Philadelphia Reflections: Help Using Philadelphia Reflections

Help Using Philadelphia Reflections

Philadelphia Reflections consists of several thousand essays on the general subject of Philadelphia ... the greater Philadelphia area extending, roughly, from Delaware to Trenton, and from the Atlantic seaboard to the Allegheny mountains.

These were William Penn's Quaker colonies, an important part of the founding of America and involved in all of America's history before and since.

The organization of this site is very simple ... the middle of the main page contains a few essays that change every time you visit and periodically refreshes itself, providing an overview of the whole body of content.

Reflections

On the right is a list of individual essays, called Reflections. This list is constantly growing and the essays are frequently modified. If you click the word "Reflections" at the top of the list of essays, you will be taken to a page that will allow you to sort the entire list in a number of ways. Alphabetic sorting is the customary list, but if you want chronologic or other listings, it can be done.

Topics

On the left is a list of "topics". Topics are groups of essays that relate to a particular subject. Topics have an introduction followed by the essays themselves. This column, too, provides a list feature under the word "Topics" that will allow various sortings of the topics.

The order and content of the lists of Reflections and Topics changes to reflect topicality and recent changes or additions.

A most useful feature is the search box on the upper left which will provide you with a list of every essay containing any keywords you type in. Every single word is indexed.

If you click on either a Reflection (essay) or Topic, you will be taken to a page that contains the Reflection or Topic and includes a list ... in the case of a Reflection it is a list of all the Topics containing the Reflection; in the case of a Topic, the list is of the Reflections it contains.

Each of these pages also contains a Print button that will format the Topic or Reflection for printing

At the very bottom of every page is a group of links that will allow you to contact us, link to us or to include our "RSS feed".

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and comes in two flavors: RSS and Atom. Both are XML formatted lists of all the reflections on the site, with an indication of the date they were most recently modified.

If you use MyYahoo to collect various such feeds, the button supplied here will add Philadelphia Reflections to your MyYahoo page automatically. If you use other feed readers, usually you will be asked to enter the URL of the XML, which you can get by clicking either the RSS or Atom buttons.

A Google search of "rss reader" will provide you with a list of programs that will "aggregate" any number of RSS feeds ... from here, from the New York Times, etc. If you're new to this syndication business, you might start with MyYahoo, however, which provides this feature and many others as well, or Google's version: Google Reader