sábado, janeiro 01, 2005

Searching - BOLLOCKS!

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A few notes on Searching:

NONE OF IT ACTUALLY WORKS. This is the important thing to remember. If you thought that a blog might be a good place to simply remember things - forget it, because unless you know where you put something you won't be able to find it.

The Blogger 'Search this Blog' feature simply does not work at all. I was on to their 'Help' service about it and got nothing but runaround. If you go to Google itself and search within the blog URL it is about as good as Technorati, but the Technorati interface with the button in the sidebar is a little easier to use.

The Technorati 'Search this Blog' feature sometimes works, but does not always find everything and does not search Comments. The Technorti servers are most often bogged so performance is a problem; and when things break (most of the time) there is no clear indication - so you are left just not knowing. As well, there is no way to control the size or whitespace around the Search button, and the thing opens in the same window. All in all - not that great, but slightly better than Blogger.

CTRL F ('Find') works but only for the contents of the currently visible page.

I have not (yet) found a way to invoke the CTRL F search from a button.


Silly isn't it - all this nonsense about Google growing like topsy because of a 'superior' searching capability and in the end it is a bollocks.

The SEARCH THIS BLOG link on the sidebar is Google - the best of a bad lot.

For the future: having learned the hard way that none of it works there are some techniques I wish I had been more careful with:
    - be careful and include everything in Tags
    - copy the Tags into the Table of Posts
    - somehow figgure out how to get CTRL F on a button

Tags: , , , , .

Pictures

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In the end ... a waste of time. I made a script which nicely formatted images in a new window which just fit them ... Google stopped supporting it so now it is just use "TARGET="_blank" which is shitty but all there is - one more reason to give up this stupid pastime, no quality in it.

A few notes on Pictures:
If you put your cursor over the images you should see a message telling you to "Click to Enlarge ... etc.", and if you do that, click on it, then it will pop-up enlarged.

When it comes up if you wave your cursor around over it (sometimes you have to cross over the edge of the pop-up to make it engage) you should see a little hover menu which includes an icon (the first on the left) which will let you save a copy.

If you put your cursor over the images (the small one in the blog) and right click you should see a menu which includes "Save Target As ...", select that menu item and save it where you will.

Sometimes I forget but I try to attach the source of pictures that I post embedded as Properties. Also sometimes a description. If you download a picture and want to know where it came from, right-click on it wherever you have saved it and select Properties from the drop-down menu.

Bloggerbot, R.I.P.:
So, there was Bloggerbot, not a great program, wedged into Hello by Picasa which has one of the least intuitive interfaces ... but at least you could (by dint of uploading again-and-again) eventually get thumbnails which more-or-less fit with some concept of how you wanted the page to actually look. So they take it away in favour of the Blogger native upload interface - no sizing worth speaking of, and hit-or-miss performance, no guarantees, no subtleties, no finesse. Young people today do NOT know how to build software.

Archive Blog

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A few notes on the necessity of Archives:

two things (in addition to the useless Search capabilities) bother my anal-retentive soul:
1. you put a link to a page and the next thing you know it is gone!
2. preppy wankers running sites like The Globe and Mail, The (Newfoundland) Independent, and a host of others, make you pay to read their advertisements

so

I created another blog and I Cut&Paste most of the pages I link to (Annex).

When you see a link looking like '(Archive)' or 'Archive'; this is what it means, generally the access time to the Archive is faster too since both blogs are on the same servers

be well.