Searching and discovery, for searchers
Tired of Facebook picking what articles you see? Do you ever get frustrated by how Facebook often doesn’t show you articles from Pages you really like? Feedly is your answer for following the blogs you enjoy. You get to pick what you see, and you’ll never miss a post! Plus, you can easily mark posts …
Replace Facebook with Feedly for your source of blogs Read More »
Chances are you probably have your entire Google search history available for you to download. If you are logged into Google while you do searches, it keeps track of all your search terms. Many people are afraid of other’s finding their Google search history. I find it absolutely fascinating. Looking through your search history is …
Google has a list of advanced search operators to give you more accurate results. With these search operators you can limit your search to include results only from one website (Search for origami on spudart.org using origami site:spudart.org). Or you could tell Google to search only the title of the website. (Find webpages that have croquet in …
List of search operators deleted by Google over the years Read More »
Sometimes you come across a blog that is just incredible. After reading the latest ten to twenty posts, you want to read more. Instead you subscribe to the blog, figuring you’ll just read the new posts as they come in. An entire untapped archive of posts are waiting to be read. It’s a shame that these older posts won’t get …
Subscribe to a blog’s posts in reverse chronological order Read More »
Imagine if you could know exactly which songs you listened to when you were a few months old. That would be pretty interesting, right? Today’s babies can have that sort of information. My daughter turned three months last week. Here’s a chart of what I’ve listened to in that time: Generated by lists.fm/spudart (and clicking …
Everyone loves Spotify for its unlimited music. But imagine if you could have unlimited music and no ads on Youtube videos–for the same price as Spotify. That would be Google Play. The Spotify individual plan is $9.99/month. You get music. The Google Play individual plan is $9.99/month. You get music and no ads on Youtube. …
How to upgrade Google Play from individual plan to family plan Read More »
You buy a product online, and then the next day an ad for the very same product is shown do you. Do you wish you could right-click on the ad to say, “I already own this. No more ads for this product.” That would be handy, right? “I don’t need to own another one of …
Instead of ad blocking, control which ads you can see Read More »
Taco Bell has a SoundCloud account? What do you think they would play? (Yeah, I should probably listen to their channel before I write about it, but let’s first speculate what they could be playing, because that’s more fun). Taco Bell commercials. Ads would be lame. Who would want to hear an entire playlist of ads? Even …
Yesterday I outlined how to create a Facebook list of only Pages you want. It’s great, you get a handy list to force Facebook to show you posts that you want to see. But then there’s the chance you don’t even know that a friend has a Page. I put together this list so people can scan …
Tired of how Facebook doesn’t show you posts from your friend’s Facebook Pages? Crazy, right? You are friends with someone, yet you never see what’s on their Facebook Page in your news stream. Here’s how to fix it so Facebook will show you posts from Facebook Pages that YOU specify. Use lists in Facebook–wait–Facebook has lists? …
How to force Facebook to show posts from certain Pages Read More »
Image if Google’s reverse image search allowed you to sort by date. That way it can help you find the original source of an image. I want to find the original source of the image in this tweet. Doing a reverse image search on Google for this image results in a bajillion options: So many …
Why does this RSS reader beat out the likes of Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram? Read my blog post, Where I find my inspiration online. A summary of the points: Facebook: too noisy, doesn’t show you everything from your Pages Instagram: too noisy, too slow (scroll, scroll, scroll through images) Twitter: not quite the visual medium yet …
Feedly is my number one source for inspiration online. Read More »
Over the course of a year, you probably end up reading hundreds of interesting articles. Even if you read just one interesting article every week day, that’s 240 interesting articles in one year. In this digital age, we mostly ignore who wrote the article. We might even ignore the publication. Whenever I read an interesting …
Auto-generating a list of authors whose articles you found interesting Read More »
Looking for ideas to blog about? Would you like to have over 900 blog drafts in your queue? On my spudart blog I gave six tips on how to have a continuous flow of ideas for your writing: Keep ALL your blog drafts in one place. Read and comment on other blogs. Prune your reading list …
Google, the mind reader. Ever forget what you are doing at the moment and you turn to Google to tell you what you were just doing? “What was I just doing?” results in about 197,000 results. “What was I just thinking?” gives about 295,000 results. Most valuable of them all is when you want to google something, but …
Evernote can hold so many things. Blog drafts, photos of notes, articles. It’s amazing archival service that is searchable. It even searches for text in your photos! Today I was looking for a blog draft about my notepad setup, I headed over to Evernote and searched for “notepad.” Certainly enough the notepad blog post came …
Evernote to search the contents of your items in storage Read More »
Headlines are a great way to surf the news. All the RSS readers allow you to browse articles by headlines and the first couple sentences. But sometimes I just want to browse articles by images. There are no RSS readers that give you an alternate view of seeing just the images. Specifically, it would be …
Google offers a custom news feed according to your defined preferences. Many other players in the field are doing this, Zite, Flipboard, and now Apple. But Google has some weight here, because y’know, they are Google. For the past couple months, I’ve been fine-tuning my “Suggested for you” feed in Google news. Telling Google I’m …
Content marketing is indeed on the rise, as Google Trends shows. As searches for “content marketing” are increasing, searches for its cousin term “social marketing” are decreasing. (View live Google Trends chart or archived version). Does this mean social marketing is going out of style? By no means! Be very careful when using Google Trends. …
iTunes’ “New and Noteworthy” section had nine podcasts that piqued my interest. I’m subscribing to these nine podcasts to give them a shot. We’ll see which ones make it onto my podcast playlist on my iPhone. In no particular order, here’s the nine: Imaginary Worlds By Eric Molinsky Science fiction and other fantasy genres — …