Lost in the Archives

[hrj]

 I was commenting on another journal re: timeline software for authors, and was trying to figure out just what keywords I'd have to use to try to track down the journal entry where I fantasized about my cadillac-version timeline software for plotting novels. (I came up with some elaborate user specs.) Fourteen years of LJ/Dreamwidth entries! And no useful index. Tags don't really work for topics like "writing process" when you want to find something specific.

Comments

[rosefox]

https://www.dreamwidth.org/search and search for "cadillac" or "timeline"?

[hudebnik]

I've been frustrated for a long time by Dreamwidth search. It seems to be designed to find "any post by anyone, ever, vaguely related to topic X", but not for "a post or comment that I know that user Y made on topic X".

[sporky_rat]

There is the paid account ability to search your own journal, but yes, the general site search is rather...ah, Antiquated. (I think we tend to go with 'Brad, in his dorm room, with the lead pipe' when we run into code like that.)

[sporky_rat]

https://hrj.dreamwidth.org/625473.html

seems to be the entry, though?

[hrj]

Good sleuthing! But not what I was thinking of. (I'm not sure I used the actual word "Cadillac" in the post I'm trying to find.) Thanks for the suggestion, though.

[sporky_rat]

https://hrj.dreamwidth.org/286336.html

This one?

(I'm support, you've given me a Thing while I wait for my notebook to update Ubuntu.)

[hrj]

That's it! (And if I'd gone through all 35 files in my LJ exports that included the word "timeline" I would have found it eventually.) Thank you so much!

[hrj]

I really should upgrade to a paid DW account simply because I believe in paying for things I value.

[sporky_rat]

It's a good service and that is what pays to keep the lights on.

Hurrah, no ads!

[hudebnik]

Me too; in fact, I thought I had, years ago, but my profile says "Free account".

[hrj]

I'm very sure that the original post was on LJ, so I've tried searching keywords in my exported archives but haven't found it yet. I tried doing a domain-specific search in Google's advanced search and some experimentation proved that that method is missing a lot of things it should be finding. (Probably due to Google trying to be smarter than I want it to be, or possibly due to DW protecting material from search engines.)

I could reconstruct the concept that was in the post I'm looking for, but that would be more effort than the impulse was worth. On my long-term to-do list is going through DW (which has all my old LJ material) and pulling out and indexing all the posts that I think are worth being able to find again. I'd like to echo all my writing related posts over only my Alpennia blog at some point, just to have it all in a location I control. I haven't been doing regular exports of my DW blog like I did with LJ, but in part that's because I do almost all my substantive blogging at Alpennia.