Gatherology: The Wizard of Aus's Trick Book, #001

I've been getting asked how I manage to keep up with what seems like an insurmountable mass of hurdles while keeping this contest I'm running, Comment Stimulus, updated and minty-fresh -- and I've been asked this before at other times. While obviously I'm a little too busy to give an in-depth explanation, I thought I might try to explain in an article for those curious about how I manage. This one is a very quick explanation of how to quickly sort through pages of articles -- hopefully I'll come back when I have more time and explain better. Without further ado, let's look at the steps:

First, go to the articles list for a group.

Next, select which sort option you want... say, "Most Discussed."

Next, go to page two.

You should see that your current URL looks something like this:

http://www.gather.com/viewArticles.jsp?num=20&currentPage=2&grpId=3659174697247372&nav=Groupspace&start=22&sortBy=numComments

Now, if you change the number after '?num=', it changes the number of objects displayed per page. The number after '&currentPage=' controls what page you're on, and '&start=' controls what it starts at. (Also, '&sortBy=' controls the sort type -- I don't remember them right now, but a bit of experimentation will show you which is which. I'll come back and edit later for more explanation.)

Now then, this can be used to pull off some interesting tricks -- for example, making a quick list of the 100 most commented articles in your group. In fact, if you edit the URL properly, you can even get a list of all articles in your group at once, just by supplying a sufficiently high number. For example, if you really wanted to see every article in Comment Speedway sorted by number of comments, you'd have to use this URL:

http://www.gather.com/viewArticles.jsp?num=6400&currentPage=1&grpId=3659174697247372&nav=Groupspace&start=0&sortBy=numComments

Be forewarned, though, that loading more than one hundred items at once tends to take a while, especially if you do this in the images section! There's two reasons for this: first, Gather uses a pre-cache system to store the normal 20-items-per-page displays you see, so that they load quickly. Nonstandard pages, since they've never been cached before, therefore take slightly longer to compile and display. Second... well, the more you display, the longer it takes to download the necessary data to display it!