The Hawkwind Article Finder

The Hawkwind Article Finder

What’s this, you say, about an Article Finder? What is it and why do we want it?

Well, I initially put something like this together for my own benefit. You see, I’m a regular buyer of magazines and newspapers (with Hawkwind content) on E-Bay. The reason why I buy them, of course, is to put the Hawkwind-related content on this website so as to give you hours of free entertainment and save you money (as in, you don’t have to buy the item the next time it appears on E-Bay because I’ve already put the interesting stuff before you!) But there’s a problem with this, in that the content in question is very often already available on the internet, and I only find this out once I’ve bought the thing, or worse yet, once I’ve bought it *and* put the Hawkwind stuff onto Starfarer.net. It’s really annoying to do this and then discover that all I’ve done is duplicate something that was already available elsewhere.

So my solution to this problem is the Hawkwind Article Finder, which is actually nothing more than a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, to be honest. But you wouldn’t believe the hours I invested in putting it together: because what this spreadsheet does is list and link to *all* the major Hawkwind press articles that are freely available on the internet. The spreadsheet is filterable, meaning you can find what you want easily, and comprehensive: it has 316 entries and covers the content of the five main websites where you can find Hawkwind articles for free. Those five websites are Jon’s Attic, Starfarer’s Hawkwind Page (of course!), the Hawkwind Museum, Hawkfanfare (which I have sometimes referred to as “Hawkfan and More” or "Brian Tawn's Hawkfan"), and the archived Welcome To The Future; which was more or less the official site of the 90’s, and lives on only in cached form, courtesy of the Internet Wayback Machine. It was the very first Hawkwind website to carry press articles in this way, and I see, thanks to the Hawkwind Article Finder, that five of the articles it carries are not to be found anywhere else!

Why is the Hawkwind Article Finder useful to you? Well, you can of course simply use it for navigation: find the article you want (based on what you know about it) and click on the Page link for the article to go directly to it. That will work. But going back to E-Bay, I now use this spreadsheet whenever I see a newspaper or magazine listed for auction there, and I’m contemplating purchase. Most vendors will at least give the magazine title and publication date, and less often, the article title or author name. I’ve included all those headings in the spreadsheet so that you can find, for example, all the content that originally appeared in Zigzag, or everything out there that was written about Hawkwind by Nick Kent… Simply check what’s in the item description against the spreadsheet, and you can see if what’s being offered for auction is already available online…

At this point, let’s look at the headings in the spreadsheet:

Number:

Website:

Title on website:

Original title (if different, where known):

Publication:

Date:

Author:

Description:

Page:

This has no innate significance: it’s provided so you can always put the spreadsheet back into its’ original sequence by selecting Data; Sort from the menu across the top of the screen.

Identifies the website where the article is located, e.g. “Jon’s Attic”

The name used on the website to refer to the article, e.g. “Hawkwind In Coventry”

The title under which the article was originally published, e.g. “Hawkwind Survive 1976”

The name of the publication in which the article first appeared, e.g. “Zigzag”

The date of the issue in which the article first appeared; I try to be as exact as possible and in descending order of specificity, dates are given as in the examples: 1-Dec-72; Dec 1972; Winter 1972; 1972

Who wrote the article, e.g. “Kent, Nick”

What the article is, e.g. “Album Review”

A link to the article, e.g. http://www.starfarer.net/mm271171.html

The headings remain in place in the topmost row of the spreadsheet as you scroll vertically. And each individual heading (except for “Number”) has an Excel feature called AutoFilter applied to it. You will see a small icon like a downward-pointing black arrowhead to the right of the relevant heading: click once on this and it pops up a listing of every different (unique) entry found in that column. All you have to do is click on the desired entry (e.g. “Zigzag” under the Publication heading) and only the matching rows will be displayed in the spreadsheet: the rest are still there, but they’re hidden. This is called Filtering. You can tell when a filter is in use because of the reduced number of rows showing in the spreadsheet, by non-contiguous row numbers down the left-hand side of the spreadsheet, and by the fact that the selected filter icon (the downward-pointing arrowhead) has turned from black to blue.

You can also turn on more than one filter, so that it is easy to display only those rows where the Publication is “NME” and the Author is “Farren, Mick”, for example.

Left: "Publication" heading filter

To turn the filtering off, click once more on the relevant Heading’s Filter icon and select the topmost entry in the pop-up list, which is always “(All)”. Do this for every filter that had previously been applied to show all rows in the spreadsheet.

Another entry that is always found in the filter’s pop-up list is “(Custom…)”. This one is used for setting the Filter to meet simple user-defined conditions. It is particularly useful for the Date heading, since it can be set to show only those rows that related to a specific period. In the example illustrated (right), only articles that date from 1972 will be displayed once this Custom filter is applied.

I referred earlier to the fact that I’ve occasionally unwittingly duplicated what other webmasters have already provided, and where this has happened, I’ve shown it in the spreadsheet. Duplicated articles are

banded together with a colour background to the rows in question (left). The colours are not, in themselves, significant: that is, the yellow background does not mean something different than

the green background. The different colours are used only to show that two articles banded together in the same colour are in fact duplicates of each other. This feature is also what I used to check how many articles there are that are unique to the old Welcome To The Future site: to do this, I set the Website heading filter to “Welcome To The Future” and then scrolled through the list of articles, looking for rows with a white background: these, not being coloured, indicate that there are no duplicate entries on other websites.

One other useful thing you can do is apply Excel’s Data; Sort feature to put the spreadsheet rows in whatever order you find most useful. The default sequence in which the spreadsheet is supplied is chronological Date order, but some people may prefer to see everything listed in order of Publication, for example. Doing that does admittedly break up the banding of articles to indicate duplication; but the original sequence can then be reinstated by selecting the Excel Data; Sort menu option and selecting Number as the field by which to sort.

I have not used Excel’s worksheet protection feature to prevent the content from being changed, because it stops the AutoFilter feature from working. This does mean you can easily mess up your copy of the spreadsheet; but you can simply download it again from the following link to get a pristine copy, or as pristine as I can make it, anyway:

To download the spreadsheet, click here: The Hawkwind Article Finder

The content is of course accurate as of now (the end of November 2005) and I will endeavour to keep it updated as we go along, most likely by charting my own E-Bay purchases, if I can keep finding new stuff to buy…