This mailing list keeps you up-to-date with new articles, columns, and Web pages that I have written. I list and link most of these on my Diabetes Directory at www.mendosa.com/diabetes.htm.
From time to time this mailing list may also include links to other Web pages of special interest.
My most recent contribution is:
- My About the Internet column "DiabetesWATCH" on the American Diabetes Association's Web site at
www.diabetes.org/Mendosa. This site is sponsored by Aventis, but has absolutely no advertising. Even better, it is a most attractive site with some powerful management tools for people with diabetes.
on December 18, 2000
Updates include:
- Broken links are the bane of all Webmasters and especially for me. That's primarily because on the 15 pages of On-line Diabetes Resources I attempt to link and describe all the Web sites with substantive information about diabetes. It now contains about 800 links, and I started it almost six years ago and probably would not have kept checking for broken links except for the gentle prodding of Eric Rumsey. For several years he has awarded me a "Clean Bill of Health" from HardinMD, a badge that I display at On-line Diabetes Resources Part 1: Non-Web Sites. "The Hardin MD Clean Bill of Health Award is given to the 'best of the best' sites, that have connection rates of at least 93%," according to the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, University of Iowa .
But I recently discovered that the Web site that I had been using to check broken links now checks no more than 50 links on a page. That forced me to turn elsewhere, and because of a tip from Eric I discovered that my HTML editor, HotDog Professional, includes an even better link checker than I had been using. HotDog is so powerful and has so many features that I never came across it before.
This powerful link checker is called LinkBot. In the past few days I have used it to check my entire site for the first time in almost six years. I was dismayed to find that of the 3,300 links it checked about 600 were broken. It took several days but I think all of them are fixed now—with the exception of links on pages saved from the defunct DiabetesWebSite. I saved 40 of my articles that had been published there before the site went down permanently last month. But I did not alter the appearance of those pages, so links to DiabetesWebSite pages that are no longer live are included.
- "You need to add a search engine to your site," is one of the most common requests that I got for years. Unfortunately, it was not possible with the level of service I previously paid my ISP for. Now, however, I have upgraded that service, primarily for the ability to add a search engine to the site. The other significant service that the upgrade provides is this mailing list.
The search engine is powerful, but like all search engines insists that you follow its rules. The main one that I have noticed is that is you search for the part of a word it wouldn't find it. You must either enter the entire word or the first few letters following by the standard wildcard symbol, the * (asterisk).
So far, I have added the search engine code only to my most visited pages. These include The Glycemic Index and Glycemic Index Lists, which are far and away the most popular parts of the site. You can find the search engine code at the top of my home page, my Diabetes Directory, and each of the 15 pages of the On-line Diabetes Resources.
I send out this mailing list about once every two weeks. The list is free and will never include advertising.
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