Navigation Tips

We'll start with the basics. If you have got here, you've obviously discovered the Navigation Buttons on the Navigation Bar to the left (if you are on a computer) or at the bottom (if you are on a phone.)

First, the Navigation Bar will move around based on how wide your screen is. If you are on a computer, you can hit the Restore Button on the top right of the screen and adjust the screen width to see how the Navigation Bar relocates.

You will also see how the text re-flows to fit the screen. If you make the screen width skinny enough, you will also see how the graphics start shrinking down.

To get back to full size, just click the Maximize Button on the top right of your current window.

The individual Navigation Buttons will change their appearance depending on where you've been and where you may be going.

The Introduction Button (White Letters on a Black Background) leads to a web page that you haven't been to yet.

The Welcome Button at the top (Blue Letters on a White Background) leads to a page that you have previously visited. Because the Welcome page is the default Home Page for the website, it will almost always be in blue on white indicating that it has been visited as your first stop.

The Songs Alphabetically with the mouse pointer hovering over it (Red Letters on a White Background) is indicating the web page you will go to if you click on the button. While your mouse is hovering over the button, the small black on white text box (usually called a "tool tip," or in HTML web parlance, the "link title") will appear that tells you exactly what will happen if you click on the button.

If you hover over a button for a previously visited page, such as the Welcome Button, the color and appearance don't change, but the tool tip/link title text box will pop up to tell you where the button is linked.

Some of the graphics are also links. If you hover over them, the tool tip/link title box will pop up to tell you where clicking the graphic will take you.

Clicking my logo at the top of each page, will always take you back to the Welcome Page (the website Home Page.)

The graphic images do not change to indicate that you have visited that page or that your are hovering over the graphic. A web page isn't a graphic editor, so the colors, etc. of the graphics can't really change. What happens is that one graphic is swapped for another. This is not something that browsers do natively but requires running a background script to change the images on the fly.

It only take a few lines of code for each graphic, but - if I get tricky juggling the images one of four things will happen.

1. The graphics will colorfully swap out and you'll be impressed for about a half second.

2. Depending upon which browser you are running and how your security settings are configured, you may get a message one time saying my website wants to run a script and asking you if you want to trust the site.

3. Same criteria, but with slightly different security settings, now your browser wants you to approve a script every single time you hover over a graphic or try to click it.

4. Again depending on the settings, your browser may tell you that it won't trust any scripts and considers them all to be malicious and will not let you even click on one of my cute color changing graphics.

To make a long story short, I'm leaving out the scripts to save myself the effort and to save you the grief.

All of the static images, those without an underlying link, also have tool tips attached to them that appear when you hover over them with your mouse.

The graphics also have an ALT tag attached to them. You normally won't see these unless your browser can't locate the graphic file. Their primary purpose is for use by visually impaired people to get a verbal description of what the graphic is displaying.

Text Links can have three different appearances.

At the top, the Green color tells you that you have previously been to the Hotel California page.

In the middle, the Pink color tells you that the link will take you to the My Heart Will Go On page. The tool tip/link title text box will also appear to tell you where the link leads.

The bottom link's Blue color for What'd I Say tells you that you have not previously been to that page.

OK - so far, so good. All of this has been pretty straight-forward and you'd probably figured out most of it already.

BUT - now we get to a major source of confusion - GROUPS versus PERSONS.

In most instances when you think of "The Beatles" you assume that it is referring to a "group" of four guys from Liverpool, England that have sold more records than anyone.

But - consider "Floyd Cramer." He made a lot of records all of which have "Floyd Cramer" printed on them. Only his name is listed, but all those records had a number of other musicians playing along with "Floyd Cramer" and being part of the "Floyd Cramer Group."

He was the lead performer, but there were other people making up the "group." So - Floyd Cramer (as a group) was a group and you will find him listed in the Songs by Group section of the website.

However, "Floyd Cramer" was also the premier pianist of The Nashville A-Team and played on a lot of records for other people - other "groups." In that case, he was acting as an individual performer and you will find Floyd Cramer (as a person) listed in the Songs by Person section of the website along with all the other performers, songwriters, composers, and producers that were involved in the original recordings on my songs.

Because of this duality, it's sometimes hard to tell exactly what you are looking at on the screen - group or person? Check out the two annotated screen shots below to see the difference.

Look at the top and notice the navigation buttons all say "Group." Also note that the page starts off with a list of the songs recorded by Floyd Cramer (as a group) .

If you look at this screen shot, you will see the navigation buttons at the top say "Person." Also, instead of an immediate list of his songs, you see which other groups he was associated with. In this case, you can see that Floyd Cramer (as a person) was a performer for the "groups" Brenda Lee (as a group) , Elvis Presley (as a group) , Patsy Cline (as a group) , Roy Orbison (as a group) and of course, he played for his own group, Floyd Cramer (as a group) .

That may seem confusing, but if you watch what the screen is showing, you'll know where you are.

One other complication - "groups" sometimes are "people."

Most of the time when we speak of The Eagles (as a group) , we are talking about the "group" that has that name printed on the records. BUT - in some cases, the entire collection of guys making up The Eagles (as a group) acted together to perform some task normally done by a single person as a "person" called The Eagles (as a person) . When this happens, the "group" becomes also a "person" and is listed in the Songs by Person section of the website.

If you look at most of The Eagle's songs you will often find Bill Szymczyk listed as producer. (No - I don't know how to pronounce his last name.) However, on some songs, such as Tequila Sunrise and Love Will Keep Us Alive you'll see that The Eagles (as a person) are listed as record producers. Because they did what a single person would normally have done, The Eagles (as a person) are listed in the Songs by Person section of the website.

Again, the way to keep things straight is to pay attention to the hints on the page as shown on the Floyd Cramer graphics above.

Hopefully these navigation tips will help you get around the site. There's a lot to explore. You will find over 5,000 pages of information along with well over 100,000 internal and external links in the 1,000,000 plus lines of code making up the website. Yeah - 5,000 and 100,000 and 1,000,000. (When I get a spare moment I'll write a script to read all the pages and count everything up for exact numbers.)

If you enjoy music and are into music trivia, you'll find you can drive around for hours looking at all the interconnections between the artists and their music.

Reeves

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Last Updated: Wednesday, December 21, 2022, 1:26:55 AM CST