Last week ago I wrote about the big blue bin virus that struck our neigh­bor­hood. While I was pon­der­ing that par­tic­u­lar post over my morn­ing tea I vague­ly remem­bered see­ing some­thing inter­est­ing along the same lines a day or two ago- or rather a pos­si­ble expla­na­tion of the mech­a­nism that caus­es weird behav­iors like putting out big blue bins on the wrong day.

But that’s all I had to go on. That and vague mem­o­ry that the web page had blue stuff on it and that the word “fol­low­ing” was used a lot. Do you see my prob­lem? There’s no way I can craft a set of search terms that’s going to find that out of all the stuff on the entire web.

Where I might have luck find­ing it is in the set of web pages that I had viewed in the pre­vi­ous 3 or 4 days. I have access to a list of those pages in my brows­er his­to­ry. And I could cer­tain­ly nar­row down the list of pos­si­ble pages by search­ing for some words like “behav­ior” and “social” and “fol­low­ing”. That would give me a short list of prob­a­bly 20 or 30 pages. Not a mis­sile at the heart of the prob­lem but a decent enough shot­gun approach that I can prob­a­bly find my nee­dle because the haystack has got­ten a lot small­er. (ouch, that metaphor mixed some­thing fierce.)

But how am I sup­posed to search just those pages? The lit­tle search bar at the top of the his­to­ry side­bar search­es the titles of the pages. Good for find­ing the Com­mon­Craft video that explains wikis in plain eng­lish which has a good descrip­tive page title (and one that I can remem­ber.) but not so good for look­ing for some­thing that I don’t have a word for.

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