted from connecting to arbitrary servers.

Visually the rearrangement is thus:

From this To this
Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2000 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5      
...                        

With a fly over menu like this:

Run the program

This link runs the script. If the program does not run, try this static instance saved from a run made September 29, 2000.


Copyright 2000 Richard A. DeVenezia
This page was last updated 28 March 2002.