More good threads:
http://www.quiltingboard.com/vintage...y-t236275.html
and
http://www.quiltingboard.com/vintage...s-t243276.html

I don't think I could begin to come up with all of the really good threads on my own in one sitting.

woohoo! thanks!

Fuzzykittenbutt! Your name makes me giggle. :-)

*giggle* *Snort* How did you know we got snow AGAIN today? ;)

I guessed since it is unseasonably cold here... you do have a good blog... snicker.

Packing a vintage machine
 

Was started by SteveH information on packing a machine to send it by post.

Google Search info...
 

30 second primer......


Google crawls the web reading and logging as much as it can about the various websites it finds. EVERY word.


When you do a search it compares that search to it's database of info. It is not actually "looking all over the web" when you search, it is just looking in it's database.


If I say search for sites with "all about me" (without the quotes) It will find the database records with the most "matches" to each individual word in the search. NOT in that order or even together. So the above search term would find the page in it's database with the highest count of the words "me" "about" and "all". a lot of people give computers more credit than they deserve. For example, in the above search, the computer has no "understanding" of the term "me". If i wanted to really do that search I would type the phrase (about "Steve Heeter") without the parentheses. the quotes tell the system to look for EXACTLY what is in between the quotes IN THAT ORDER AND CASE.


There is a LOT more that can be done to make searches "smarter" like putting a + in front of word that says this word is more important that the others and MUST be on the site for it to be shown, whereas without it is only gets as close a match as it can. You can use a - symbol to say find sites without this word... i.e. Sewing machine resources -Singer would give a reply that is less Singer oriented that without the -Singer part.


Definitely not as simple as some folks think.


Getting replies is the EASY part, weeding out the unwanted replies is the tricky part.


One last note. the first few replies are usually paid sponsored replies so look over the whole first page of results before clicking on the links

These are 2 of my favorites:
http://mysewingmachineobsession.blogspot.it/
http://vssmb.blogspot.ca/

Also worth noting is that Bing sometimes gets different results than Google does and sometimes they're relevant with less of the advertising stuff. The same rules that Steve posted should work on Bing as well.

For instance: Searching for Singer Factory St Jean sur Richelieu in each search engine:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=Singer+...ZI&form=MOZSBR
https://www.google.ca/search?q=Singe...+sur+Richelieu

Sorry Montreal is on the brain as it looks like I'm headed there at the end of the month for 3 days. I was hoping to pop by the site of the plant but it looks like there's no point. It's condos now. :(

Narrowing down your Google search to match a web site
 

You can tell Google to only show you results from a particular site or sites.

For example, here is how I showed my students this afternoon how to search for info on store cards and narrow it down to only include Australian web sites:

"store cards" site:.au

This means search for the string in that order and only with a space in between, the site: bit means only show results for web sites that end in .au

If you want to search using Google but only search QB, you'd add "site:www.quiltingboard.com". The possibilities extend to anything in between. For Aus Gov't sites "site:.gov.au" etc.

Told the students (VCAL numeracy) it was probably the most useful thing they would ever learn in my subject :thumbup:

Hey Mike! That's a good tip, I like that one (I always forget to use it though for some reason, so thanks for helping me rediscover it!) but it can be a little pollution high. If you search for a particular topic on a site, you may find hundreds of hits returned for what amounts to roughly a half dozen pages that have lots of tags. That said, it IS nice to have to wade through this kind of pollution rather than the completely irrelevant stuff. :)

ex. I think there are about 8 relevant posts on tension on my,... er... Arctic's blog...;)
if I search tension on the site:
https://www.google.ca/search?q=tensi...haicarcane.com
I get 170 hits.

There are 98 posts on the site in total.

ETA: OK, my search says that there are 37 posts with the word tension in them... apparently there's a little stress in my life? ;)