Advice needed for data sorting and filtering

[Qyzbud]

Hi everyone, I'm new to the forums here, and I've come to ask for a bit of help. My apologies if this has been covered here before, I had a look around to check, but I wasn't really sure what keywords to search for, so I may have missed a thread. Anyhow, this is what I'm needing advice with:

I am working on a fan site for the Donkey Kong Country TV show, and am creating a pictorial list of items, events and places which appear in the show. I have the visual layout complete, and am happy with it for now. Here is a pic which links to it:


This 'encyclopedia' project of mine is basically a series of entries which each have a name, image, description, category and which episode they are from. What I'm hoping to do is have links/buttons available to allow users to sort these entries based on their various properties (by name, alphabetically, by order of appearance in the show, etc), and also to show only ones with certain properties (such as only showing items of a certain type, from a certain episode, etc). Download.com features pretty much exactly the sorting and filtering functions I'm looking for. Example image/link:


Is there a good way for me to implement this functionality? Currently I'm just handcrafting this page in Notepad/HTML. Do I need to set up a server-side database system, or is there software available for me to enter the data into which will pre-sort and/or pre-filter it, and export formatted HTML pages for me to then create links for and upload?

Any advise is very much appreciated, and I hope I made sense...
-Karri

Edit: After some exhaustive trawling through Google, I turned up a technique which maybe a good solution for my needs. Tabular Data Control (TDC) appears to do just what I was hoping for. If anyone is interested, this is where I found a very helpful tutorial on TDC - http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/tdc.shtml

Hopefully this will work well, but if anyone has a better/alternative suggestion, I'm all ears! Thanks.

[major]

Hi this method, is only for Windows Explorer, you may not be able to view your site in netscape or firefox, without a plung-in. I remeber when I first started out web developing I use to use flat flies like you are a lot, but discovered that they dont work in other browsers, this was a few years back though so, browsers may be able to use the TDC. Try it out and see if it works.

The other alternative is to use a database such as ms access or mysql...etc, but then you will need to learn server side scripting language such as php or asp, thats if you dont already know. Also you need to know if your hosting company supports databases and scripting languages like php or asp.

If you ur account doesnt have databases or php,asp and you dont know any of the scropting languages, then you might as well use the TDC, but be carefull as sometimes it tends to mess up a little which requires u to edit the txt file to set things correct. Hope that helps

[Qyzbud]

Thanks for the tips and advice- I appreciate your help! Currently it seems that I'll have to stick with TDC and JavaScript, and it's actually working quite well for me, but it's taking quite a bit of time and thought (and patience) to set up. Ah well, at least I enjoy seeing results after hard work!

Many thanks for your help,
-Karri