Soft As It Gets Help & Support

Right now, I can search and get all the articles that carry a given tag, but the listings are too lengthy to be useful. If I ask to see all the items carrying a particular tag, each item (in the collapsed list) contains four lines.   So if I have 100 items that have that tag, I'd have to read through 400 lines to find the specific article I'm looking for or simply to see what items I have with that tag.  All I really want when I do a search for items with a given tag is is the title of each item, not four lines of information.  Is there (or will there be) a way to set the number of lines that should be shown when I collapse the listing for a given tag?  I strongly hope so, and I would set the number of lines to 1.

Hi Joan,

Thank you for your comment. I recently kick started my first data file in Clibu called Beagle Tips & Tricks. I picked this file for simplicity & none sensitive info. And as with any program there is a modest learning curve.

I have visited this blog site an have looked into your concerns many times. They (your posts) have been very helpful and have given me an "overview" if you will, of some issues in the Clibu cloud app. that I needed to pay attention to.

You seem very focused and organized on how you collect data and through "word association" (first-line) find and organize these snippets. I whole heartedly agree with your concerns on the note title. For some that could be a deal breaker.

I have a post that is as we speak being polished and soon will be published. I'm very much looking forward to your response. I find it very interesting on how creative "collectors" of data use their info for organizing by keywords/tags. PLEASE continue to post your experiences with Clibu! I wish we had more collaborators commenting on their experiments/experiences with Clibu.

Best

Ken Moshier

I appreciate the suggestions that Ken Moshier has made.  However, they don't really meet my needs.  Let me say first of all that most of the material I currently store in Surfulater and that I expect to store in Clibu are articles from newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc., not notes that I have written.  And I save them so that I can refer to them as needed.  I often read the entire piece, not just skim for one bit of information (although I sometimes do that, of course).  Moreover, I generally find that the title of the article as written is adequate as a signal to me of what the piece is about.  I do occasionally edit the title (I'm talking about my experience with Surfulater) to make it shorter or more specific, but generally it's fine as it is. Since the title is only one line long, I can see the titles of MANY articles at a time, and I find this immensely useful, even necessary.  I have no need or desire for more than one line in the list of pieces--even two lines cuts by half the number of pieces I can see at one time in a list.  What I'd like to see in Clibu is a flexible way to set the number of lines that are shown in the list, so that I'd have an OPTION to set the number to 1, and someone else could set it to 2, 3, or 4, depending on his/her needs.  This is very important to me.

 

Re: the discussion on how many title lines are useful. The concern was that too many lines (run-on text) in what many call the "title" (first line of a note) was too confusing and took up too much space etc. 

I recently put up a data file in Clibu on Beagle Tips and Tricks. I picked a very long note that potentially had a lot of keyword & tags and very useful tips. Good information buried deep in a note that normally you would have to read line by line to find. Very time consuming!

I experimented with this concern for about half an hour and this is what I discovered. Below are the 4 lines I currently see in the note. This is the exact copy of the "title".......

Spaying - How Will Spaying Change My Dog?...............Medical Benefits......................Behavioral Changes  >>>>>SpayingYourDog........................Common Myths ..........potential drawbacks ........Don’t Spay Your Dog Until After Her First Heat.......................Letting a Dog Have One Litter Will Calm Her Down......Spaying Is a Quick Fix for All Behavior Problems .......................

As you can see I used a lot of periods to space out the "high-points" of what I wanted to see in the header of this note. The main body text is a couple of lines below so there is some good visual separation in my text. It took about two minutes to create & time well spent.

Personally, I kinda like the way it reads, hope you do to. 

Ken Moshier

I agree with this comment on the "header" list by limiting to 1-2 lines.

Notes with purpose

Name the notes first line with descriptive text & some keywords. This is usually done while in the organizing & proofing stage of note taking. I often re-organize my header\first line content after the "gathering" (note taking binge) stage.

First Line of the Notes: Make your content more concise. A Clibu user reads the "header" (first line) content because he\she needs to find a specific bit of information, therefore we skim the content. We are not going to sit around and read our article\notes word-for-word.

I believe by allowing 1-2 lines in the header should give us more collapsed articles. BTW: I like the roll-up article window.

Ken Moshier

Thanks, Neville.  I'm very happy to hear that the Clibu Browser Extension will capture the Web page title, etc.  I would suggest that in addition to an option for specifying the number of articles displayed per page, there should also be an option for how many lines should be shown when an article is compressed.  That way, I can set the number of lines to 1 and immediately see what each article is about (and can have more articles visible per page).  From a search standpoint, this is really critical.  It may be that other people will prefer to see more lines, which is why an option is so important.

 

Hi Neville.  Thanks for your reply.  As I said in my response to your other response, I make a LOT of use of titles.  I often find them immensely useful, much more so than the beginning of the article, which often is an anecdote or a lead-in to make me interested rather than telling me what the article is about.  When I'm searching through a large number of articles that carry a given tag, I need to know very specifically what each article is about.  Most often, that means I want a title, and I want that title to stand out from the rest of the article.  Needless to say, I agree very strongly with your sense that many people may want to see more than 5 articles per page when the articles are collapsed.  I can easily imagine wanting to see 25 or more articles per page.  That won't be hard if I can limit the collapsed size to one line and have that line be the title.  (I might note that not only can I do this in Surfulater (via the tree), I can also do it in my excellent bookmark manager, Linkman, which uses both categories (like Surfulater) AND keywords (which are more or less like tags).  Linkman has taught me the power of keywords/tags and has made me look forward to Clibu.

Yes, I too hope more people will offer their views.