My apologies if this is a redundant post--I've searched the HB and found similar ideas, but nothing this simple and straightforward.
Let's say you want to check out the profile page of a 'Baker who hasn't been around in awhile; you can't remember their email, or there was something funny in their profile and you can't remember the exact wording, whatever. Instead of hunting through old posts trying to find one of theirs, or one they annotated (what _is_ the past tense of 'anno', anyway?), you could just type their username into the profile search and Presto!, there they are.
All the other ideas along this vein seem overcomplicated or not in keeping with HB philosophy--suggesting profile annos, ranking systems, heirarchical bs, etc.
I don't really expect this one to fly, considering it would mean more work for our exalted leaders and would further complicate one of the most beautifully simple secret grottoes of the Internet. But I just thought I'd run it up the flagpole.-- Alterother, Oct 16 2011 E.g. searching for your username, [alterother] http://www.google.c...2Fuser%20alterotherthe URL here is encoded, but is the same format as in my anno [swimswim, Oct 16 2011, last modified Oct 18 2011] Include the "site:" search operator in a Google search and it should do the trick. So your Google search box would include the following:
site:www.halfbakery.com/user searchTerm01 searchTerm02
...Including as many searchTerms as you like.
Is this what you're looking for? It's not embeded in the HB though.-- swimswim, Oct 16 2011 who are you trying to stalk ?-- FlyingToaster, Oct 16 2011 //who are you trying to stalk ? //
You, of course.
Actually, I didn't have anyone particular in mind. It just sort of occurred to me out of the blue.
Thanks, [swimswim]. I'll try it.-- Alterother, Oct 16 2011 I don't get it. When you type in a user name in the search thingy, you get links to their idea and can just click on the name right there and be directed to the profile. Easy and fast.-- zeno, Oct 16 2011 For some reason it doesn't always work that way. For example, you may get the most recent mentions of that user's name by other 'Bakers, or a hit on a post that has an anno of theirs halfway down a thread as long as your arm. Yes, you can get where you want to go, but I'm suggesting a shorter route. Since [swimswim]'s suggested method appears to work quite well (I've given it a half-dozen test runs using names of 'Bakers past), mine appears to be moot, but I'm game to sit here and hash it out anyway.-- Alterother, Oct 16 2011 The internal search results are sorted by number of occurrences of the search term. For those halfbakers who don't incessantly talk about themselves in the third person on their homepage, that may not be the best possible order. Maybe I should just artifically move the user page (if you're searching for the name) to the top of the list?-- jutta, Oct 16 2011 Probably not, since [The Alterother] is one of the worst of those obnoxious bores. At least he refers to himself in the singular form.
Like I said, I really wasn't looking for anyone in particular, it's just something I've noticed in the past... Actually, I think it was when I was trying to find your profile, [jutta], in order to read a quote from your famous collection to The Good Fairy Jenny. It took me longer than fifteen seconds to find it, which is just damned inconvenient.-- Alterother, Oct 16 2011 good god, now I've read it all...-- po, Oct 16 2011 FWIW, the difference is that the Google method searches profile pages exclusively, either for the username _or_ for content on profile pages. Moving the profile page to the top of the HB search results, as Jutta suggested, accompishes the profile-by-username lookup but not the exclusive searching of profile page contents. Meh -- I can't imagine there would be many people searching profile page content anyway.-- swimswim, Oct 16 2011 random, halfbakery