I tried to implement the Google search of my site a bit like John Robb suggested. In the comments to this item somebody mentionned that using "inurl:" would force Google to only search your blog if it is hosted on weblogs.com. It doesn't work perfectly: it restricted the search to my site and some others which is a bit annoying. If you don't have your blog hosted on your domain, PicoSearch can index it if you have less than 1500 pages. Russ Lipton has instructions there.
Seb's right, it is an interesting story from Stephen. I like the idea that paper piles are like Groove spaces. I like grouping articles I print by topic or problems they are related to. When I work on a program/problem/concept, I group in a pile all the articles related to the program/problem/concept. When the program is written, the problem solved or the concept learned, I put the articles back in their bin (I use empty cereal boxes to sort my articles/papers) ready to be re-assembled into a "workspace" related to the next program/problem/concept I am working on. Clever metaphor!
I am having some problems with the display of my topics. I posted a message to the liveTopics Yahoo! group. I'll fix it when I'll have received a hint from somebody. I finally managed to make Google search my site! My readers can now use the best search engine to search my site!
Weblog per-post metadata. For a well baked blog, add topics. Michael DeMaria over at Network Computing wants weblogs to have topical lists of posts. He points out that the time-based format isn't the easiest thing to use when looking for specific posts on selected topics. There are obviously two ways find posts contain a specific topic:
1) Use a search engine. This is the best approach to use when people are resistant to entering metadata.
2) Use a metadata tool like LiveTopics by Matt Mower. Matt has built a tool for Radio that makes it easy for authors to enter in metadata with each post. This makes it easy to provide directories that list post by topic (through use of the outliner). Basically, Livetopics can create a simple list of topical links to posts, or a complex hierarchy of topical links. Matt has a complex hierarchy on his site.
Clearly I think Mike makes a very valid point. Weblogs make great diaries, but the by-date navigation structure sucks for locating topical information. More information about liveTopics can be had by either clicking the liveTopics see-also reference under this post, or going to the liveTopics page on the Novissio website.
I installed LiveTopics today. I think it will help to add more structure to my blog. I am always quite hesitant to add more categories to my blog, I don't want to reach a point where my taxonomy is so vast an accurate that choosing a category for a posting will become an headache. With LiveTopics, I can add Topics that are in fact a kind of sub-categories. I also like the fact it adds a line mentionning where to find other postings with the same topics but belonging to different categories (like software RAID and hardware RAID).
