Richard Rasala @ Northeastern University
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Rasala Photo

      

CCIS Quick Links goes to a page with links to:

Quick Links was last updated on July 28, 2015. There will be no future updates of the data. To obtain current information, see the CCIS site as well as Banner and CourseLeaf. The Quick Links site has historical information that goes as far back in some cases as 2009. The site will be maintained for a time in case this historical information is useful.

This page uses the concept of expandable/collapsible sections. With this technique, an overview of the content of a site may be given using headers and the details may be revealed by opening particular sections.

Here are two other examples:

CS 1100 Excel Strings Tutorial

CS 1100 Access Queries Tutorial

To enable expandable/collapsible sections, you need one CSS file expandable.css , one Javascript file expandable.js , and two images: an expand-icon Expand or + and a collapse icon Collapse or -.

All “expandable” code files and images are in one subdirectory expandable of the top level directory.

This design makes it efficient to download, install, and use the “expandable” code.

To Download the “expandable” code, click on the Download link.

To see how to use expandable/collapsible sections on a typical web page, use your browser’s View Source menu item to see the html source of this web page.

The Story Utility enables a web-based slide show in which each slide is a fully functional web page. The Story Utility is similar to PowerPoint but is much more powerful because each slide may have its own dynamic behavior. In many ways, the Story Utility is a web-descendent of the Apple Hypercard program.

Each web-based slide show is driven by a story file that provides a list of the links to each web page that will become a slide in the slide show. Each link should be provided with a title that allows the slide to be identified.

Now that Northeastern is delivering most web pages using https, the Story Utility must also respect https rules. This means that to use the Story Utility the links in the story file must either be internal links or be external https links. This is a severe restriction since much of the interesting content on the web is still delivered by http. Over time as the web as a whole moves to https this will become less of an obstacle.

The Links Utility gets around the https problem by eliminating the slide show and simply presenting all links in a story file as links on a single web page. Each link will open in a new tab so that the original page is maintained.

Since links open in a separate tab with the Links Utility, there is no issue about http versus https. An https page may exit to an external tab using either http or https links.

Given the http versus https situation, the Links Utility is now preferred over the Story Utility.

The Story Utility may still be used if all links in a story are a combination of internal links and external https links. The use of the Story Utility when feasible is elegant since the information is displayed in a single page with no proliferation of tabs.

To make the Links Utility more useful, additional lines in the story file may be used to provide annotations on the web page constructed. These annotations are:

The use of these annotations will be discussed in more detail in the Links Utility documentation.

Here is a link to both the Story Utility and the Links Utility. You will find full documentation and examples. You will also have the ability to download the code as a zip file.

Story Utility & Links Tools

This documentation is presented as a story slide show. This is easy since https is not a problem. All essential links in this particular story are internal relative links.

The link below provides examples of links related to web development. Although you may not be interested in the details of the content, the examples show the potential of the Links Tools to organize lots of information.

Web Development Links

The link below shows the Synchronized Google Maps web application in several flavors including Northeastern University maps and satellite images of the major league baseball parks. The link also documents the web application by using the Story Utility and by displaying sample data files.

Synchronized Google Maps

Services @ Northeastern University: Rasala Site

Senior Information for Newton MA

MBTA Proposals and Newton MA

Newton MA Bus Proposals

Newton MA Zoning Documents

Newton MA Zoning Discussion

Multiplication Table