all I want for Christmas - belated

[Dien Rice]

Why Don Alm seems to have gone missing from the archives (at least when you do a search)

Originally Posted by Unregistered

At this time of year, when the tendency is to ponder what we are thankful for, I am thankful for this forum, for the frequent contributors, for Don Alm, for the Don Alm-bashers, for those who give freely of their knowledge to others, and for Dien, for persevering when it looked like we might not have sowpub to kick around anymore.

Hi Robert,

Since you mentioned Don Alm, you may have searched for his name in the archives. Unfortunately, due to some technical issues (which I won't go into right now), you can only search for words with 4 letters or more. 3-letter words or less don't "register" in the search database. (I think they did this to save space when it creates a searchable database, so common words like "to" or "and" are not included...)

Unfortunately, the words "Don Alm" consists of two 3-letter words - so it won't show up in a forum search. If you want to find his posts, some alternative ideas are to search for his web site names (like "pjbux" or "donalm" in more recent posts), or perhaps you can figure out some common words or phrases he tends to use and you can search for that too (such as the words "unique programs").

Also, posts are (eventually) getting archived by search engines like Google and Yahoo. So another option is to do a search like

don alm site:sowpub.com

at Google or Yahoo, which will find all mentions of "don alm" here at Sowpub... (However, it takes time for posts to appear in the search engines, so the latest updates won't appear there, at least not for a little while...)

This also holds for others whose names you might want to search for which have less than 4 characters - though Don's is the only example that springs to mind...

I hope that helps!

Dien

P.S. As I think Phil mentioned, you can find the Sowpub archives (currently from 2001 to May 2003, though it will eventually go through till around mid-2006) here...