At the beginning of last week we announced the URL for the FlyBase
home page on the World Wide Web. The purpose of this followup
announcement is to provide others maintaining their own WWW pages with
two additional URL's that help them set up hyperlinks to FlyBase.
As previously announced, the main URL for the FlyBase home page is
http://morgan.harvard.edu/
There are two additional kinds of URLs already in place that WWW
page maintainers may find useful to link to. If you would like assistance
in setting up links to these sorts of URL's for FlyBase, please email us
at flybase-help at morgan.harvard.edu. If you would like to use types of
links not described here, send us email; there are many other sorts of
public links we could provide if there are database and WWW page maintainers
who would make use of them.
The first URL is a link to the script that returns fully hyperlinked
FlyBase gene reports:
http://morgan.harvard.edu/htbin-post/gene.script?
You can link to this script with either a correctly capitalized FlyBase
gene symbol or FBgn number (FlyBase gene number) for that gene. For
example the Drosophila gene that currently has the symbol Adf1 has been
assigned the permanent FlyBase gene number FBgn0000054, so you can link
to it using the URL:
http://morgan.harvard.edu/htbin-post/gene.script?FBgn0000054
We do not encourage you to use the gene symbol to link to the gene,
since gene symbols are subject to change for a variety of reasons, such
as when two or more groups of alleles are discovered to be alleles of one
and the same gene.
You can see examples of such interdatabase links using FlyBase gene
numbers in action by selecting a Drosphila SWISS-PROT entry on the ExPASy
Molecular Biology Server at URL
http://expasy.hcuge.ch/
The second FlyBase link of interest is the URL for the gopher+
capable relay to the top of the FlyBase gopher server:
http://morgan.harvard.edu/htbin-post/flybase?top/
If you wish, you can link to one of the top-level FlyBase
gopher directories by naming it. To get to the stocks directory, use
http://morgan.harvard.edu/htbin-post/flybase?top?stocks
You can even name locations in deeper directories, such as
http://morgan.harvard.edu/htbin-post/flybase?top?stocks/stock-centers/bloomington
but we recommend against this practice, since it is not unusual for
details of the directory names and organization to change from time
to time.
Finally, it should be mentioned for anyone putting FlyBase URLs in
their hotlists or setting up FlyBase WWW links that you should not rely
on the more detailed URLs continuing to work. The simple forms
recommended here will be supported, but we can make no promises that URLs
that list several directory levels will be.
Please let us know if you link to any of the FlyBase URLs and
send reports of any problems you encounter in doing so to
flybase-help at morgan.harvard.edu
