PDF Phylosophy

Having seen that many of the PDFs that I have posted are being accessed directly from Internet users making searches without visiting the pages that I was referencing them from I decided to develop a new phylosophy with respect to them.

In some ways I feel bad that many of the PDFs were found by me doing exactly the same thing. i.e. finding a reference to something that I was interested and then downloading the PDF so that I could reference it.

The Phylosophy (failed)

The phylosophy here is that having found the PDF on my website an Internet user would be curious to see what else is to be found on my website. Well this doesn't happen even if this is what I do myself.

The positive side is that I get an indication of what visitors are interested in on my website. Seeing an entry in my logs I can see that the visitor had not ventured any further on the site.

PDF Shim

My first approach was to create this shim that forced the visitor to respond to a dialog before loading the PDF. This did not work, as did the other shims that I have removed. In fact the shim was just a disincentive in looking at other pages.

My other reason for developing the PDFShim was to protect articles that I have scanned and have uploaded so that I can reference them to support my research. This is fundamentally diffrent to articles that I have in fact approriated for my own use.