jump dates categories direct

February 24, 2008 3:16 PM

Is it possible to jump to posts based on a specific date?

I've become interested in cooking lately and have been backtracking through the food and drink section. I've just browsed through posts from the present back to November but continuing this tomorrow means I'll have to hit the Previous Question button about ten or twenty times to get back where I was. Is there a way for me to just directly jump to where I left off? For example, I'd like to be able to view Food and Drink questions posted earlier than such and such date.

posted by gfrobe to Feature Requests at 3:16 PM (13 comments total)

You'll want to try the (sub-site specific) Archives, linked in the header and footer of the page. Get an index by month, and bam!
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:20 PM on February 24, 2008

Askme, Mefi.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:22 PM on February 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Always with the subject specific gags, cortex, always with the subject specific gags.
posted by OmieWise at 3:33 PM on February 24, 2008

Thanks but I'm still missing something. If I click on Archives by Category (say Food and Drink) it lists all F&D archives beginning from present. And if I click on Archives By Date, it lists all Ask questions from that date but not broken down by category. So how would I jump to just Food and Drink questions from Nov?
posted by gfrobe at 3:34 PM on February 24, 2008

You can't do that, actually. It was unclear from your question that you wanted sorted by category and then ordered by date. While having users be able to search within a category's posts is on the to do list, for now you can take a look at the URL structure

http://ask.metafilter.com/category/12?page=2

And basically change it to suit your purpose sort of. This isn't perfect since new posts will be added at some clip but you should be able to have some idea if you've seen a post before.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:46 PM on February 24, 2008

Have you checked out Eatme? It's a collection of food based Metafilter posts.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:12 PM on February 24, 2008

Jessamyn's got the right solution. And in case it's not crystal clear, just change the page= value to whichever page you'd like to skip to. So, you're clicking 10 or 20 times, your url is
http://ask.metafilter.com/category/12?page=11 or
http://ask.metafilter.com/category/12?page=21.
Hope that helps.

For the record, when attempting something similar recently in the MetaTalk archives I found that you can just change the url for the desired number of results given. I worked my way up from the bottom of this one:
http://metatalk.metafilter.com/thread.cfm?category_ID=5&lastweek=2000
posted by carsonb at 4:47 PM on February 24, 2008

carsonb, that metatalk hack only works because I used to stuff the number posts you wanted grabbed in the URL, which we don't do anywhere else.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 5:24 PM on February 24, 2008

Yeah, it looks like the MeTa archives are rather unique in the way they're set up. They still work fine. =) Though as far as I can tell the categories are only accessible by clicking on a post's byline.
posted by carsonb at 6:31 PM on February 24, 2008

continuing this tomorrow means I'll have to hit the Previous Question button about ten or twenty times to get back where I was. Is there a way for me to just directly jump to where I left off?

Yeah, save yourself a bookmark/favourite in your browser with the archive page that you've got to. Then, tomorrow, you can jump back to it, and pick up where you left off. Repeat.
posted by chrismear at 11:05 PM on February 24, 2008

gfrobe has a couple of years to perfect his/her culinary skills before MeFi's 10th anniversary. Perhaps it could be at his/her house. Oh, UK. Never mind.
posted by Cranberry at 11:21 PM on February 24, 2008

Thanks all. Pancakes are on me.
posted by gfrobe at 11:24 PM on February 24, 2008

literally? 'cause that would be kind of weird (and fun?)
posted by philomathoholic at 10:17 AM on February 26, 2008