A Few Updates to the Blog

A few minor updates here.

First, due both to a longstanding request from my friend [[Oliver Baker]], and to meet my own needs when using the 17 years of blog posts as personal reference (i.e. “what was I writing about on the day before the day I got my gallbladder out?”), I’ve added “Previous” and “Next” buttons to the bottom of every post (borrowing heavily, design wise, from Jeremy Keith’s version of the same feature):

Second, I’ve fixed some longstanding issues with the full text search (you knew you could search the site, right?). The search index was stuck for a while due to some unrelated hacking about. And the search now indexes my sounds and my travels as well as regular old posts. If you’ve never used the search feature before (and in typing this I realize that this all might only be of interest to me), it’s useful to know:

• You can search for phrases — just like Google et al — by surrounding your search keywords with quotes. A search for “open data”, in other words, will only find posts with that phrase, whereas a search for open data, no quotes, will find any post with either of those words or both.
• If you enter multiple words or phrases, the search will return posts with one or the other. If you want to find only posts with all of your words or phrases, put and between them. So a search for Charlottetown and fire will only find posts with both the words Charlottetown and fire in them.
• You can search for posts that don’t contain words or phrases by prefixing them with a minus sign. So a search for “tim banks” -ducks will search for all posts mentioning Tim Banks, except those that also mention ducks.

Finally, the archive of all posts I’ve ever written now goes back to the year I was born. Not because I was writing in utero, but because I’ve dated sounds my father recorded then by the date they were recorded. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Thank you for your continued patronage.