Search is still not the robust feature we all wish for on DK4. As noted in the last FAQ Forum, it wasn't quite ready when the software was released, and there are still issues with it.
In backwards fashion, we started with the Advanced Search capability for the Search Diaries and Search Comments pages.
Tonight, while the forum is happy to try to answer your questions about anything and everything, including regular and advanced searching, I thought it was time to go through all five searches as they exist today. And point you to the many excellent comments that were made on this site in the past 24 hours.
When you click on the orange Go box at the right side of the menu under the masthead, you get taken to the Search page on Daily Kos. If you also added a search string, it will be populated in the "Where" section textbox, though you can always change this once you get there.
You start on the "Search Diaries" page. There are four other search pages, accessible by clicking on one of the links under the "Search Daily Kos" header: Comments, Users, Groups, and Tags. Each of these pages has a number of sections that you can fill in to specify different facets of your search, though you only need to fill in one (or sometimes two) fields in order for search to work.
The original plan for tonight's diary was to examine at all five pages, and each section in those five, to look at each section and what data it accepts. As usual, I was wildly overambitious: I have my hands full just doing Search Diaries. Nevertheless, the information will probably prove useful when you go to other pages, and I'll cover them in detail at some point in the future.
Search Diaries
This has five sections:
• SEARCH
• WHERE
• BY AUTHOR(S)
• BY TAG(S)
• PUBLISHED BETWEEN
SEARCH: this is a simple pulldown menu that offers All Diaries as a default, and affects every search. This is exactly what it says: it will search all diaries for you to find matches to whatever else you specify. You can choose a smaller group of diaries from one of the other three choices:
- Frontpaged diaries: all the diaries that have ever been on the Daily Kos front page. Technically, it's all the diaries that are in the Daily Kos group, aka main.
- Recommended Diaries: currently not functional. This ought to, by rights, return all the Recommended diaries there have ever been, but I have my doubts that it can do that, since the tag record is far from complete. Once they hook this up, and I see how it functions, I can give an educated guess on how it works.
- Rescued Diaries: this doesn't list all the Rescued diaries based on the tag that was in use since 2006, but only lists diaries that have been placed in the Community Spotlight since DK4 was introduced by the Rescue Rangers. For some reason, it doesn't seem to be working today with an end date of today's date (3/31/2011) or the default "now": it returns data through the end of February only. A workaround: use any end date before today, and you can see March diaries up through the specified end date.
WHERE: this combines a pulldown and a text buffer, and lets the user search on a text string in a diary title or the text of a diary, or do an advanced search. The default is Title or Text, which searches both the diary title and its text to see if it CONTAINS the string you enter in the text buffer . Other choices on the pulldown:
- Title: This only searches the diary title for your string. If it's there, the diary is returned.
- (Advanced Search): instead of specifying text to search for, you specify one or more commands that tell Search what to do. Legal parameters for this search were given in Top Comments: DK4 FAQ Forum: Advanced Search; please check there for further information.
More on the CONTAINS string: each word you enter will be searched for separately, unless you put quotes around it. For example, if you enter top comments, it will find all diaries with the word "top" and all diaries with the word "comments" in the diary title and (if specified) in the diary text. If you enter "top comments", it will only return those diaries that use "top comments" together in those places.
BY AUTHOR(S): although this says "author(s)", you can only specify a single entry in the text to search with. You can't do, for example, sardonyx or brillig; that won't get any results. You can specify an entire username to get back diaries by that user. If you don't want to specify a user, just leave "(usernames)" there; if you delete text you'd entered there, "(usernames)" should reappear.
A more powerful ability is to specify whole words that appear in a name (for example, Meteor or in MD), and it will find authors who match that name. You can also specify the first part of word in a name by using an asterisk after it (for example, nath* will return Nathan Newman, nathguy, Nathan Jaco, NathanArr, and Nathan in MD if you go back to the beginning of 2011). You could also get Nathan Jaco by specifying Jac* in this field. You can also do Met* Bl* to get Meteor Blades, but only trailing asterisks will work: you cannot use it at the beginning of a word or in the middle of a word in the username. The asterisk may not be used as the only character for a word in the name—you must use at least one alphanumeric starding character—and you may not skip a word. For example Nat* * MD will not return Nathan in MD, but Na* i* M* or even Na* i* will return it.
