MiggyTrack

When it comes to offering personalised search tools, Rollyo are no longer the only game in town. Google are hungry for a slice of the pie and aim to claim a sizeable portion by way of their newly uncorked Co-Op web app.

With Co-Op you get pretty much the same deal, except under the bonnet (or 'hood' I suppose :p) you'll find Google's own search engine rather than Yahoo's, you're supplied with a wacky, instantly forgettable URL to link to your widgets and you're given more scope to categorise your web-foraging offspring.

To check out the hue of the grass on the other side of the fence I've thrown together a custom search widget which queries eleven of the top-ranking Amiga game database web sites. Not that I'm obsessed or anything silly like that.

I was pleasantly surprised to find it's a nice shiny emerald green. The start pages are distinctly uncluttered as you'd expect from a Google Gooey, you can opt to eradicate all adverts (as long as you're not operating as a commercial organisation) and there are plenty of advanced options to keep the most demanding tweakers happy. For now the race is too close to call. Do the front-runners have any competition?

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My First Search Engine. Porn and spam sold separately.

Statistics show that 98.54% of the content on the internet is worthless dross, yet we still have to wade our way through it to get to the good stuff. Perfect example: whenever you search Google to locate a trustworthy review of a piece of tech gear you're considering purchasing, it spews out wads of irrelevant shopping spam sites which - purely by chance of course - contain the word 'review', even though no opinions, positive or negative, are imparted within their pages. Typically this fluff populates the first few pages of Google's output, pushing the genuine content deep into obscurity.

One workaround would be to identify a handful of reliable sources for each kind of information you require, bookmark and search them individually. Better still is Rollyo; a newish, startup web gizmo which provides the means to tailor your search results to suit your personal preferences. It does this by allowing you to 'Roll Your Own' categorised search filters. For instance, you could create a health 'Searchroll' by entering the URLs of up to 25 top-rated health-focused web sites, which when queried would only return content produced by these previously vetted sources.

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Our cannon fodd... er, distinguished superhero soldiers are "plenty smart"

Since hearing about John Kerry's cringeworthy "stuck in Iraq" goof I've been Googling away to discover if there is any truth behind the accusation he didn't make. I have to confess I've always believed in the 'stupid grunt' stereotype, but according to some credible studies I'm dead wrong.

I can't possibly imagine how I arrived at this conclusion. These people are perfectly content to be herded into the world's toilet to fight a farcically unwinnable war for no logical reason, under the auspices of an incompetent leadership (who at least have the common sense to never have served in the military themselves) for a salary they could earn flipping burgers in the comfort of their own home town. It should have been clear to me from the start that what we're dealing with here are no less than Einsteins-in-the-making!

Except when you see a group of soldiers holding up a "hilariously misspelled" sign supposedly as evidence that Kerry is clueless about the intelligence of the infantry serving in Iraq, you have to wonder. You'd have to be pretty dim to swallow the GOP-spin that Kerry - at the 11th hour of the midterms - would deliberately set out to alienate the swathes of the American populace who are either serving in the armed forces, are related to someone who is, or who pretend to support the troops while secretly thinking they're idiots for throwing their lives away on a wild goose chase they don't fully understand.

Another myth, I'm told, is that people don't join the army because they quite like the perk of being given free reign to bully and murder foreign baddies, civilians or whoever happens to be available at the time. I expect IT technicians don't choose to work in the IT industry because they like working with computers either. I'm wrong about a lot of things.

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Convert owt to owt (ish)

You can't have failed to notice the current web 2.0 trend of taking commonplace computing tasks online. Everything from virus scanning and making backups to writing documents can now be performed from within your web browser; the advantage being that you can take your 'applications' with you wherever you go and never have to worry about updating them (or paying for them in most cases for that matter).

One of the latest tasks to be given the online treatment is file conversion. What stands out about web services like Zamzar is that they'll have a stab at converting pretty much any kind of file to an appropriate, alternative format. This is ideal for those of us who only convert a file once in a while and can never remember the name of the application you need to process one thing or the other when the need arises.

The downside is obviously that whatever you want to convert, first has to be uploaded, and then downloaded in its altered state, so how useful these services are to you will ultimately be determined by the speed of your internet connection.

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Backup your entire Blogger blog in under 2 minutes

For my next party trick I'm going to show you how to perform an entire backup of your Blogspot (aka Google's Blogger) blog in three idiot-proof steps.

This technique requires no software other than a web browser so you can put your offline site sucking tools back in their box. Neither will any template modifications or configuration alterations be necessary. Your backup will consist of a single html page containing every entry ever published in sequential order, a handful of miscellaneous CSS files, plus any images you have posted, no matter where they are hosted.

Should disaster strike you won't be able to use your backup to instantly restore you.blogspot.com as you might with an automated import script, but likewise this would be the case if you instead chose to follow Google's tortuous advice (link now dead and not saved by archive.org), or employed an offline browser (which I should point out would save multiple copies of the same posts in addition to all kinds of superfluous fluff).
Here's the procedure...

1. Scroll downwards through the list of dates in your 'blog archive' sidebar until you reach the year in which you began posting and click on the link.
The URL - minus the spaces which have been inserted to trigger word wrapping - in your address bar will look a lot like this:

http://kookosity.blogspot.com/ search?updated-min= 1999-01-01 T00%3A00%3A00Z&updated-max= 2000-01-01 T00%3A00%3A00Z&max-results=13

2. The URL in this example instructs Blogger to display all the posts created between the first day of 1999 and the first day of 2000, though if you extend the 'updated-max' date to reflect the date of your most recent post (or just set it way ahead into the future) and boost the 'max-results' limit to include all your entries you can force Blogger to cram everything onto one page.

3. Make your adjustments, press return and then save the output in "web page, complete" format (if you're using Firefox) to a safe place on your hard drive.

The result will look identical to its online counterpart so can easily be absorbed by the naked-eye (as opposed to an RSS interpreter for example). Beats pulling rabbits out of a top hat, eh.

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