Find any Support Alert article from your browser
By
Brian Livingston
If you remember reading an article from the Support Alert Newsletter — but you can't recall the date — there's a better way than random browsing to find what you seek.
You can now download our free browser plug-in, which adds Support Alert as a database you can query from the search bar of IE 7 and Firefox.
1. Search past years of Support Alert content
As you know, Support Alert merged with the Windows Secrets Newsletter on July 24, 2008. We've posted all the previous issues of Support Alert (1998–2008) in the WindowsSecrets.com library.
Even better, we've posted every Support Alert article going back to July 2002 on its own page. And we've indexed all of these 3,000+ articles in our library search engine to help you find the exact trick you're looking for. (By July 24, we'd only finished indexing each article going back to June 2006. The last editor of Support Alert, Ian "Gizmo" Richards, started writing the newsletter's articles in July 2002, when he took over from the previous writer, Robert Schifreen.)
Figure 1. Using our free plug-ins, you can now search from your browser for any past article from Support Alert or Windows Secrets — or search all Windows-specific sites via our Google API implementation (notice the last three rows in the image at left).
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A built-in search bar is included in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 and higher. In both browsers, you can easily install as many search plug-ins as you like.
After installing our Support Alert plug-in, you select it in the browser's drop-down search box. Enter your query, click the magnifying-glass icon, and our library search engine does the rest. (The Opera browser doesn't support these plug-ins, but only 0.8% of our site visitors use Opera, according to our server logs.)
You'll see a page of results from past Support Alert articles. Once you're on our search-results page, you can easily expand your search if you don't immediately see the answer to your question.
One of the reasons why Gizmo, our new senior editor, licensed to Windows Secrets all of the past Support Alert content is because we could make it known to a larger audience. By working together, we can notify more than 400,000 combined e-mail subscribers each week about new ways to access this storehouse of data. The Support Alert Newsletter had 150,000 subscribers prior to July 24.
To get our free Support Alert search plug-in, or all three plug-ins, visit our
search engine plug-in page.
Our newest download is based on coding efforts by our program director Tony Johnston and Web developer Damian Wadley.
2. Query everything in Support Alert, Windows Secrets, and LangaList
In addition to the articles that appeared in Support Alert, you can also use our library to find articles from past newsletters published by Windows Secrets and the LangaList. Start at our
search page.
3. Search all Windows-specific sites using our specialized search
If even our combined library of some 10,000 articles isn't enough, you can go wide using our Google API hack. This free service allows you to query every Web site that Google considers to be an "authority" on Microsoft Windows. Start at our
Windows-related search page.
Our Google API tool is laser-focused, but it still includes hundreds of truly useful sites. For this reason, I find that our implementation produces better results on Windows questions than the generic version of Google.com.
What's your experience? Try a few queries and let me know what you think via the Windows Secrets
contact page.
New reviews replace old in our software sidebar
I announced in the first combined newsletter on
July 24
that we'd added to WindowsSecrets.com a "software sidebar."
This new site widget lets you jump to the most recent rankings by the Support Alert Newsletter of the best free and commercial software. These articles, as mentioned above, were licensed to Windows Secrets by Gizmo as part of merging our two newsletters.
I also said that we planned to update the software reviews in the most important of the 100+ categories by the end of 2008.
I'm pleased to say that we're making good progress on re-reviewing every category of free software.
Since May 15, when our new reviewers Scott Spanbauer and Becky Waring started writing for Windows Secrets, we've updated the 16 categories shown in Table 1. Our new senior editor, Gizmo, is now writing 22 new reviews per year in our paid content, too.
Together with associate editor Scott Dunn — and other writers who'll chip in reviews now and then — we should be able to retest every category of software by some time next year.
Table 1. New reviews added to the software sidebar since May 15, 2008.
Check out any of the above reviews on categories of software you're interested in. You can see the entire software sidebar on many of our pages, including our reviews home.
We don't expect to make everyone agree with our rankings, but we do promise that we'll do our best to make them interesting.
Thanks for your support!
Brian Livingston is editorial director of WindowsSecrets.com and the co-author of Windows Vista Secrets and 10 other books.
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