Author: Tara Calishain

Wikipedia

Tinkering With WikiTwister

I’m using the holiday to work on WikiTwister, which is a utility site with tools designed to extract information from Wikipedia. This will be my SIXTH (!) hand-coded Web site this year (what the heck, Calishain.) Every time I make a site I try to make it one step better than the one before. With […]

News Search

SearchTweaks.com – 16 Tools to Make Your Google Search Better

Happy holidays! I made you a present: a collection of sixteen tools to make your Google search better, presented in a new site called SearchTweaks.com . As you might imagine, after over 25 years of writing about search engines I have plenty of thoughts and opinions about what’s missing in the search experience and what could be […]

News Search

Hooking the ProPublica Congress API and the FCC Licensing API together and pointing them at Google

This recent political stuff has impressed upon me that I should be doing more to connect politician data to local news data. Furthermore, as long as I’m doing that I should be making news monitoring tools. So that’s what I’ve been doodling around with today. Here’s how it works – currently I’m working on just […]

Search

9/11

What do you THINK I was doing on 9/11? I was aggregating and updating a resource list just as fast as I could. My stepson lived in New York City at the time and while he was fine we didn’t hear from him until late in the day (the phones were down) so it helped […]

Mastodon

A Bookmarklet for Mastodon

I made a bookmarklet today! Do you know about bookmarklets? They’re like regular browser bookmarks, only souped-up with JavaScript. As you might imagine the addition of JavaScript makes bookmarklets much more powerful than regular bookmarks. The bookmarklet I made was to address a Mastodon annoyance. Because Mastodon is decentralized, following a user on a different […]

Mastodon Search

What Do Internet Users Know About Social Signals and How Can We Apply that to Mastodon search?

It used to be that if I found some online writing I really liked, I’d look up and follow the author on Twitter. Now I look up the author and follow them on LinkedIn. This opinion piece by Elizabeth Lopatto is first rate. I love it when an entire article resonates from the jump. ‘Get […]

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