List of Common Item Types/Tags

Manually Tailoring Searches (list of tags included)

Written for Raven's Twine Tutorials: http://www.twine.com/twine/raven-s-twine-tutorials

This technique of manually creating search-strings was originally posted in Bookmark Customized Twine Searches to Boost Productivity; a tutorial on how to categorize twines using browser bookmarks & Twine's search. This is the follow up, providing means of manually overriding the blue search tags when they don't show the exact results you want. We do this using the tags that pop up in the search strings. This includes the tags to include (for example) authors, twines, text strings, types, sort order & dates and date ranges.

An example is tailoring comments made by Hrafn Thorisson (me) and another user. If one of the names does not pop up as a tag, there's a manual way to create the search.

Let's first put our Twinerian (White) Hacker Hat on and take a look at the URL describing comments made by me:

http://www.twine.com/search?view=&type=Comment&author=hthorisson

Now, say you want to search & subscribe to results that include my comments and Bent Rasmussens, but the blue tags are not recommending his name. In this case you can manually add the author tag and Bent's username, xosfaere, to the end of the string:

&author=hthorisson": http://www.twine.com/search?view=&type=Comment&author=hthorisson&author=xosfaere

You can knit these kinds of combinations for any item types or twines & the following section presents some of the main tags to do this.

List of Common Item Types/Tags

(Do not include the [brackets]).

• &author=[usernames] -- items created by [username]
• &spot=[nameoftwine] -- items contained in the specified twine.
• &text=[text] -- basic search string.
• &type=[itemtype] -- type of items: [bookmark, comment, image, video, member, note, person, twine]
• &start=[number] -- Start x many items into the results. Example: &start=10 starts 10 items into results.
• &sort=[relevance] -- Sort Order: [relevance, most-recent, most-recently-changed, alphabetical-a-to-z, alphabetical-z-to-a]
• &created=[year]-[month]-[day] -- The date of creation (Include dashes but not the brackets. See example in Working with Dates & Date Ranges below).
• &created=[year]-[month]-[day]-[year]-[month]-[day] -- Date range of creation (Include dashes, but not the brackets. See more in Working with Dates & Date Ranges below).

Note that "type" allows many different options. However, some of the item types (e.g. People & Places) use the markup "annotation=" followed by a more complex unique IDs. An example: "&annotation=radar%3A%2F%2Fs5n4gnp-21r" is the ID for the organization Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While this makes it harder for us to manually tailor search strings, it's still possible to find unique IDs for items and copy paste them. And, the item types listed above will probably prove more than enough in use case scenarios.

Working With Dates and Date Ranges

Dates are tags that need special attention:

&created=[year]-[month]-[day] Example: &created=2008-03-21

This will give you all items created on March 21st. But we can do better than that. Try this:

Example: &created=2008-03-18-2008-03-21

That gives us everything created between March 18th and March 21st. Neat, eyh?

Mystery Tags

Here are a couple I haven't had time to properly examine.

• added=[(on-off)] -- Appears to eliminate duplicate items if you use 'on' as a parameter.
• type=basic -- Don't know what it does. Found in auto generated code on Interest Feed page.

See also

• Facyla's Some Twine URL: http://www.twine.com/item/115hxwc5d-3p2/some-twine-url
• Bent Rasmussen's user page: http://www.twine.com/user/xosfaere