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February 06 Stimulate the economy, Save Social Security AND cut taxesEvery year, the government collects about 650 Billion dollars through social security taxes. Let’s stimulate the economy in 2009 by not collecting that 650 Billion dollars. Neither employee or employer should pay in 2009. In return, the retirement age permanently goes up by one year. August 14 Contractor in South Florida for innovationsMarty Wallach was the general contractor for the addition on my house. He did a excellent job and I can recommend him for additions and renovations. See his website Wallach Builders: Renovations and additions in South Florida. February 13 New web site celebrates 150 old business in COCheck out San Luis Preservation which celebrates the oldest business in the oldest town in Colorado. In 1857, Dario Gallegos, one of the original settlers in Colorado, started a mercantile business in San Luis. The store quickly became a hub of the community. Despite two devastating fires and economic hardship in Costilla County, one of the poorest counties in the state, the store has remained opened and operated by the direct descendants of Dario Gallegos for one hundred and fifty years! See this opening post about San Luis, Co. August 31 How to use Excel in two windowsAlex Scoble pointed out that Ant Drewery explains how to change the file type for Excel to automatically open in two windows. If you only do this occasionally, there's an easier way. Hold down on the CTRL key when you launch excel for a second time and it will open a second instance which gives you a second window. You can then use the open the second file from within that version of Excel or drag a file into its window. Here's a trick: If you hold down and keep holding down on the CTRL key, Excel will ask you if you want to open the second instance in safe mode, which you can decline. But if you hold on the CTRL just for maybe a second as you launch, Excel won't bother to ask about safe mode. Cool, huh? August 28 SwoogleSwoogle is an experimental search engine which indexes semantic web sites using ontology. It's been added to OpenSearch plugins. This is a very ambitious project because most websites don't have the metadata necessary to make this work. What is metadata? Consider when you're doing a local search for the closest pizza joint. If every business added the metadata of its location through geocoding, then that search would be very easy. Unfortunately few add location in the form of latitude - longitude. Location is a very simple kind of metadata but as you can imagine metadata is as complex as any form of knowledge organization. August 19 Furl ViewI recently came across Search Furl IE7 which uses a combination of public and private flagged sites to recommend websites. Very cool. August 14 Kosmix added to OpenSearchKosmix automatically categorizes websites and then produces searches organized by category. It's particularly useful for health searches. It was recently named one of Time Magazine's 50 most useful sites. I've added it to Search plugins for IE7. I did a search on tinnitus and it correctly categorized it as well as producing subcategories such as basic info, definition, causes, symptoms, treatments, and so on. Very cool. August 13 Windows Live WriterI'm using Windows Live Writer which has been released by live.com as a front-end editor for blogging. So far it has all the typical things except I was really hoping for the squiggles that appear under misspelled words like in Microsoft Word. They seem to support more than one blog and many different blog hosts, like blogger, live.com, typepad, etc. This is my first post, so I'll report back later. In the mean time, you can check out Search plugins August 11 HubpagesHubpages.com got added to OpenSearch adding plugins to IE7. Hubpages relies on users to create content and is especially flexible in allowing various feeds to appear on the pages created. You might also check out this hubpage on searching August 09 Added Topix to OpenSearchTopix.net was added to OpenSearch add searches to Internet Explorer. Topix indexes more than 50,000 news sources and you can search for articles up to a year old. You can add RSS feeds for the searches you do at Topix. Topix also indexes blogs, but is not as comprehensive as Technorati or others. August 06 Recent hub created about OpenSearchThe hub OpenSearch: add search provider plugins to IE7 and Firefox was just created. It aggragates information about OpenSearch and the plugins for IE7 and Firefox. Interesting tool. August 02 IE7 and Quicken and SchwabRecently I noticed that Quicken 2005 had not updated my Schwab account. All my other accounts were correctly being updated from the Internet. I called Tech support and they quickly told me that IE7 turned off SSL 2.0 by default (under advanced settings). After turning it back on, everything worked just as it had before. July 30 Debt clock ticking down, right?Take a look at Skeptical Optomist clock. It is going down, right? July 29 Exploding batteries in cars?See Polarman's most recent concerns with the Tesla. I wish he'd hurry up and get one so he'd quit worrying and just enjoy it. LII: Librarians' Internet Index search
July 25 Wow, Technorati!Technorati, which has many tools for tracking blogs, did a major upgrade yesterday. At first, I was horrified because I was running IE7 and the site looked like something you'd see on a cell phone. Technorati fixed it within 12 hours, and now it looks great under IE7 also. Way to go, Technorati.
In other news, Polarman wants a Telsa Roadster but is concerned about the battery life. July 23 Yahoo and multiple site searchesIn my previous two posts here and here, I discussed MSN and Google's ability to restrict your search to more than one site. I used movies as a demonstration. I wasn't able to figure out how to get yahoo to do the same thing. I did notice that Ozzie had added Yahoo Movies to OpenSearch: Add searches to IE7 and Firefox. Adding firefox search for multiple sitesIn my last post, I used MSN search to search multiple sites and then put the search into Adding Search to Firefox using OpenSearch. We'll make it a plugin. Let's see how to do the same thing using Google. Google lets you search multiple sites without having the put the parentheses.
And here's the resulting URL to add to OpenSearchList.com
Comparing Google to MSN, we see that Google does a somewhat better job. I guess what I'd like to tell the search engines is to take the top 5 from each site that I select. That'd be a cool feature.
Customizing searches to only search multiple sitesPolarman says that you can use live.com's macro capability to search multiple sites and then add that macro to IE7 using OpenSearch: adding search to IE7. Here's a different take on how to do that using search.msn.com. msn's search allows for an OR condition when search sites, so we construct the following query:
Interestingly enough, MSN tends to overemphasize IMDB and RottenTomatoes. In my next post, I'll discuss other ways to approciate this problem. July 22 Added WWWcoder to OpenSearchJust finished adding wwwcoder.com to OpenSearch: Search providers for IE7 and firefox. WWWcoder is a resource I use that covers basically all the dot net development languages and tools. Includes vb.net, c#, and so on. I'm not sure if they have any IronPython stuff. Don't ask me why they don't have a period between the www and the coder part. I guess that's to make sure you really understand that you don't need a www to make a website work. |
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