Home > audience-is-any, blog, documentation, e-learning > How to search this blog: Combining searching for tags and categories with feed display in Internet Explorer

How to search this blog: Combining searching for tags and categories with feed display in Internet Explorer

2011/12/14 Leave a comment Go to comments
  1. By adapting this mask in the address-bar: https://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:wordpress-search-tag category feed ie-subsearches-marked
  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): https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?category_name=arabic works, but so does https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/category/arabic/feed and also https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/category/study-program-is-any/all-languages/arabic/feed.
Categories: audience-is-any, blog, documentation, e-learning Tags: , ,
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