Slashgeo

In our efforts to improve Slashgeo's experience, we added a new search in the left menu on the main page. This is not a minor improvement and here's why. First, there's a whole new searchbox: searching tens of manually selected geospatial blogs using Google's Custom Search. Second, the stock slashcode search has some serious limitations: (1) search words must have 4 letters or more, which is a serious problem if a user wants to search for GPS, KML, LBS or GML, etc., (2) some words are ommited at MySQL's level, such as 'where', so you could not search for the Where 2.0 conference and (3), the comments themselves are not searchable. The old search, at the bottom of the page, is still there for you to use it. It's not that obsolete since it offers some flexibility that the Google custom search does not provide. Another related tip: I often use the topics page to find items related to a specific topic. One last thing, text ads are shown on the custom search results page. Let's say this is experimentation and testing. The next poll will ask you, the Slashgeo users, what you think of this situation.

A new Slashgeo user asked me a pertinent question about using Slashgeo to meet his needs, here's the answer! The question was if there is a way to receive the daily newsletter only for news regarding the 3D topic. The short answer is no. The daily newsletter, to which you can subscribe in your account prefs, shows all stories which go to Slashgeo's mainpage. Stories directly published to a section, usually less important, will not show up in the newsletter. However, you can see all stories for a topic by selecting the topic directly (link in top left menu) (here's the 3D topic). Ok, but that requires you to visit a page, so it's pull, not push. If you don't want to visit Slashgeo's website, alternatively, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of a specific section. Here's the main Slashgeo RSS feed (well, it's a GeoRSS feed :-), but there are specific RSS feeds for individual sections. Since the 3D topic is in the Technology section, this RSS feed will display only Technology related news. The main Slashgeo's sections are "Application domains", "Industry", "Reviews", "Technology" and so on. And finally, you can search for specific news using Slashgeo search capabilities, either the one at the bottom of the page or the Google Coop search box at top left of the page.

Confusing? A little I admit. We'll be looking to improve this in the coming months if Slashgeo survives. As an example, the Slash developers are experimenting with tags, which will eventually improve Slashgeo's navigation efficiency.