Wjhonson's Knols with Pageviews and Running Total

A table with rearrangeable rows and automatic ranking

I got really tired with re-arranging the rows of my table on my last "My Knols" knol, in order to keep them in ranked order. And also when I did that, I had to manually rerank the entries. So now I'm trying a new way of displaying my knol list, where I don't have to use the HTML window at all to rearrange the rows of my "table". And this new way automagically re-ranks the rows when I move them!

Authors

Will Johnson

This article should be cited as:

"Wjhonson's Knols with Rank, Pageviews and Running Total", by Will Johnson wjhonson@aol.com
URL: http://knol.google.com/k/will-johnson/wjhonsons-knols-with-pageviews-and/4hmquk6fx4gu/276
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

This article serves as both an example and a product of a method I designed of creating ranked table entries with a simple way to re-arrange the row elements as you choose. Not only can the rows be re-arranged easily, but the table, retains the automagic re-ranking of the entries without any extra effort. Feel free to copy this knol as a template for your own row-re-arrangeable table. If you're just looking for the latest list of my knols, see The Knols of Will Johnson, Sorted by Pageviews and
See Also: Wjhonson's Fifty Most Recent Knols

The Problem

I had written a few knols which were simply a table of all of my knols, in pageview order, with rankings. On one of these knols called "Wjhonson's Pageviews This Week", I had a running total, on the other knol called "The Knols of Wjhonson", I had columns showing what the pageviews had been at some earlier time. When I wanted to update these knols, I would often find that some page had gotten many more pageviews than it's upper neighbor and so had to move up the table, in order to maintain the table in ranked-order. In a Knol table, there is a simple method to delete a row, but there is no simple method to move a row. I quickly figured out that there is a slightly more involved way to move a row. While in editing mode, you click on the HTML icon above and wait for the new window to open. Then you do a "find" for the text you want to move, and you will see it surrounded by the <tr> </tr> tags. If you select everything from <tr> to its companion trailing </tr> tag and then cut that text, you can then move to the part of the table where you want to insert it (in HTML mode) and then paste it there. Then click the Update button and the HTML window will disappear and your table will now have the row in the place where you had wanted it to appear.

That works great except when you want to go back and forth between updating the table in WYSIWYG mode and moving rows in HTML mode. For small tables you don't notice any issue, but for table of fifty rows or more, there is quite a noticeable lag to open the HTML window. Doing this 20 or more times in a single session is really irksome. So I sought a better solution.

The Solution

I started with the idea that if you didn't use a table at all, you could simply re-arrange the lines of your text and there wouldn't be a problem. And then using the # directive you could make them re-rank themselves just by re-arranging them. Bam! But wait. What if you put each # line into it's own table? Would that work? It turns out that it does work. If you re-arrange them, they will re-rank automatically. But attempting to actually re-arrange them was still problematic. They didn't seem to want to recognize that they were all siblings, and tried to become child or parent entries of each other. After much testing I finally was able to figure out that if I broke the tables with something like a "-----" line, and then just selected from the end of one such line, to the beginning of the next such line and then cut, that I could move the row, paste it, and everything would re-rank correctly. That then explains why you see the "Table" below in the way you do. Because the entries are row-re-arrangeable and exhibit automatic re-ranking, without the need to use HTML editing.