Dead Carrot

The Carrot2 search-engine appears to be kaput. It’s been down for days now, unable to show results. Multiple different browers, on different systems, even different VPNs, give no results. A query can be input, but… no results. Even a TOR browser can’t get it to respond. Such a pity, it was so promising.

The worthless Peter Lowe ad-blocking list

The Peter Lowe ad-blocking list is obviously now worthless, due to its over-reach and scattergun blocking of all sorts of legitimate things. Back in June I found it blocking Harvard. I’ve since found all sorts of similar blocks on things that should not be blocked. I’ve unsubscribed my browser’s ad-blocker addon from the Peter Lowe list, and I suggest that you also consider doing so.

Carrot2 search – a new script for multi-column results

The Carrot2 search-engine has changed both URL and layout. It was at search.carrot2.org/stable/search and it’s now just at the search.carrot2.org URL. I guess the public-facing search may have come out of beta? This is what their new layout looks like…

Not good, on a widescreen desktop monitor.

Which means I’ve made another custom CSS for it. This slices the Carrot into a multi-column layout suited to a widescreen 1920px monitor. It works in the Stylus browser addon, and you need to tell the script to target the search.carrot2.org site

Yum, crunchy Carrot! All the z-depths are set up nicely, so you can still click on/in the filters and search box.

I like to read the URLs in search-results and so I’ve turned them dark green and wrapped them to make this possible. The results look good with URLs that line-wrap by up to three lines. But it’s unavoidable that some very long URLs will wrap over four lines, and will thus spill over the element below.

In most cases there should be no need for any scrolling.

It only works in Day mode, with the Carrot’s new toggle-able Night and Day mode…

If you want a night mode, you’ll have to manually change the colour chips to a charcoal black on…

body, body.light {

and

div.ResultList

The other drawback is that whereas the old multi-column fix showed about 25-30 results, now we’re down to about 16. If you want it up to 20+ add the following code…


.ResultClusters {
display: none;
}


There’s also the lack of a “more…” button, but this usefully forces the user to use the Carrot’s innovative faceting systems over in the left-hand pane.

---

To install my fix, simply go to Carrot2, then left-click on your icon for the Stylus browser addon and click “Write style for…”.

Then paste in this…


/* ==== CARROT2 - Multi-Columns v.02 Oct 2019 ==== */
/* run this Stylus script on search.carrot2.org */
div.document div.url {
overflow: hidden;
color: #3a7730;
font-size: 110%;
}
body, body.light {
background-color: #ece5db;
}
.ResultList > div > a > span.url {
color: #3f7126;
font-size: 80%;
font-weight: bold;
white-space: pre; /* CSS 2.0 */
white-space: pre-wrap; /* CSS 2.1 */
white-space: pre-line; /* CSS 3.0 */
white-space: -pre-wrap; /* Opera 4-6 */
white-space: -o-pre-wrap; /* Opera 7 */
white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; /* Mozilla */
white-space: -hp-pre-wrap; /* HP Printers */
word-wrap: break-word; /* IE 5+ */
}
a {
font-size: 100%;
}
.SearchForm {
z-index:20;
}
div.ResultList {
z-index:4;
position:absolute;
background-color: #ece5db;
padding-top: 180px;
top:0;
bottom:0;
right:0;
column-count: 5;
width: 70%
}
.ResultList > div > a >div {
font-size: 80%;
}
div.sources {
padding-top: 25px;
}
div.ClusterList {
background-color: #ece5db;
padding-top: 10px;
column-count: 2;
}
div.clusters-tabs {
width: 40%
}
div.clusters {
z-index:4;
width: 50%
}


Tested in Opera, which is a browser that runs on Chrome. It will probably work with other CSS style injectors.

Be warned that Carrot2 will perma-block an entire IP address (in the case of BT in the UK, or VPNs, that can mean hundreds of thousands of users) if it detects “excessive traffic”.

WordPress to ebook – without plugins

Needed: an easy three-click “WordPress to ebook” service that works on any free WordPress.com blog account. Such a thing doesn’t currently seem to exist. I can only find ebook plugins for install on third-party hosted installs of WordPress, or which need WordPress.com’s £240 per year Business account upgrade (which allows use of plugins).

Button-holed

The Google CSE team is obviously updating with some tweaked code, on the front-end of the Custom Search Engines (CSEs).

As a result, JURN’s custom “click to search button” has become a small generic-looking one done in .SVG code. This is smaller and tighter than I’d like, and has replaced JURN’s nice custom .JPG button.

