For enjoyable user experience and functional organization, it is very important to have an easy to follow navigation tool on visited websites. My favorite tool is the graphically static table of contents. There are many ways to build such TOC, but it is easy to end up with a lot of redundant code or unnecessary limitations.
I figured that the best way to build the TOC would be to build it recursively from a database.
So I spent 2/3 days writing pieces of code on the bus while going back and forth to college and here it is.
As an open-source fan, the project is, of course, copyrighted by me and distributed under the GPL license.
- rectoc v1.4 - August 29, 2006
- Major rewrite of some parts, lots of bugfixes, many new features and performance improvements. After one whole year this codebase has proven stable and is ready to be published. Still I'm ashamed that no backoffice is written yet... Perhaps some Ruby on Rails solution could eventually cover that hole.
- rectoc v1.3 - August 20, 2005
- Small cleanups. New database entries (toc_name,title) for improved website integration and management flexibility.
- rectoc v1.2 - January 14, 2005
- Every table entry can be disabled from the database. This prevents new links from showing even if present in the database but not linked; Some more website integration functions added.
- rectoc v1.1
- Website integration functions added, minor bugfixes since v1.0. It is now possible to access TOC links from the website. The purpose of this was to keep the links controlled by the database: description, location and enabled/disabled links will be extracted from the database from an identifier.
- rectoc v1.0
- first working version. basic functions only. no website interaction besides TOC construction.
