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How to efficiently find help on this blog

2011/06/10 plagwitz Leave a comment

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. https://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: https://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: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/faq+[add your problem-technology-tag here, e.g. Audacity]/
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: https://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: https://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.
Text-messaging: Get synchronous human help through the Moodle-Wimba Room link.