This “click to search” button still works fine, so it’s only an aesthetic change…

I’ll leave it a few days before jiggling the CSS to try to get the custom button back, just in case Google decides to revert the changes.

GRAFT updates

GRAFT has updated with a new batch of repository URLs added. Search across full-text and records alike, in 4,723 repositories.

JURN pagination links fixed

In the last week or so Google has made some slight changes to the default styling templates for CSEs, resulting in the numbered pagination links at the foot of the search results becoming very small and grey. This has now been fixed on JURN, and your per-page links to more search results should now look like this. They should be far more easily selectable now, and especially for touch-screen users…

My thanks to Amit Agarwal of India, for the elegant snippet of commented CSS for the .gsc-cursor-page element. If you have the same problem with your own CSE, this snippet goes in the style header of your page. Colours are controlled elsewhere, in the ‘Look & Feel’ | Customise | Refinement section of your CSE admin dashboard.

Changes may not show up until you and your users refresh your main page a few times, due to Web browser caching.

GRAFT has also had the same fix applied.

---

Update:

Also add padding for the pagination row, by adding the following to your CSS style (I have mine in the page itself)…

Search serendipity

An example of the strange ways in which search serendipity can (and often does) work…

Ahead of the release of Zbrush 2019, I was searching for “npr” 3d shader in: Google Search | ‘Last Month’.

On the second page of results, I discover the ‘moved and lost from JURN a year ago’ archive of the RAF’s Air Power journals.

A search for “npr” 3d shader has nothing to do with the British Royal Air Force. ‘NPR’ being non-photorealistic rendering with ‘3D’ computer models that have been fitted with ‘shader’ materials, to make them look like hand-drawn cartoons when they’re rendered into graphical form. The results were arising because the same keywords were shared.

Air Power et al will be back in JURN soon.

NME 1978-1984 as digital scans – where?

The NME. Was there ever a weekly publication that had such a perfect confluence of writers, attitude, cultural flux, zeitgeist, popular mass appeal, content and photography? But where can one find scans of the NME music paper in its ‘golden era’ 1978-1984 run, from the Winter of Discontent to the defeat of the Miners’ Strikes?

Sadly it appears there’s still no facsimile archive, and copies sell for £10 per weekly issue on eBay. At 2019, here’s my run-through of the options:

1. The Rock’s Back Pages archive website appears to have full-text for the NME‘s ‘most important’ reviews and interviews from that period, though stripped of their inky grandeur and surrounding context and strapped into a mundane generic Web page format. As if the plain text was all that was important about such a monumental cultural and historical artefact. Back Pages appears to be pitched mainly at subscribing universities, and apparently about half in the UK currently have a subscription. Personal subscriptions are available, but cost £150 a year or £70 for three months. Even the ‘free’ articles require registration to view…

2. The British Library appeared to have facsimile page scans of the NME for 1946-2000 until about 2013, when a blog post appeared touting their “Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive 1880-2000, an “exclusive database”. But even then you could only access it in person at their London reading room. In the Archive’s current format, the NME appears to have been removed from the titles list (see the full spreadsheet for the Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive).

3. The pirates don’t seem to have yet filled the resulting public void, with their own torrent of complete scans of vintage copies of the NME. Possibly the oversized nature of the weekly newsprint NME is rather offputting, requiring a large scanner. Nor would the likely fragility of the newsprint encourage use of an automated sheet-feeder. Nor do scans of individual copies seem to have quietly filtered into Archive.org.

4. What about a CD set of scans, perhaps issued pre-Internet in the 1990s? No, that doesn’t seem to have happened.

That appears to be the state of play in 2019.

Glamorous GAL

There’s a new type of Creative Commons / GPL -like content licence. The General Asset License Information (GAL) is specifically for… “digital assets, shared or sold with the intent of being used within larger works”. Think low-poly 3D models for building new videogames with, that sort of thing.

As I read it (and I’m not a lawyer), GAL is not for final works. Rather it permits use of what the digital entertainment production industries often call ‘assets’, ‘content’, ‘merchant resources’, ‘stock’, and similar terms. A videogame partly made with GAL assets could be sold commercially and protected as a commercial product in the market. Even while the GAL parts of the game remained free for others to re-use again under GAL. The GAL seems to be aimed at allowing a creative maker to be generous with their free content, without forcing them to go to CC-BY or CC0. Presumably GAL content would not be purloined, aggregated and sold on by the Alamy-like companies, since GAL would only permit re-use as a part of a larger indivisible whole product.

Looks good to me.