Random Thoughts #2 (and sale reminder)

Published 2008-09-25    Printer-friendly version

This week Clarion Magazine is having its annual fall subscription sale (save some bux, go to the home page for details), and that's put me in a reflective mood. What are some things most people probably don't know about the mag?

In this installment: Massive lists of articles and news items.

The Clarion Magazine home page has some URL options you can use to list all articles (and at the same time news items) for a given year, a given year and month, and even all articles and news items ever published in Clarion Magazine.

The three parameters involved are year, month, and limit. You'll need to specify the limit parameter in all cases or the default (currently five) applies, and typically you'll specify a limit higher than any reasonable maximum. .

For instance, to see all articles for 2008 you can use this URL:

http://www.clarionmag.com/index.html?year=2008&limit=500

You'll notice that the articles are in descending order (newest articles first), which is the default. To see oldest first add &desc=false to the URL:

http://www.clarionmag.com/index.html?year=2008&limit=500&desc=false

To see just the articles published in May, add the month (and, if you like reduce the limit, though it won't matter unless you use a lower limit than the number of articles available):

http://www.clarionmag.com/index.html?year=2008&month=5&limit=50

Again, add &desc=false to the URL to see the oldest articles first:

http://www.clarionmag.com/index.html?year=2008&month=5&limit=50&desc=false

To see all articles ever published in Clarion Magazine, in descending order, try this (but be prepared to wait - it's a very big page):

http://www.clarionmag.com/index.html?limit=2000&desc=false

I tried that with a limit of 1000 but that only took me to mid 2006. A 2000 limit should work for a few more years. The URL on the site index uses a more generous value of 5000.

The same approach works on the news page. To see all news items for this year:

http://www.clarionmag.com/cmag/news.html?year=2008&limit=500

And to see all news items ever posted (another big page):

http://www.clarionmag.com/cmag/news.html?&limit=5000

Actually that isn't all news items ever posted - it's all news items since January 2001. Prior to that time I created the news pages manually (I can't believe I actually did that). And a limit of 5000 should work for another two years or so.

Now, here's a fun thing to try. If you're using Google's new Chrome browser, bring up the above news page. Press Ctrl-F and type RPM in the search field. Chrome will highlight all the instances of RPM in the document and show a colored line for each instance in the scroll bar. Click on any line to jump to that instance of the search term.

To keep up on all the latest Clarion articles and news, make sure your Clarion Mag subscription is up to date. Log in to the My ClarionMag page to check your status, and/or go to the ClarionMag store to renew/subscribe. Remember, the fall subscription sale ends Friday, Sept 26.

Store: http://www.clarionmag.com/cmag/store.html?action=shop

Site index (which also has links to the Clarion Online articles): http://www.clarionmag.com/cmag/siteindex.html

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Clarion Magazine ISSN 1718-9942