Mastering Gather: The SiteWizard™ for Friday, 02/08

As discussed in prior SiteWizard articles, content searching on Gather can often return unintended results, unless your search contains very specific search terms. Knowing the techniques for refining your search request can dramatically improve the accuracy of your content search.

For example, if you are looking for book reviews on Gather, and do not know the exact spelling of the author's name, you may need to perform multiple searches using different spelling variations. Even then, it is possible that you won't locate existing content on Gather related to your search.

Fortunately, by using 'wildcards', you can find articles and other content very easily on Gather, even when you know only a portion of the word you are looking for. A wildcard can be used to substitute for another character, or series of characters. This is useful when you aren't certain how a word is spelled, or whether another form of a word was used by an author. One of these wildcards, the asterisk (*), substitutes for a series of characters within a search word.

Wildcards can be used in any search term, including tags, title, and group name.

Here are two examples of how to use the asterisk [ * ] wildcard:

Searching for book reviews by Dean Koontz can be entered as:

book AND review AND k*z

This will return articles containing the words book, review, and any word beginning with the letter k and ending with a z. Similarly, searching for the member Mike Abrashoff can be entered as:

mike ab*f

Tomorrow's Tip ...streamlining photo essay creation.

"I belong to many groups, and I try to only publish to the groups that relate to my content...but the group selection process is very time consuming, and occasionally I end up clicking the wrong group by mistake, or missing one. Is there a better way to choose groups when I publish?"

Yes, there is!

In fact, you can easily categorize the groups on the publishing page, and quickly publish to ONLY those groups with just three clicks of your mouse! -- You'll never miss publishing to one of your groups again, and you'll also reduce the possibility of accidentally publishing to the wrong group(s).

The technique works equally as well in Firefox or Internet Explorer, and there is even a Mac solution. You can establish as many group categories as you like (cooking, photography, etc.), and publishing to these groups takes only seconds for all content types on Gather.

Tune in to tomorrow's edition for complete details and step-by-step instructions.

Gather currently provides several email notification options, which can be set or adjusted on your account settings page. Do these options allow you to adequately control your notifications? If not, what changes, or additional email options would you like to see?