Dear silver-list'ers, We have a list archive at
http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html ... but the search engine they provide there is a *little* quirky. Here are a couple of tips I've worked up... The worst thing about it is you have to search Subject lines before they give you the option of searching message bodies. We all know how closely Subject lines follow the content of the message, don't we? *NOT*! <grin> This would be useful, at best, for pulling up an entire thread once you know the subject line. I'd usually rather search the bodies to begin with. Here's how to get around this. To do a search of message bodies directly, cut and past the following url into the address line of your web browser: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/search.html?qbody= After the "=", type in the words of the phrase you want to search for, separated by plus signs (+). Example: To search for the phrase "honest politician", the last half of the url would look something like this: ... search.html?qbody=honest+politician Note that you'll be searching for the exact phrase "honest politician" only. You won't get hits on "honest as a politician" or "...politician who is honest...". The way it's set up means we're pretty much limited to searches on single words or very short phrases. I don't know yet how to get it to do a more flexible Boolean search. Another important foible of the archive is that it's hard to go back to a specific date. Say you knew there was an interesting thread back in January of this year. There are over 160 pages of date index right now. Paging through all of them to get back to January would be tedious, at best. There is something to help with this a little, and possibilities for making it much easier to use later. First, go back to the first date index page: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html Just above the index list is a line of navigation links: "Date Index page 1 of 161. [First] [Prev] [Next] [Last] (Switch to Thread Index) (Switch to Author List)" Clicking on [Next] gets you to the index page before the current one. You'll note that the url now looks something like http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html?by=Date&n=2 You can manually change the "2" to a different number, going back to whatever page whose number you type in without having to page through all of the ones in between. Going back to our example of trying to get to January 1999, I tried typing in 50, and came out somewhere in July. 100 landed me in April, and 130 back in July '98. I got to early Feb with 110, and early January, finally, with 113. Ugly, yes, but faster than paging through all 113 pages it would have taken to get there the other way. It looks like it might be pretty straighforward to code up a little index to the index so we can have a web based form that will let you go directly to any particular date. However, as pages are added to the archive the number of all the pages goes up one. So, some arithmetic will be needed to make it work right. However, I'm not yet up to speed with CGI script coding enough to tackle it. I hope these two tips will help you at least a little bit in the meantime. If there are any great coders out there who wanna take a crack at some web-based controls and forms for making this navigation a little easier, let me know in e-mail. Be well, Mike D. [Mike Devour, Citizen, Patriot, Libertarian] [mdev...@mail.id.net ] [Speaking only for myself... ] -- The silver-list is a moderated forum for discussion of colloidal silver. To join or quit silver-list or silver-digest send an e-mail message to: silver-list-requ...@eskimo.com -or- silver-digest-requ...@eskimo.com with the word subscribe or unsubscribe in the SUBJECT line. To post, address your message to: silver-list@eskimo.com Silver-list archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html List maintainer: Mike Devour <mdev...@id.net>
