Articles and Features

New Feature: Quotations by Author

by Michael Moncur, December 10, 2000

We are proud to announce the new "Author Index" option on the navigation bar. This links to our new Quotations by Author page, an index of over 1600 authors. You can browse the index alphabetically or sequentially, and you can click an author's name in the index to display quotations by that author.

The index covers all of the quotations in our collections (Michael Moncur's collection, Motivational Quotes, and Classic Quotes). For the first time, you can now browse through every single quotation in these collections if you wish. You may also find the index more useful than the search page in some cases.

Within each author's page, the quotations are displayed ordered by source (which is particularly noticeable on authors like Shakespeare) and then in alphabetical order. Ten quotations are displayed at a time, and you can browse through the pages by using the Previous Page and Next Page links.

Another benefit of the new author index is that on the Search page, you can click on authors' names to display more quotations by that author. (Only authors who have at least two quotations listed are linked.) This feature has also been extended to the QOTD and MQOTD pages.

Here are a few more highlights of the new features:

  • The Quotations by Author page keeps all of its status information in the URL, which means that you can bookmark (or link to) your favorite author's page.
  • The index lists birth and death dates for authors, where available.
  • Authors listed in bold have two or more quotations.
  • From an author's page, you can use the links at the bottom to go to the previous or next author in alphabetical order.

Since this is a new feature and will be further improved in the future, please keep a few things in mind:

  • Only authors who appear in our collections (Michael Moncur's Cynical Quotes, Laura Moncur's Motivational Quotes, and Classic Quotes) are indexed for now, and only quotations from these collections are displayed. The other collections will be included soon. In the meantime, use the Search page to find more quotations.
  • We have tried to remove duplicate quotations, but some remain, particularly when two collections list a quotation with slightly different wording. We are working to correct these.
  • The "Number of Quotations" count on the author index page is approximate, and may be slightly inaccurate.
  • Quotations in search results may not always be linked, particularly when the results are from collections other than our own. (This is usually because the author's name is listed differently.)
  • Please keep in mind that the author's pages are not meant to be a definitive list of quotations for each author - they are just a list of the ones we have. If you want to complain that your favorite author is poorly represented, why not Contribute some quotations instead? (Contributed quotations will soon be added to authors' pages.)
  • Some typographical errors that were hard to notice before are now glaringly obvious. I've already corrected several. If you spot an error, please post in the Quotation Corrections Forum or Send us email.

We will be doing much more with this feature in the future, beginning with biographical information and links for authors on their individual pages. Stay tuned!

Once again, I'd like to thank everyone who has sent comments about the new features. If you have comments, please use the Forum - which isn't getting much traffic yet - or for more private comments, Send us email.

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