About Oberlist
Oberlist is a tool designed to make it easier to find particular pages on the Oberlin.edu website.
What Oberlist Does
Oberlist does this through two methods.
The Portal Page
The first method is the “portal page,” located at oberlist.com . This page is laid out as follows:
Across the top of the page are the six most useful links on the official website. These might change from time to time depending on what you tell us you think should be up there and what you actually use — we record anonymous statistics for precisely this purpose — but for the moment those links are: Classifieds, Calendar, Fussers, ERes, Blackboard, and Presto .
The rest of the page is divided into large category columns with smaller category headings. For browsers that run JavaScript, you can click on these smaller headings to expand lists of pages that fall into these categories. For browsers without JavaScript, these headings are already expanded. Like the rest of this website, these lists are a work in progress. We will add items according to what people are having trouble finding and what people tell us to add.
Down the right side of the page are a list of the most frequently visited pages — as well as pages that aren’t on the official website — that didn’t make it into the big six across the top.
Redirection
The more powerful — albeit slightly less intuitive — use for Oberlist is redirection. If you have a word to describe what you’re looking for, Oberlist can shove you in the right direction. This is how it works:
You type into your URL bar something that you’re looking for as “oberlist.com/SomethingThatIAmLookingFor” and if our scripts can figure out what page you’re looking for, they’ll redirect you straight there. If they have trouble, then they’ll offer you a list of suggestions, or just a way to search the oberlin website yourself.
For instance, if you type, “oberlist.com/osca” then you will be sent straight to OSCA’s website. If, however, you type, “oberlist.com/co-op” then you will receive a list of pages including: Bike Co-op, Film Co-op, et cetera.
Bookmarklet
The Oberlist bookmarklet makes finding things go even quicker.
Drag this button to your bookmark bar:
↓
When you click on it, a window will pop up asking what page on Oberlin’s website you’re trying to find.
Colophon
Oberlist was conceived and created by Harris Lapiroff. It is specially designed to make him rich and famous.
Oberlist is designed with accessibility and web standards in mind. Don’t yell at us if we don’t validate all the time. We do our best. The frontend is built in XHTML and CSS with tiny sprinklings of unobtrusive JavaScript. We also do our best to maintain proper web typography, but sometimes we fuck up.
The backend is coded entirely in PHP, but you won’t see any ‘.php’ extensions in your address bar. It’s magic!
Oberlist is hosted (along with various other H. Lapiroff projects) on Media Temple’s grid server. If you purchase from them, consider putting “lapiroff.name” in as the referring URL.