Accessing the scan of existing posted URLS

April 4, 2008 2:13 AM

My blushes at making a duplicate post to the blue have been spared more than once by the code which scans my proposed URLs and looks to see it there is an existing match. Phew! However I have only ever found a way of accessing this facility after having first of all composed a post to the point where I can preview it - hence wasting quite a lot of time. Is there a way to access this scan directly?
posted by rongorongo to feature requests at 2:13 AM (19 comments total)

. . .

What is stopping you from just hitting preview before composing the whole post?
posted by finite at 2:35 AM on April 4, 2008

Yeah, I always just whack the URL(s) in, then hit Preview before I even think about writing the post.
posted by jack_mo at 2:45 AM on April 4, 2008

A tip I gleaned from the still-useful Crunchland Method.
posted by jack_mo at 2:48 AM on April 4, 2008 [5 favorites]

Just put the URL in the search facility.
posted by tellurian at 2:52 AM on April 4, 2008

There is nothing stopping me from following this advice. However by the time I have got round the writing a post I will have done some preliminary checks to see if the some of the key words or tags I am going to be using have appeared before. For example I had been looking at some of Mike Stimpson's photographic recreations in Lego and was considering posting about them before discovering that Slithy_Tove had beaten me to it. My preliminary search on the term "Stimpson" or "Lego" had not unearthed this post so I assumed it was OK to put together a draft post.

Searching MeFi for the URL in question directly returns no match either. It would be nice if it did.
posted by rongorongo at 3:04 AM on April 4, 2008

Thank you, jack_mo, that was very helpful.
posted by Marie Mon Dieu at 3:06 AM on April 4, 2008

rongo: Type just the links and tags you want to use and then hit preview; the function will tell you if it's been done before.

Also, the post you're looking for is the first result for lego on the tag view.
posted by flatluigi at 3:43 AM on April 4, 2008

Re: Crunchland Method.

"BoingBoing and Memepool may
be popular, but that makes them mainstream -- anything on BoingBoing
will be on a billion other websites within 3 hours. That means it
definitely doesn't need to be on Metafilter."

I have no desire to read BoingBoing, and is Memepool even still around? I disagree with "doesn't need to be on MetaFilter."

"Start with a blogger"

Ugh, no. No one should ever start anything with a blogger, except for a delicious facepunching. The best posts don't often come from blogs, but a lot of the worst ones do. And if it's from a blogger, isn't that similar to pulling from BB? What is the readership threshhold that makes an FPP necessary or "doesn't need to be on MetaFilter"?

I don't disagree with the rest of it, but wow, is that first bit a bit of navelgazing blogocentric circlejerkery. I'll allow that it works for some people, but it seems to actually engender NewsFilter and discourage obscurity. It also doesn't allow for users who prefer other kinds of content. A lot of good posts don't come from pre-packaged blog content. MeFi's not a race or a contest:

"As I write this, the number of my front page posts hovers at nearly 375
topics. This makes me one of the more prolific front page posters on
Metafilter"

More content is not necessarily better content. This isn't an attack on any of crunchland's posts. But it seems to be in contradiction with:

"The best threads on metafilter are when you raise a subject, and all the
other people bring something to it. That gets stifled when every other
message is posted by you."

Shouldn't you, by extension, allow others to post and bring things to the table for discussion? Deluging MetaFilter with repetitive blog-eat-blog content and discouraging other kinds of posts (even passively) is not much different from shouting down other comments on your post.
posted by Eideteker at 7:29 AM on April 4, 2008

I disagree with "doesn't need to be on MetaFilter."

Me too. In fact, my last post attracted a fair amount of "It was on B-B" criticism, but that's not where I saw it, and the post also attracted a fair amount of appreciation from other members. The fact that you read B-B every day and know everything that's on it does not mean the rest of us do, and the appearance of an item there does not automatically make it common knowledge.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 7:53 AM on April 4, 2008

I think we should refrain from critiquing the crunchland method. It hails from an older, brighter time: when posters still aspired to some sort of standard for putting material on the front page. A lot of its recommendations were intended for the kind of people who wouldn't simply post a link to an nbc marketing page as the entirety of a post. There are many bad posting styles that we accept nowadays that crunchland advised against back when people would ask themselves if what they intended to post was actually The Best of the Web. It's pointless to speak out against it, now. It's a neat piece of history, a look into the time when people joined metafilter for more than just askme.
posted by shmegegge at 8:44 AM on April 4, 2008

There may be a way to search in Google using "site:___" and "link:___".
posted by neuron at 8:45 AM on April 4, 2008

Actually, these days it's true. There really aren't very many link blogs left. J-walk, Boing-boing, blort... and, as you point out, memepool is dead. But back when I wrote that (maybe it was 2004?), there were lots of link blogs around, and if you managed to find one that didn't echo all of the common ones, you could often find links that no one here had ever seen. That's why I recommended finding foreign link blogs, because they often had stuff that didn't pop up on the usual channels here. Nowadays, though, it's a desert. Lots of bloggers, yes, but most of them are topic specific, and posting their own opinions -- food blogs, politics blogs, poetry blogs. Yech, at least as far as link mining goes.

I still think it's lazy to pull a link from boingboing and post it here. I still cringe when I see a "via" that goes there. I mean, come on. That's just phoning it in.
posted by Dave Faris at 9:25 AM on April 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

Do boingboing readers ever complain about stuff that gets posted on boingboing from metafilter?
posted by slimepuppy at 10:04 AM on April 4, 2008

boingboing readers complain about EVERYTHING.
posted by shmegegge at 10:31 AM on April 4, 2008

Are you sure that memepool is dead? Historically, it lies dormant for months on end, only to sit bolt-upright and jibber for a few moments before falling back into its coma. I'm not willing to declare it dead until... well, let's give it a year without updates, shall we? Four months does not a death make, though it is the longest hiatus so far.
posted by mumkin at 11:22 AM on April 4, 2008

Well, their site says: "copyright © 1998 - 200666666", so it's obvious to me that they've simply gone far, far into the future. Once we catch up, regular updates will resume as a matter of course.
posted by Eideteker at 11:29 AM on April 4, 2008

n-thing jack_mo's suggestion. Collecting links before writing the post and slapping them into the New-Post fields has saved me much effort in the past. Also, doing a thorough MeFi search before launching into the collecting-info phase.
posted by not_on_display at 11:37 AM on April 4, 2008

Blogspot: No one should ever start anything with a blogger, except for a delicious facepunching.
posted by loiseau at 3:08 PM on April 4, 2008

...and presto, while Metafilter is off getting a well-deserved massage, memepool proves that it yet lives, with links to a b3ta interview of the guy who coded MS Solitaire and his favorite boobie-evaluating game.
posted by mumkin at 1:55 PM on April 18, 2008