searching the cow…..small rant, then discussion suggested

[Walter Biscardi]

[David Roth Weiss] “Since most who read them aren’t from Hollywood or even thinking making the move, is it okay for them to get to offended? Not that they should, I’m just trying to follow the logic…”

It means if you get easily offended or take things personally that aren’t meant personally, then you should probably consider another career.

I’ve been in many an edit session where I’ve been insulted, yelled at and otherwise verbally abused when the deadline is in 60 seconds but when all is said and done, we shake hands with the understanding that stress and deadlines causes people to say and do things they don’t really mean. If you can’t accept that, then this industry is probably not for you.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!

[David Roth weiss]

That was an insider’s joke Walter. Shane and I know the secret jokes, the handshakes, and all that stuff.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Abraham Chaffin]

Great stuff –

I like the feedback and to hear from anyone who has ways to improve the mechanisms here. Many of the things that have been presented have been added from all your feedback. Like the little search field that shows on every page in the forums now was contributions of Jeremy G
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/1/855585#855585

Many things have been added to help users find relevant content to what they’re looking for. For instance the related threads on each post such as

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/988943
or
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/988898

Which under the post has related threads that are relevant to the subject. This of course is hit and miss. The mechanism simply takes the subject and tries to find other subjects that are similar but it’s a good place to check.

The COW Wiki is something we’ve had on the back burner for well over a year. It came to the front and we worked on it for awhile but many questions arose as to what direction to take it and how to get the ball rolling in the right direction.

The search mechanisms are continuously evolving and being developed to maintain speed, relevance and usability. Recently two upgrades were made to the search engine to increase performance and depth. For some people these upgrades may seem like down grades unfortunately, just like any search engine. When Google changes it’s algorithm some people pay hard while others win big. Just recently Alexa updated their functions and the COW jumped up about 3,000 positions.

The sticky posts are easily added and I’m sure will be part of this forum and maybe others very soon. It just takes someone to build the post. When it is built I’m sure it will grow with more contributions from all of you.

Contributions are greatly appreciated as more heads on a problem are always better. Feel free to contact one of us and let us know in the Feedback Forum or directly.
https://www.creativecow.net/contact_us.html

Lately we’ve been trying to maintain the sites ability to support its traffic. Our traffic continues to grow which requires more servers and upgrading our existing servers. This has been the biggest project and most time consumption has been there in the last few months. We brought in 4 new servers and a load balancer and have been working on getting the kinks worked out of them while keeping the site online. In the next couple weeks we’ll be upgrading a few other machines as well as our UPSs.

Thanks for this discussion and the part you play in making the COW a better place!

Abraham

[Steven Gonzales]

As Fred Allen pointed out, you have to be tough in Hollywood:

“You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a firefly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.”

Fred Allen
Radio comedian (1894 – 1956)

[Ed Dooley]

My favorite Hollywood book is “Hello, He Lied”
Ed

[Bob Cole]

Abraham, thanks for the reply. Great work on the site.

I’m just curious about whether you can offer some search tips, to cut down on the “false positives” — that is, the number of replies that aren’t relevant. Boolean search terms? “Result must include all terms,” or “Negative terms” (e.g. if “Bob Cole” appears, don’t list it in the result).

Again, great work and many thanks.

Bob Cole

[Abraham Chaffin]

Right now we actually have 3 search engines that search the forums. More actually but these are the ones that users can use to search:

https://forums.creativecow.net/search.php
This one searches the forums and the library and is used just from the Google Toolbar / Browser Toolbar.
See info on it here:
https://newsletters.creativecow.net/newsletters/2007/09-05/index.html#tip
It supports boolean and searches – This was designed for newer users to find articles as well since many of the answers people are looking for are in the library.

https://forums.creativecow.net/forums_search.php
This one just searches the forums and uses MySQL’s fulltext boolean search function. It filters of course before the search but is full boolean support. You can use quotes + and –
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-boolean.html

https://forums.creativecow.net/forums_search_old.php
This one is a deeper search but is rather slow and sometimes even times out. If forums_search.php doesn’t get results it automatically bounces you to this one now and uses that mechanism. Quotes is supported but not plus or minus at this time.

Tips for better search results – Use the drop downs. Sort by is a key drop down to use. I personally believe in relevance searches but whatever sort will help you find what you’re looking for is up to you.

The forums_search_old.php mechanism was built when our database and searches were being run off of the same server that runs the forums and was causing some slowdowns. Now we have a dedicated MySQL server and are planning on adding another so they are load balanced. While this won’t be up to the level of Google’s ability yet =o , as was mentioned earlier, it should give us the ability to create a more sophisticated algorithm and throw more processes at the databases.

Google does love to crawl our site and it’s setup to give the crawler as much access as possible. So while I do believe the COW search engines will probably find what you’re looking for better than Google =) Feel free to Google a search like
“site:creativecow.net Final Cut Pro”

Abraham

[Rennie Klymyk]

[Peter Wiggins] “Cow-Wiki?

or would that be WikiCow? “

How about this:

“How Now Brown Cow”

“thou can not stir a flower without crumbling a star” ……Henry Wadsworth Longfellow