Thursday, October 13, 2005

The way to NOT advertise in RSS
The reason why ads are bad in RSS

Here is your perfect example of why ads are bad in RSS. Note that the same ad repeated throughout feed, the ad seems 3 times bigger than the text for each entry (which results in a very very low signal to noise ratio), and it hogs screen space.

BoingBoing does graphical ads like this one every 3 or 4 entries. While still big, graphical, and "noisey", I guess I can live with that. But this feed is overboard...




Spotlight question
I love spotlight. Love it. Well, except for the semi-crappy interface you get when you search, but that's not the point of this particular entry.

I want to perform a search on for a particular search attribute, but i don't know what I want to search against when I define the query. What I mean here is that I know what type of thing I want to look for, but want the user to specify a value to search against.

This is confusing, so I'll include a picture.

In this example, I want to search for Python files with a particular function. Except I want to be able to specify the function name interactively. If I specify it in the Python Function part of the query it will always look for that particular function, even though I may want to search for another function.

Ideally I want to be able to specify that content from the Finder's search box gets used as the name of the Python Function I want to search for.

I do not want to execute a Spotlight query for some stupid function name, have to edit the query, specify the function I want to search for, then have Spotlight reexecute the query. That could take like 5 minutes... and while it's faster than hunting manually, that's a stupid amount of time.

So, does anyone know how to do what I'm after?