ADS-L archives

[Grant Barrett]

On Feb 11, 2012, at 14:24, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> At 2/11/2012 04:26 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>> On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 4:19 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > The new www.americandialect.org design made it a bit more
>> > time-consuming to get to the list archives -- unless I'm not seeing
>> > something on the home page.  "Archives" there means American
>> > Speech.  I have to select "Access to the ADS-L email list" in a
>> > list of bulleted items, then click on "ADS-L Archive
>> > covering from 1999 to present".  Can this be made quicker?
>>
>> The top link in the right-hand column, "Today's ADS-L messages," will
>> also take you the archive search page.
>
> Not exactly obvious, however?  The archives are not today's.

Not obvious, no. It could be made quicker but if you're a heavy user of the archives, perhaps you need a browser bookmark or you need to enable browser autocomplete or you should set up a custom search in your browser.

For example of the latter, in Google Chrome I have "ads" set as a search keyword with the string

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?S2=ads-l&q=%s

set as the URL. So if I type "ads" and then a space in the location bar and then some string of text and then hit return/enter, Google Chrome will do a search by replacing "%s" in the URL with my string of text and sending the search on to the ADS archives. Scads quicker: I don't have to go to any site and don't even have to use the search interface. (To set it up, go to the preferences, to "Basics," to "Search," to "Manage Search Engines.")

Something very similar works in Firefox, too.

Grant Barrett
American Dialect Society
Vice President of Communications and Technology
http://www.americandialect.org
grantbarrett at gmail.com

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