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 ๐Ÿ™‚

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Reading: mind’s fuel

Frederick Giasson

I have been really busy in the last weeks. In fact, it is since I started to develop Talk Digger. Once the design was finished, the only thing I had to do is to program it: a technical task that only take time. All my time was spent to develop it, debug it, and to finish some other pending contracts.

I like to read and I read a lot. I learned the power of reading over time. When I was child, I was like any other kids: reading is for others. I needed to work in a Library to start liking books, what they smell and look likes, to start to read. Since then, I buy and read at least a book per week: science-fiction, management, combative, psychology, polar, suspense, politic, anything.

The current fact is that I was not able to read that book in the last weeks. The way my mind think changed, my ideas and visions flowed differently. The mind is a muscle: the tasks you will perform will make it think differently. It is why an engineer will not think like a sociologist.

Now I need to take some time to read, read books and articles. I need to train my mind to think differently, to see thinks in another angle. That way I will be able to focus on problems with a new eye, to try to find new type of solutions to the current problems I try to resolve. I need to make a mind shift.

Some days ago, NewScientist published an article called “Most scientific papers are probably wrong”. Slashdot reported that a senior editor of a scientific journal says that scientists are already aware of this:

“When I read the literature, I’m not reading it to find proof like a textbook. I’m reading to get ideas. So even if something is wrong with the paper, if they have the kernel of a novel idea, that’s something to think about.”

All the vision in a single phrase: it is all about finding ideas. It is exactly why I like to read science-fiction books: because it is a way to find new ideas. When reading, you mind think about all the stuff you read and try to correlate it with the other knowledge you have. This correlation will let new ideas, related or not with what you are reading, emerge. This is the exact reason why science-fiction books are so important in my creative process: this is an entertaining way to find new ideas, to train me brain differently.

Let begin that new training program with a book called “Grammatical Man, information, entropy, language and life” by Jeremy Campbell

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