| IdeaXchg Article By: M. Asherman |
(Author's note: this page is obsolete, but it has been retained for further review and processing. Some broken links to deleted elements may still be present on this page. See IdeaXchg Development Tasks for current notes and references.)
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The home page navigation bar is for the convenience of frequent visitors. At present the main focus of IdeaXchg is the Discussion Discussion, but my intention is to gradually expand the coverage to additional topics. The primary Search page spans the entirety of IdeaXchg, to allow for searching across all IdeaXchg discussion areas. Most IdeaXchg pages also include both a top and bottom navigation bar, with Bottom/Top links for convenient intra-page navigation. The Help link on the IdeaXchg home page takes you to this article.
Throughout IdeaXchg, you will see prominent links to context-sensitive help. In addition, every help page has links directly into further discussion about that particular page. This web-based discussion is live and open to the public, and you are encouraged to participate by adding your own comments or replies to other people's comments. There is no need to register, and you can participate anonymously, if you wish.
A very brief welcome message follows the home page's top navigation bar, for the benefit of new visitors. General announcements may also be added here.
IdeaXchg is partitioned into multiple discussion areas, each devoted to a particular topic. These discussion areas are listed and briefly described. A discussion area includes an edited Contents outline with links to related articles and discussion. For now, this really boils down to just the Discussion Discussion, but the point is that there could be a number of additional such discussion areas, and these would be listed on the home page. (See IdeaXchg architecture overview for additional details.)
Note that each IdeaXchg discussion area supports both framed and unframed interfaces. If your browser doesn't support frames, an unframed version of the page will be supplied automatically. If your browser does support frames, you can still opt to use the unframed interfaces when you find this to be more convenient.
The graphical numbers preceded by the label "Hits:" in the bottom right corner of the home page are from FrontPage's Hit Counter component, using the most compact of FrontPage's canned selection of styles. Other IdeaXchg pages, except for forum messages, also include their own such hit counters.
Every page in IdeaXchg includes a page footer, which varies according to the type of page. For example, the home page and other "structural" pages use a common IdeaXchg system page footer format. Page footers may include two forms of timestamp automatically maintained by FrontPage. The date/time last edited corresponds to the creation or last manual editing of a page. The auto-update timestamp covers indirect revisions made as a result of changing an include file, e.g. a shared header or footer. All page footers also include the page's URL, which is especially convenient when dealing with frames.
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