(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

how much longer will it be before the search link at the forum front page is changed to point to the advanced google search link above? it is obviously useless as it is so why hasn't it been changed?

aarf wrote:how much longer will it be before the search link at the forum front page is changed to point to the advanced google search link above? it is obviously useless as it is so why hasn't it been changed?

I agree. Why not both of these:

http://wellminded.com/puppy/pupsearch.html

and

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=0010833906 ... aptrn9hwag

Rgds Mike

how much longer will it be before the search link at the forum front page is changed to point to the advanced google search link above? it is obviously useless as it is so why hasn't it been changed?

It isn't useless. Both it and the google search have their place. Sometimes I need the special options on the forum search page, such as searching in a particular section of the forum, or for an author...

I concur with disciple
Very often, I find, people don't understand the search process

This may help, & maybe some modifications to our forum's search database are possible?

http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/01 ... rk-part-i/

http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/01 ... k-part-ii/


Pizzasgood, maybe, can you do this mod? Is it worth it?

Aitch

I should perhaps clarify that normally I already know what I am looking for - it is probably a little less helpful to the average newbie

My personal favorite search engine, that I've used for years (and it fits well with this linux distro!) is Dogpile. It searches Yahoo, Google, MSN and a few others and tells you from which search engine(s) a particular result was found.

I guess it depends what you're searching for, but I've done o.k. with the forum search using the search button on here -- I usually enter a 2 or 3 word term and select 'search for all terms'.

For general internet searching -- I think google tends to lean toward being good at giving higher ranking for very recently updated pages; but for things I research /search for, I seem to get higher quality results from Yahoo. Using dogpile, I get the best of both worlds!

I've just spotted this very helpful thread and have immediately installed the Firefox Wellminded search function.

I note that the Search Icon is the same as Google's search Icon. How can I change this to something more obvious, such as the Puppy Linux Dog?

Perhaps, the Wellminded people might put this in as a future option.
Thanks.

When I originally made the plugin, it did have the Puppy icon. It must have gotten lost when they put the plugin on the wellminded page (I didn't make the wellminded page, I just made a search plugin to use it)

The original is over here:
http://www.browserloadofcoolness.com/so ... earch.html

The actual file is this:
http://www.browserloadofcoolness.com/so ... search.xml
The bit in between the image tags is where the actual image is defined.


Looking at the version in use at wellminded, it seems that maybe they made their own version of it:
http://wellminded.com/puppy/search-puppy.xml

Thank you very much.

...... after I PM'd peppyy - wellminded's creator....

BadCam wrote:Thanks. I have a feeling that he's already responded. Cool I have a nice new doggy icon in my search bar now. Sweet. Thanks again.

Maybe peppyy will post how to do it, if there's a need?

Aitch

For the benefit of Chinese Puppy users, following Alexa stat results

http://www.baidu.com/

Aitch

Have you tried the custom google search on the puppy web desktop?

You can search the forum only (murga-linux.com) or all puppylinux.* websites (including .com .org .ca .asia and anything else that comes around that starts with puppylinux)

The forum search yields the same results as the wellminded search.

The second one (.*) will turn up lots of pets on .ca and .asia and useful info from the various faqs, wikis & blogs on .com or .org

See my signature for the link

Thanks Techno

I have posted a link in a post of Eric's

Also new

puppyite wrote:Protect your privacy, use Scroogle.org and get the same results as Go0g!e.
Ixquick is a Metasearch that respects your privacy too

thanks puppyite, borrowed from your sig

http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm

http://www.ixquick.com/


Aitch

Many, many thanks to Pizzasgood and most especially peppyy (and all his other aliases) for the Puppy Google Search plugin.

I too get frustrated with the default search engine - though I find it extremely useful (by default) for catching up with the current moving and shaking in the puppy community. I wonder whether the google search link be also included so that the current (default) and detailed (google) be made available to all casual or output-focused users?

Organisation of search results is the other bone of contention. I've frequently spent hours looking for "stuff" and then have to do it all over again weeks later to find that certain diamond of data in the rough. Currently researching the use/possibility of Puppy in low-ram Toshiba laptops - but I would hate for all my tedious crawling to go to waste so I'm aiming to build and post a summary report for fellow and future newbies - also in some way to support those allied interests of Aitch and Colonel Schell in other threads.
To do this I'm using Zotero, an invaluable add-on for Firefox 2+ (alas not Seamonkey or Firepup EDIT: see below ) and creating bibliographical items from each thread of importance (and their cross-references). I cut'n'paste the data 'diamonds' into zotero notes for quick retrieval - but all of the pages, notes etc are re-searchable on- or off-line, for when developing the summary report. The posted report/skeleton search will then be added to and ammended by the suggestions of the puppy community, but hopefully it might serve as a "go to"point for other researchers that might otherwise be lost in the realms of puppy wisdom...I've compiled about 70+ useful threads on low-ram computers - time I re-surfaced into the real world...

