Memory Amplifier

I've developed writing and searching strategies that help me remember thoughts I've had year after year. post

Google searches wherever it wants, including some part of the federation.

David Bovill has just shown us a way to get google to focus on sites that he has found to be interesting but not too techy.

My search looks at the "visible" federation meaning all those sites I have seen following forks, references and rosters from fed.wiki.org. I've been watching since Sept 2015 and have 1600 sites in my index.

The Search plugin consults my index though it could be reconfigured to search any other index that supported the "match" api. David's recent study has shown that I have yet to index maybe 40 of the sites he is aware of.

The the wiki page footer search link constructs a variety of Search plugin queries one might find useful like "who links here?" and now, as of today, "who else has this page by title?"

The web page search looks at all of the sitemap info (title and synopsis) for all of the sites in the browsing neighborhood. This is often 100s or 1000s of pages.

The browser offers a search command too which will search the full text of the pages in the current lineup.

I have been intentionally careless in organizing my own writing such that I can test the effectiveness of each search.

I like to add a couple of related links to most pages. I do this by looking up things I remember writing or forking before and bringing them into the site that I am authoring within in the moment.

This provides a "memory amplifier" which rewards me for writing in the visible federation.

I title pages with short phrases that I may or may not remember. I am careful to include a topic related words in the first paragraph (the synopsis) which is how I find most pages over a couple of years old.

I keep a couple of rosters of places I have written and will at times load all of those sitemaps to aid a search.

On rare occasion this fails me so I use the Search plugin to search the visible federation. If the page I sought is as good as I remember I fork it into my site full of "good parts" and revise the synopsis to include the search terms I was just using.

This is my go-to roster for looking things up.

This roster has 50 sites approaching 5000 pages that I have touched in some meaningful way.

The Federation Directory lists sites made specifically to remember other sites beyond this roster of my own work. Each directory contains only pages describing other sites with domain names as titles and only a sentence or two of "what is done and shared" on each site.

The original wiki had search widgets on the FindPage. I've since made this fast and incremental and recently cloned the logic to work in the federation. original federation