Quick Tour

Things to Try as a User

Click Around The Page

• Try clicking on the table of contents and see how it moves you around the page.
• Look at the alternate format links available for Sample Entry. (The links are to the right of the entry.)
• NEW. Look at the special link menu at the top right. It contains:
  • HOME which brings you back to the starting page.
  • WHAT'S NEW which lists all pages created or changed in the last week.
  • CART which lets you view your "shopping cart" (details below).
  • FIND which lets you search the site (details below)
  • HELP which takes you to this Quick Tour. 

Do a Search

• This site does not have that many pages in it, so you should go to Better File Cabinet, a database of math problems or Math Education Literature Database to get more interesting search results. 

• To explore the new search possibilities, try these examples in the Search box at the top right. The search form shows abbreviated entries. Click on the titles (which are links) to go to the entry page.
  • Find a Word. calculus will produce a few items about calculus.
  • AND Search. concept image graphical will produce pages which mention “concept” AND “image” AND “graphical”. Any blocks separated by spaces are treated as connected by AND.
  • Find a Phrase. "concept image" will produce pages with that literal phrase (and thus miss the items tagged concept-image)
  • OR Search. (concept|image|graphical) will find pages with “concept” OR “image” OR “graphical”.
  • Tag/Field Search.   Tags:.*calculus finds pages with a line with “Tags” followed by anything followed by “calculus”, i.e. a item tagged calculus. author.*=.*Tall finds pages with Author and Tall on the same line. Someday we’ll simplify the syntax...
  • Complex ANDs. (concept|image|graphical) author.*=.*Tall This will find pages that match the first OR search AND the second Tag search.
    • You can arbitrary many pieces ANDed together. We don’t have a way to do ORs of pieces, so this isn’t a full boolean search.
  • Regular Expressions. Actually, any Perl regular expression is allowed in the Search. One tasteful use is if you want entries about a “fly” but don’t want to match pages about “flying”, you can search for fly\b, and that will require a word stop at the end of “fly”.

Save Items in Cart

• There is a simple “shopping cart” feature.
  • Next to every element in a search listing is a checkbox. Selecting a checkbox will put the item in your cart.
  • You can use the View Cart link on the bottom menu to look at your saved items.
  • In the title bar of every item is a checkbox which you can use to put it in or out of your cart.
  • This requires Javascript and cookies turned on.
• NEW. The contents of your cart can be exported in a few ways. You can download:

  • all pieces as one HTML page

  • all the BibTeX pieces as a single BibTeX file.

  • all the LaTeX pieces as a single LaTeX file, either as separate pages or a single enumerated list.

Things to Try as an Editor

• Log in. (Login link is at the bottom right.) Be sure you put your Username in. Now you have access to more commands at the bottom of each page.

• Edit the entry on this page. (Look for the Edit This Page link.) Save it and (if you wrote valid text) admire how everything is updated.
• Try pasting in HTML from other web pages. We try to keep much of the formatting.
• Notice how real BibTeX is displayed in a civilized way.
  • Notice how you can save a draft (only one), and preview the page.
  • Notice the pop-up formatting help (above Username)
• If you truly mess up the page, you can go to “See Past Edits” and rollback to a previous version (perhaps the one before you started editing!). 
• NEW. "Manage Site Changes" is an advanced version of the "What's New" page.
• Notice how the Table of Contents is automatically built.
• You can create a new page by using the "Add New Page" form at the bottom. 
• You can also create a new page by making a link on an existing page.
  
  • Enter the text [[Name_Of_Your_Page?]]. When you save the page, that text will look like [[Name_Of_Your_Page?]]. Notice the question-mark. You can then click on the question-mark to go to an editing page. (Please don’t make a new page there with that name so we can preserve the nice little question mark!)