About the Group B Strep Association Website

Search the Site Copyrights & Other Legalese

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There are several ways to navigate this site.

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At the top and bottom of each page are three buttons that will move you between the site's major content areas.

Take a tour of the entire site by successively clicking the "next" buttons ().

You may go back one page by clicking the "previous" () button.

You can quickly jump to the top or bottom of a given page by clicking on the up () or down () arrow buttons. Similarly, many longer pages are divided with section headers that often have a "" button which will take you to the top of the current page as well.

At the bottom of every page is a standard "footer". It contains the following sections:
..." Site Navigation"...

In addition to the next/prev buttons, there is a popup menu with all of the content areas (indicated in capital letters) and their subtopics. Select the desired one and click the go to button ().

..."Change Notifier"...

One of the problems with wonderful, extensive sites is that once one has spent a couple of hours exploring it's nooks and crannies the first time, one doesn't want to go through that many hour long process the next time. We offer three methods to help return visitors find just the "new" information:

1. You may register any given page with the URL-minder, a free service that keeps track of Web pages and other resources on the World Wide Web, and sends you e-mail whenever your personally registered resources change.

2. The "What's New" page lists site changes in reverse chronological order. Bookmark it and easily see what's changed.

3. The date that the page was last modified is automatically appended to the bottom of every page.You can tell at a glance when something is different.

..."Rate-A-Page"...

We want to make you happy! Help us meet your needs by letting us know which parts of the site are of more or less value to you. Help shape its future as we continually revise and enhance it. Rate the relevance of each page's content and subject by selecting the appropriate radio buttons and clicking on the check (). Also, you can see how other's have rated our pages.

..."Misc. Helpful Additions"...

Do you ever save pages (to your hard disk) for later? Don't you hate it when you go back to it weeks later, check it out, find something interesting, want to learn more, but can't because you don't know the original URL? Well we do. That's why we put each pages URL at its bottom so you can see it, whether you saved the page as text or as source. We include it in the source code as well. Lastly, we include a hit counter to track a page's popularity.

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Dynamic, Database Driven Content

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If you're unsure of the exact information you desire or if you just want to explore, simply click the "Find" button () and you'll get the first ten records. We provide simple and "full blown" searches in each case. You're free to pick with which method you're most comfortable and/or suits your particular needs.
If you're on a fast or slow internet connection, you may want more or fewer records returned than the default 10. No problem, you can specify how many records you would like to see at a time. "Prev" and "Next" buttons are shown if there are more items that matching your criteria than were specified.

If you wish to narrow your search, you may choose values from the popups and/or enter specific words into the text boxes. Your chosen values must all be present in a given item for it to be returned. However, you may enter multiple keywords in any given field and items matching any one or more of the keywords will be returned. Blank or un-chosen entries are ignored.

In most cases, you will be able to choose how you would like the information you are entering to be compared to the database information. In these cases, you may choose the desired "operator" from the popup. If you are unsure, use the default; it will usually return what you want. If you would like to narrow your searches try the following. Given the operator in the left column below, a record will be returned if the field matches the description in the right column...

	is null	empty
	is not null	not empty
	=	equal
	!=	not equal
	>	greater than
	<	less than
	>=	greater than or equal
	<=	less than or equal

The last three comparison operators apply only to text fields. In this website, the default is "begins with" which performs a wildcard search to find all words that start with the specified string(s). For example, specifying "info" would find all the following words: "info", "inform", "information", "informal", "informed", "informative", etc.

"Contains" can be helpful in some situations but if used improperly can return too many records. These searches find every word that "contains" the specified string, anywhere in the word. Thus, on a search for "RNA", the word "RNA" would be returned, but so would the word "journal", "barnacle", "alternate", "furnace", "béarnaise", etc.. Note: in some databases, notably SQL databases (ie, not Filemaker), "contains" can be slower than other methods for the indexing method is inefficient.

"Ends with" is rarely used. However, if you need it, it does the opposite of "begins with" - it finds all words that end with the specified string.

Lastly, don't include "http://" when adding or searching for records When doing a "contains" search on URL fields,the database engine treats "/" as a word delimiter, which can result in returning many more records than one desires. For instance, searching for "http://www.something.com" returns everything with "http:". To help get around this quirk, we store URL's without the "http://" but append it upon returning the links in search lists. An alternative is to do an "equals" search whose criteria begins with a wildcard (eg, "*p://www.something.com", where * indicates zero or more characters). This will force an exact match search and return only those records matching the URL exactly.