Thomas' Work Space

1. I am looking for posts on my blog that fall under the categories “English” (ESL teaching) and (“listening” OR “speaking-4-skills” – never mind the “-4-skills”, another oddity).
2. http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/category/study-program-is-any/all-languages/english/feed or shorter http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?category_name=english, opened with MS-Internet Explorer’s feed display allows me to access the result of the 2 AND searches with 2 additional clicks
3. :
4. OR search works: http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?category_name=listening,speaking-4-skills
5. AND search works, so I could provide 2 separate links:
1. http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?category_name=english+listening
2. http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?category_name=english+speaking-4-skills
6. But I cannot find the syntax that would give me both AND and OR against categories, for the following return nothing (what is the operator precedence of “+” and “,”)
1.  http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?category_name=english+listening,speaking-4-skills 
2. http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?category_name=listening,speaking-4-skills+english

See what I mean: Downloading and browsing the full content XML is of course more powerful than this.

1. By adapting this mask in the address-bar: http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/YOUR-1ST-TAG+YOUR-2ND-TAG+…+YOUR-NTH-TAG/feed/?category_name=YOUR-1ST-CATEGORY+YOUR-2ND-CATEGORY+…+YOUR-NTH-CATEGORY
2. you can combine into an AND-Search
   1. a tag-search (e.g. for the posts tagged as “FAQs”. You can find other tags from the tag-cloud in the right column of the blog; note that it is not complete, but only the most frequent tags are displayed there. Tags are a metadata collection that can flexibly grow on demand)
   2. a category_search (e.g. for “audience-is-teachers”. You can find other tags from the category-hierarchy in the right column of the blog; note that this hierarchy is complete, all categories tags are displayed here, top categories alphabetically, sub-categories alphabetically under their respective parent. Categories are a more controlled metadata collection)
3. and the display of only the “feed”

1. which makes for a quicker overview of large search result sets than the complete articles that a search without “ /feed” would return)
2. and allows for subscribing to (or saving stored) searches
3. Internet Explorer’sfeed display is
   1. compact
   2. provides a (1) cumulative overview of all tags and categories (the “ tag cloud for search results”  that is missing on WordPress.com ) within the search results which is easy to browse and drill into, for searches within search results (click to “filter by category” and tag: Internet Explorer subsumes both tags and categories of WordPress.com’s blogs under the term “category”).
   3. (2) evidence of an AND-search across tags and categories (e.g. find only FAQs that are for meant for teachers: 15 matches for the former, 15 matches for the latter, 15 matches overall)
   4. Result:
4. Limitations
   1. To browse categories by view (syntax /category/[CATEGORYNAME]), you would have to travel the full path of the category hierarchy. Using “&category_name=” seems easier, especially since the view does not allow for searching within the entire category sub-branch. Each node stands by itself.
   2. Remember that this is not full-text, but metadata (“human curated”) search technology. The quality of the search results hinges on the quality of the metadata originally added to the blog posts by the author (“To err is human”, or “Garbage in, garbage out”).
   3. Worse: There is no provision for collaborative tagging on WordPress.com.
5. more hints:
   1. “/feed” works only before ?query-string-syntax, but only after /view-syntax, like in the following examples around “Arabic”.
   2. you do NOT need to give the whole branch of categories when using the view-syntax (and also not only for the 1st and 2nd level): http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?category_name=arabic works, but so does http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/category/arabic/feed and also http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/category/study-program-is-any/all-languages/arabic/feed.

1. Searching
   1. Full-text search: quick, even though dumb (“Computers are only machines…”). It may not return the most relevant results.
   2. Human-curated search: The author adds metadata to his posts as he sees fit. The metadata vocabulary is somewhat stable from past experience, but may change (”The author is only a human.”  ). You effectively execute a humanly-curated search when clicking in the right column on either
      1. a tag link, e.g.  http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle/
      2. a category link, e.g.
   3. Humanly-curated and Boolean AND search combined: This can be powerful in drilling down to an answer to a specific problem – provided there is one on the blog.
      1. Even though there is no easily clickable interface for this, by building URLs in the web browser address bar , combining tags or categories with the plus-sign, you can execute an AND-search against multiple tags(or categories) on WordPress.com
      2. Example: http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle+erepository/ finds posts that the author related to both Moodle and eRepository. This can be especially useful for searching the FAQs: http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/faq+[add your problem-technology-tag here, e.g. Audacity]/
2. Notifications: Subscribe to RSS-feeds to receive timely updates on the topics that matter most to you.  Both
   1. WordPress.com, providing RSS-feeds for all categories and tags (click on a tag or category link and find the icon, it will link to the RSS feed – Example: http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle/feed/) – watch either the webpage or your browser GUI for orange RSS icons you can click on to initiate a subscription  -and also for multiple categories/tags (even though this feature is even better hidden, you need to construct a URL in your browser address bar. Example: http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle+erepository/feed/). If you want to go beyond our own metadata, WordPress allows also for subscribing to your own searches via RSS: “To keep up with your favorite search results we offer an RSS feed for all search results. Simply click the Follow this search via RSS link in the side bar of any search results page to subscribe to updates in the search result”, consult the WordPress search documentation.
   2. and MS-Outlook, making RSS-subscriptions look familiar like email (of importance in certain environments), greatly facilitate this.
3. Text-messaging: Get synchronous human help through the Moodle-Wimba Room link.