Many upgrades to Talk Digger in the last days

Frederick Giasson

I make many changes to Talk Digger in the last days:

  1. A new item preview feature
  2. A new “choose the search engines you want see the results” feature
  3. A new host server
  4. A new classification of available services

I worked some days to make all these things happen. You can see them as major updates to the system. Many things changed, internally into the system, and externally for the users. I will tweak some other things in the next days related with some display glitches in the results returned by some search engines.

Now, we will take a look at these news upgrades.

1. A new item preview feature

This new feature now permits to Talk Digger users to see an item result into the current Talk Digger’s interface. That way, you have access to the full information without quitting Talk Digger, or opening a new browser window.

How to use that new feature? It is quite simple. The only thing you have to do is to click on the “[Preview]” link that appears beside all returned results. The first time you click on it, the preview will appear at the bottom of the result. If you click on that link a second time, you will close the previously opened preview.

2. A new “choose the search engines you want see the results” feature

If you take a look at the menu items at the top of Talk Digger’s website, you will see a new “OPTIONS” item. If you go to that “options” page, you will see a list a checkboxes. If a checkbox is checked, then the results of that search engine will be included into Talk Digger. If you uncheck the checkbox, the results of that search engine will not be included into Talk Digger.

This option is really useful because you now have the possibility to include and/or exclude the search engines you do not like, or the ones that have problems, or the ones that are slow.

Do not worries, as soon as you check or uncheck a checkbox, Talk Digger take care of your new preferences. This is why there is no “save preferences” button.

In the above example, the results of these search engines will be returned and displayed on Talk Digger: Bloglines, BlogPulse, Feedster, and Blogdigger.

3. A new host server

I hosted talkdigger.com on a new web server. The first phase of the project was hosted on my blog’s web server. It was not really convenient, but it worked. Now it will fix some things and be more reliable. It also gives me much more power to think about new things to implement into Talk Digger.

The current result of that upgrade: no more web site redirecting. However, I will leave the http://fgiasson.com/td/ online (without the new “options” feature) for my Chinese friends that have some problems to access the domain name talkdigger.com

4. A new classification of available services

I did a little classification in the search engines. You now have 3 different sections in 3 different colors: (1) the social search engines like Technorati, (2) the feeds search engine like PubSub, and (3) the traditional search engines like Google.

5. Conclusion

So, I hope that you will enjoy these new features. It is possible that the migration of Talk Digger on the new web server cause some problems. So, if you have some problems with some of the Talk Digger’s functionalities, please leave me a note and I will fix it as soon as possible.

If you are using the RSS feature, you can change the feeds’ URL from “fgiasson.com/td/” to “talkdigger.com”.

Finally, if you have any suggestions to continue to upgrade Talk Digger, leave me a comment or an email and I will answer you with a great pleasure 🙂

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