Cheers!

(...maybe it might show a new form of self-organization for help research in the puppy forums, via volunteered contributions from newbies or teams of regulars. We could call it "Bitzer".... aaargh real world beckons)


EDIT: I successfully loaded Zotero in Pulp0.03's Firepup (Bon Echo, Firefox 2.0.0.20 base) from the add-on site. I wasn't able to get it working in Firepup previously in other puplets but now we're cooking.

The best forum search I find, is the 6 or 7 search engines I made and installed in 4.2 Seamonkey with monkey menus and 2.14x Firefox, It does way better results than the forums default search, plus There are others I made like Barry's blog, sourceforge, freshmeat, gnome etc.
ttuuxxx

zotero firefox plugin here

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3504

I also found this, while looking .....

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10187

Easily navigate through Google search results using a fast, simple and useful Tag-Cloud technique. Use our Topic-Mapping-Technologies for quick access to answers, news, videos, blogs, Wikipedia and more. Install now and boost your search.

thanks Puppyt

Aitch

added, so it doesn't get lost!

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 068#259068

How to give effective problem reports

Something far too few people search for, IMHO

Aitch

My apologies if I've failed to find a previously published answer . I admit I've only read the first post of this thread carefully, and skimmed through the rest.

Am hoping there's a simple explanation of the structure of one of the three pre-set searches, the "view unanswered posts" search.

What frustrates me is this.

When I run this search, the first page (page 1 of 230) shows posts from the current date (Nov.6, 2009), yet when I click on the last page (230), it also shows posts from today's date.


And then, when I open the second last page (#229 today), I'm looking at posts for 2005!

Page #1 had 7 posts dated today, page #230 had 9, and all the posts on page 229 were dated 2005...


On third glance, I see that the poster's name in the "last post" column is given as "guest" in all of the posts on the last page.

My first thought was that these were posts by unfortunates who had been banned and converted into "guests", and the database somehow kept their orphaned posts perpetually current. But I see that all but two have an active username in the "author' column.

The other interesting thing is that all nine of these "guest" posts have the same posting time (on the search page), and that this time is always the current time on my system (ie. the last time I looked, it was 11:42 for all the posts).

When I viewed the posts, all displayed time stamps from months or years back (the oldest is from December 2007), except for the one at the bottom of the page ("Puppy Linux in Linux Format"), for which I got a "no posts match your search criteria".

I ran a little experiment with this last post by replying to it. Will see whether it now disappears from the last page of the search...Yep, it's gone!

OOPS! Not so fast. It's gone from the bottom of the last page, but reappears on page one now, with legendofthorn as the author "0 replies" and otropogo as the last poster... The original post is still nowhere to be found. Have asked the author about it via PM.

More weirdness...

After posting this message, I ran the "view unanswered posts" search again to see where my new post would land - and I couldn't see it on either the first, 230th, or 229th (after reloading the pages).

Why not? It got posted, as it's listed in the correct thread, I was able to access it via that route, and it hasn't had any replies...

Explanation(s) please...

Some of the guest people probably were really guests. We used to allow guest posting back when the forum was new, before spam started getting bad.

As for the temporal anomalies, I'm not sure what's going on there. The posts themselves seem to know when they were made. Maybe threads have their own "last reply" timestamp rather than relying on whatever is in the last post in the thread, and maybe it got borked on those ones. I don't know.

As for the one you replied to, it sounds like maybe the post had been deleted but not all the entries in the database were adjusted correctly, so that when you replied, your post became the first post in the thread. And apparently the threads have their own entry for who is the original poster, which did not get updated when you replied (which it shouldn't, since a reply is by definition not the first post.... except when things are screwy).

Maybe these things are a result of the forum crashing in the middle of those people's posts being processed or something.

Pizzasgood wrote:Some of the guest people probably were really guests. We used to allow guest posting back when the forum was new, before spam started getting bad.

Only three of the nine authors are shown as "guest" in the actual post. And of those three, only one., whose post is dated May 8, 2005, would meet the date criteria. The other two posts are date stamped Jully and October, 2009. The rest are all registered users with active accounts.

....

Maybe these things are a result of the forum crashing in the middle of those people's posts being processed or something.

Yes, there's chronological cluster of five posts beginning at 22:42 on March 16, 2008, and ending at 01:41 March 17 which suggests an extended forum malfunction.

What concerns me more than the above glitches though, is why my original post above didn't appear in the list after I submitted it..


Is there a set delay after posting before a post is flagged "unanswered" ?

If so, what is it.?