Browsers

Your browser is the program you use to view web pages, probably Google Chrome ®, Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox ®. You can have more than one browser installed. If you do, you will be asked to pick one as your default (primary) browser.

For those who use more than one browser:

We suggest that you use your primary browser when you register online and for visits to the websites where you have registered and subscribed, say for reading the Plain Dealer, for banking and shopping, and for searching digital archives.

Often your registration information, say for your rights to use a digital archive, and the "scrapbook" of archived articles you've saved (or to be more precise, the addresses of the articles in your scrapbook) are stored on your hard drive in "cookies" (text files) and are browser-specific. (Each browser has its own cookies.) An example: Firefox is my primary browser. When I use it on this website I can view the CJN articles easily using the links on these web pages. But if I use Internet Explorer or Google Chrome, view those same pages on this website and click on those same links to stories in the CJN archive, the CJN archive will regard me as a non-subscriber. It will display only the first few lines of the story, followed by an invitation to subscribe.

Searching

We hope to add a website search to our new Home page. Until then, here's a simple alternative. Search for the name you want, plus cleveland. Our pages with your search term will likely appear on the first page of results.

Here's an example of a search for our pages that mention Jacob Mandelbaum, who in 1887 bought the land that would become Mayfield Cemetery. We show the first page of results for a Google search for "jacob mandelbaum" cleveland Note that the name was enclosed in quotes.

Linking

Linking to other web pages, on our site or other sites, is one of the unique advantages of presenting information on the internet. We strongly advocate hyperlinked history because it lets readers learn more with one click. Our pages link extensively.

We show links as underlined text. On some pages the underline is always visible; most pages will show an underline only when your cursor is on the link. We never underline text except to show a link.

Our links are active: clicking on them takes you to another page or, in a few cases, to another place on the same page. Example: top of page.

There are two types of links and our custom is to use them differently.

• Internal links (links to pages on this website)
  The new page takes the place of the page you had been viewing. To return to where you were, click on the "back" icon or link on your browser or press the 'back' key.
   

• External links (links to pages on other websites)
  The new page will open in a new window of your browser. That will let you move around the other site freely. Remember: you are now viewing pages on another website. Address any comments to the webmaster of the other site, not to us, unless you believe our link is inappropriate. To return to our page, close this new window by clicking on the in the upper right corner of your screen.

Broken links

Links sometimes go bad, especially links to other websites. Websites go offline or change their design or the target page is deleted. Then instead of a web page display you see an error, often a "404 page not found" message.  If the broken link was on one of our pages, please contact us telling which of our pages had the bad link and which link it was.

Digital Archives

Searchable databases are among the internet's most useful websites, but they are costly to build and maintain. Newspaper archives can be especially complex. As an example, the CJN Digital Archive holds about a half-million articles, lets you read old issues, go from the start of a story to its end on another page, and allows wild card searches (rosen* will find any word starting with "rosen"), proximity searches (word1 within N words of word2), and searching within a range of dates.

Newspapers, hoping to recover these archive costs in a time of declining revenues for print publications, have been requiring paid subscriptions or allowing free searching, but charging as much as $4.00 per page to view and print what you find.

Here are some examples:

• The Cleveland Jewish News Digital Archive is now behind their "pay wall". Unless you are a subscriber registered on the computer you are using you will see only the first few lines of the desired item which will show above an invitation to subscribe. Access is inexpensive (only $10 a year for a print subscriber) and highly recommended. Learn more on our page on this resource.  

• Links to stories in the Cleveland Plain Dealer archives display stories, with no registration required and no fee.

• The New York Times, which once allowed free access, has tried to monetize it in recent years. You may be limited to ten free articles a month. To read their very complex policies and prices, click here.

• The American Israelite, America's oldest Jewish publication, charges $9.95 for one month access to its searchable archive, or $74.95 for a year.

Our adjustment to the growing practice of charging for using newspaper archives has been to capture and display images of important articles. This is legal (see our Fair Use statement} if done with restraint by a nonprofit site like ours.

Reading large .pdf documents

Serious readers of large .pdf documents will want advanced features such as going directly to a page using its page number, text search, and copying text from the document to paste into another application.  If your browser's built-in .pdf reader lacks such features or is hard to use, consider using another browser for that purpose. Or download the document using the "save" option instead of "display". Then open the pdf reader of your choice and open the document which will generally be the newest file in your Downloads folder.

Recent versions of Microsoft Word® and WordPerfect® will open .pdf documents and can also save them as word processing, rich text and text only documents. Adobe Systems Acrobat software is the most versatile choice for working with .pdf documents, but very costly. There are many other lower cost applications that edit, create and convert .pdf documents that are very useful. Here too be very wary of software downloads. What you may regard as trustworthy sites might host downloads that include malicious payloads.

One caution: while .pdf documents created from directly from word processing files will generally be searchable and convertible into text, .pdf documents created by scanning hard copy documents, especially older scans, may behave like images. You can view them and print them - but don't try to search them or convert them. How to tell? If clicking in a page turns it blue, then it's an image. No searching possible. Or if CTRL + f (the find function) works enter a common word. If it displays "not found", sorry. It's an image.

Files in Portable Document Format (or .pdf files) are widely used for newsletters, organizational reports, and more. This site currently has 55 of them.

Adobe Systems offers its ADOBE READER® application at no cost, but be careful when downloading it. Many download sites have names that look official, but are not. Their downloads may include malware or adware. After you download the software and install it you may find that ads display or that your browser has been hijacked - your home page is now a strange website and you can't change it back to what you used before.

My suggestion is to download only well known programs and only from the software manufacturer's website, from your local computer or office supply store, or from a reliable online source such as Amazon.com.

as of 10/21/14   More to come ....    Arnold Berger  webkeeper