A way to search the forum archive titles

While the search feature of the forum is broken, here is another way to search for topics of interest. The following URL opens a web page with links to the titles of the posts in the "How Do I ..." section.

http://www.alice.org/community/archi....php/f-16.html

It seems to be current and is probably more up to date than Google.

By playing around with the number following the "f-", you can access other sections of the forum. For example, the following URL will access the "Share Worlds" section, and it is completely up to date as of this writing.

http://www.alice.org/community/archi...x.php/f-6.html

This will only allow you to search for keywords in the titles of posts, but for the time being, that is better than not being able to search at all. Once you access the page, you can use the "search this page" feature of your browser to search for a keyword.

Of course, you can accomplish the same thing by using your browser to search for keywords in the pages as displayed in the forum format (the "f-nn" numbers are in the URLs at the tops of the pages). Where things really get interesting is once you identify the URL for all the pages that contain titles, it wouldn't be difficult to write a Java or C# program that could be scheduled to run periodically, searching for a list of keywords in those titles and notifying you when a match is found.

With a little more effort, the program could be made to search the bodies of the postings for the words in the list of keywords.

By using regular expressions, the searching capability of the program could be made very sophisticated.

That would make a good student project for those students who have progressed beyond Alice into a stronger and more versatile programming language such as Java or C#.

Dick Baldwin
Free Alice tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm
Free programming tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/toc.htm