BY TAG(S): this says "by tag(s)", and works like "by author(s)" in that you're only allowed to specify a single entry. It will take what you enter—one word or many—and return all entries that fit. If what you enter starts the tag, or (if no spaces) starts a word in the tag, it will return all diaries that match that tag. One way in which this differs from "by author(s)" is that asterisks are not required.
For example, top or comment or top comm will all return diaries with the "top comments" tag, but "top" also returns other tags such as "race to the top", and "comment" works similarly. The string "comm" will also return all diaries with the tag "community", which is a great many indeed. The words in tag must be given in their proper order; for example, comments top returns no diaries at all.
PUBLISHED BETWEEN: this offers two date fields with an "AND" between them. The first field is the start date, which defaults to a week before the present day, and the second field initially says now. When you click on these fields, a calendar will come up with the current month. You can click on a date in this calendar, or click the back or forward arrows at the top of the calendar to move in time. Every search requires a date range, so be sure it's the right one for your search.
If you want to specify an old date—and Daily Kos has records back to October 13, 2003—it saves time to type in the date directly. The date format of these fields is mm/dd/yyyy, and you sometimes have to persist to get it to let you type and for it to retain the date you do type.
A closing shoutout to dmsilev, who originally founded the FAQ Forum and posted 77 of them in 2008 and 2009.
If there's some part of the DK4 FAQ that isn't clear, do let me know. Ask questions here! Areas that continue to need fleshing out include groups, messages, and searching. I've been busier than I expected this winter and spring, so there's been precious little fleshing out over the past two and a half months. Things are getting even worse now that spring has sprung.
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We received quite a few emails today from people who took the time to submit comments that deserved recognition to Top Comments mailbox in time for the 9:30pm Eastern Time deadline. The address of our mailbox for top comments submissions remains:
TopComments AT gmail DOT com
(change " AT " to "@" and " DOT " to ".")
Anyone can send great comments to our address. Be sure to include the direct link to a comment—the URL—which is available from that comment's date/time; we need that to find your choice. Please always include your Daily Kos user name in the body of your message, so we can credit you properly. If you send a writeup with the link, we are able to include that, too, though we reserve the right to edit.
From politik:
This comment by ricklewsive is the best expression of appreciation I've seen for any liveblog series, and expresses my opinion exactly. Thank you to the Japan Nuclear Incident Liveblog group members for their efforts, and to ricklewsive for the comment.
From phonegery (writeup expanded by sardonyx):
Many readers of bobswern diaries think bank reports are not really believable. In today's Did You Hear The Latest Joke About The Treasury Department's Bailout Profits? ROFLMAO!, mrblifil reaches this logical conclusion. Also, raboof has further good news (?), the The Dead Man puts a new spin on WTF (as noted by psychodrew's reply), and geez53 looks at the CPA side of the equation.
From Rick Aucoin:
BenderRodriguez writes that being American also means being indifferent.
From Pam from Calif:
This comment by Delilah speaks for me.
JekyllnHyde's cartoons are always spot on.
I love nonnie9999's snarky posters.
From commonmass:
I found this thread hilarious: especially the Chuck Norris/DK4 comment by Craziel down thread.
From Seneca Doane:
You—YOU—can phonebank for JoAnne Kloppenburg between now and Tuesday even more easily! In puddytat's excellent Rec Listed diary, AnnieJo tells you how (direct link to instructions is here)!
From sardonyx (your still-searching Thursday diarist):
In a comment on Jed Lewison's front-page article, Fox blames weather for weak turnout at tea party rally, wherein Jed notes that Wisconsinites have been braving far worse weather for weeks on end, urbazewski is blunt.
Please add your own comment finds below! (I ran out of time: too much searching…)
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A reminder: Top mojo will return once we figure out how to strongarm convince Comment Search to give us exactly what we need in a form that we can use. Which is more difficult and requires more hand-editing than it should be (or used to be).