Search in Tabs with Search!o

Comments (1) · September 15, 2008 at 5:01 am · Online Tools

There isn’t much more you can do to re-invent the search engine that others haven’t tried before in the past.  What you can do is improve on ideas that are already out there.  You have all seen the pages that search multiple search engines at once, and they all pretty much suck.  Well, I have finally found one that does it right - and Search!o is its name-o.

The front page is pretty slick, you have the search box, the “go” box (to get your search started) and then you can pick from a number of search engine groups such as: audio/music, blogs, books, css galleries, fonts, images, jobs, news, search engines, social bookmarks, videos and more.  Each group will search a different series of web sites.  Doing your basic “search engines” search will give you results from Google, Live Search, Ask, AOL, Dogpile, Clusty, Alta Vista, Lycos, and All the Web.  Each source has it’s own tab inside of the web site, so navigation is as easy as clicking the tab or the Alt + a number combination.

The address it gives to you is the last feature I want to share with you.  Look at this:  http://search.io/search-engines/web hosting show/

The address is based on the search group type I used (”search-engines”) and then my phrase I searched for (”web hosting show”).  Only thing that lack that I would like to see is an easy way to add them to the search box via the browser.  Play with Search!o today, and let me know your thoughts on it.

 

Offer Multiple Subscription Methods

Comments · July 21, 2008 at 5:11 am · Web Development, Writing Advice

When getting started building a brand Online, a lot of people ask what should they do first?  Well after you get your content flowing, you need a way for people to follow that content.  That is where RSS and all the various feed readers out there come into play.

Everybody has their own way of doing things though, so you need to make sure you meet everybody’s needs.  Thanks to services like FeedBurner, this is pretty easy.  From inside their web site you can generate tons of those subscription links, as well as your standard big orange button and even e-mail newsletter management.  It is by far the best option out there.

As a rule of thumb, you want to give people the ability to follow you via:

• Your Domain (visiting your web site)
• Via RSS (using the feed reader of their choosing)
• and a newsletter (which you can easily setup with an RSS feed with FeedBurner)

Also it never hurts to let people know your RSS feed over and over again.  Such as how I am right now begging you informing you to subscribe to this feed if you want more informative posts just like the one you just read:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/mitchelaneous

 

Virtual Desktop Apps Don’t Work

Comments off · September 21, 2007 at 6:09 am · Personal, Software Help

The last few days I have been trying to try a few more productivity and desktop applications to help me get a little more work done. One thing that I have seen for ages but never really gave a fair shot to was running multiple desktops on one machine. So I tried out a handful of programs - and I have to say it just did not do the job for me.

Now I like to keep the minimum needed open when working on anything. I really don’t like clutter - but after downloading a few of these multiple desktop programs I found it more of a chore than anything to switch back and forth for different projects or jobs I was doing.

Just in case you want to give it a shot yourself, here are a few you can try:

Multiple Desktop Power Toy for Windows XP

Dexpot

Virtual desktops are a good idea but for some reason nobody seems to have made it work just right - just yet.