Once you get to know and use Twine, you'll start to use some twines more often than others. Quite likely, there will be twines you visit everyday, every other day, every week, occasionally.

If you feel overwhelmed by the flow of information that quickly piles up with connections and twines on your back, it's tempting to dump the "occasional twines" to manage the flow. But Don't Panic! You can use your browser to improve twine's usability in this regard.

I've already mentioned that Search is a real powertool around here. Use it to create perfect result pages that you can then bookmark and visit in two clicks. I'll call them Quick Knits (Going with the metaphor here).

Here's what a Quick Knit bookmark folder can look like (created specifically for simple demoing):




These are simply bookmarked search results for Items and Twines that I visit often. These allow me to get an overview of all twine activity for a specific subject, or all my managed twines, etc — and in two or three clicks!

Firefox & Safari both offer bookmark folders in the toolbar (and I'm sure IE has it as well, and other big browsers). You can also subscribe to search results via RSS — but you'll need a feed reader that handles passwords while Twine is still in a private beta.

Here are the same links in clickable format so you can see the filter settings:

• AI Twines (all twines tagged with artificial intelligence)
• Twines I Manage (twines you manage)
• Design (tag+twine)
• Recent Comments (all comments in your realm)
• Metaverse (multiple twines+keyword — remove the keyword to get all items from the specified twines)

Note that I created these just for example. More realistic versions of these would probably be best served warm and more personalized. That's where knowing how to manually control the search comes in handy — see below.

Tailor More Specific Searches in Subfolders

You can create subfolders containing more specific Quick Knits. For example, a search only for comments made by David & Nova.

Power Tip: The blue tag recommendations are intended to help you browse; but can act up when trying to tailor a result page like this (ie. not suggesting the things you want).

But let's put our Twinerian Hacker Hat on and take a look at the URL:

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

If you want to a page that includes my comments, Nova's and David's, but the blue tags are not displaying the name — you can manually add the author tag and my username to the end of the string: "&author=hthorisson" — actual link for Hrafn, David & Nova comments.

You can knit these kinds of combinations for any item types or twines.

(By the way, a Twinerian Hacker Hat looks like an old wizard's hat, with the Twine logo/network pattern. Just in case you were wondering.)

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