RE: FLASH: Technotes thoughts

[John Dowdell]

At 9:51 AM 5/11/0, Jeremy Pinkham wrote:

>I could be wrong, Matt, but I think Cheri was asking for a change in the

>functionality of the Macromedia TechNote search engine, rather than

>refinement of the existing "meta" keywords.  Would the effort be prohibitive

>to set your search engine to search the entire text of each TechNote, rather

>than just these preselected terms?


Cool, can do... the small search field at macromedia/support/flash/ is just

keywords, true, but you can do keyword or full-text search at the

PowerSearch page in my sig. (I've set this up as my home page, and rarely

use the front page of each support section myself.)

http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/



Trivia: Many times when someone new indexes a document, they'll keyword it

with what the document is *about*. That's wrong... the correct approach to

take is "When someone needs this information, what will they use to look

for it?"  It's a weird mindset, to think of putting something where you

know someone will find it when they want it, and where it won't get in the

way when they don't want it.... ;-)


Other search tips on the Macromedia technotes:


--  Use lowercase when searching... this will match lowercase, uppercase,

and midcap results. (eg, searching with "quicktime" will pull up

"QuickTime" as well as "Quicktime", etc)


--  Use the "Search Tips" page... it describes how you can use boolean

tests, exclusions, use commas to affect weighting, more.


--  Once you've gotten a set of results, you can sort by date, version or

other parameter... click on the column in the search results and it will

re-sort.


--  To see all recent technotes, either:

  a)  search Flash technotes without keyword (to pull all), then sort by

date; or

  b)  use the "Top Technotes" link on the main Flash support page and then

the link to all new technotes; or

  c)  bookmark the actual search term link:

<http://search.macromedia.com/search/search?Action=FilterSearch&filter=fv.hi

ts&ResultTemplate=rs.hts&collection=support_eng&dateMod=31&product=Flash&Sor

tField=DateMod&NewSortOrder=desc>



One thing we *don't* have yet is an efficient feedback mechanism on these

thousands of documents... there's not a

wish-technotemacromedia [dot] com

address, unfortunately. Matt has kindly offered to add keyword suggestions

for Flash technotes, but for the other tools it's best to put keyword

suggestions to wish-director and the other relevant addresses, thanks.


There *is* work being done towards adding a technote ranking and feedback

engine, but I don't know the delivery date yet. The Macromedia Exchange for

Dreamweaver is now up and running (and it's a beautiful thing! check it

out!), and so a technote ranking engine is now closer to the top of the

stack for the Macromedia web applications group. It's not there yet, but

it's coming closer...!




jd







John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US

Search technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/

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