Beyond the Son of Filamentality

Sorting Your List of Links

This phase of creating an Activity Page is strictly an HTML thing. What you need to do is review your links list to see what sites go together. "Go together" may mean they are on the same basic topic or are perhaps opposites that you want to juxtapose. Once you're familiar again with the sites, then you'll want to get at your HTML file (do you need help finding and working with HTML or saving and viewing your changes?).

  1. Find the List of Links in your HTML page. It follows the "Activities" header:

    Find 'Activities'

  2. Go ahead and cut the line that says, "(you'll fill in the activities that go with the links later)." Drag across it (as shown), and do an Edit - Cut from the menubar.

    Cut a line

    Notice that the HTML tags for an unordered (bulleted) list begin with <UL> and end with </UL>. The tag for the bullet itself is <LI>.

    UL & LI tags

    Also notice that what you're looking at is one specific link to the THOMAS site of the Congress offered by the Library of Congress. What you're going to do is rearrange the links that you want to group together and separate any that should be by themselves.

  3. To move whole links around, drag across an entire link and then do an Edit - Cut from the menubar.

    Cut the Link

  4. Next you have to find the place you want to paste the link you've just cut. Look for the <LI> that shows the starting bullet of a link you want to put your cut site above (or look for the <P> that ends the link entry if you want to paste it after that link). When you find the place, drop your cursor right where you want it, for example:

    Drop Your Cursor

  5. Then do an Edit - Paste from the menubar to insert the site you'd just cut.

  6. Repeat this process until you have all the sites grouped the way you want. You might need to Type in <P> s between the links if they accidently got cut or mixed up.

  7. The last step is to check how your bullet indenting is doing. By moving around the links, you may have gotten the <UL> and </UL> mixed around so your bullets aren't lined up on the margin. At this stage we'll just check to make sure they are lined up. In a later lesson (Adding Activities) you'll learn details about setting grouped links off into separate columns of bullets. So, scan your list of links in HTML and make sure there's a <UL> before the first <LI> and a </UL> after the last <LI>.

[ Sort List of Links | Brainstorm Activities | Add Activities | Customize Your Page ]
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Education First - Pacific Bell - SDSU Last revised May 21, 1996
By the SDSU/Pacific Bell Fellows
Applications Design Team/Wired Learning
http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/beyond/acts.sorting.html
Copyright © 1996 Pacific Bell -- All Rights Reserved