While the current version of InfoTech Tuesday offers a wide range of features not possible on the previous platform, updates are still being made to the site to make it a more user-friendly vehicle for technology news at K-State. In this vein, a couple of improvements have been made to the site:
- An improved archives that allows “viewing by issue”.
- A new “full-text version” that allows readers to read an entire issue all on one webpage.
Improved archives with “viewing by issue“
Long a desired feature, an improved archives section has always been on the list of things to update. In the past, the only way to view archives was on an article-by-article basis. So, when looking chronologically at the archives, it was possible to view a listing of all articles in a given year or month. However, since InfoTech Tuesday is published on a “weekly issue” basis, the previous archives did not reflect this structure and allow for the browsing of articles on an issue-by-issue basis.
Now when visiting the archives, the issues display in reverse chronological order separated by year and month. When an individual issue is clicked, the articles in that issue drop down offering links to each individual article or, importantly, a link to view the whole issue on one page. In addition to this listing, there are also links at the top of the page to each year and month the newsletter has run, which link to pages that display the issues that were published in that particular time period. While this is a new feature, the old archive views are still available by selecting “view by date” or “view alphabetically” directly above the dates links.
Read the current issue all on one webpage
Along with improving the archives of the newsletter, it is now possible to view the current issue as “full text”. Typically the newsletter homepage displays snippets of articles with links to “read more”. However, on the full-text page, you can read the entire weekly issue from top to bottom with all its content included on one page. (This is similar to the newsletter all-in-one format used up to Aug. 19, 2008.) To read the newsletter like this, simply append “full-text” to the site’s web address:
http://itnews.itac.k-state.edu/full-text.
