Firefox Extension Published

Cool! Firefox Extension Approved

I just got this email:

Trexy TrailBar 1.1 - Approval Granted
Your item, Trexy TrailBar 1.1, has been reviewed by a Mozilla Update editor who took the following action:
Approval Granted

Please Note: It may take up to 30 minutes for your extension to be available for download.

Your item was tested by Mike Kroger using FF 1.5 on Win XP.
Editor's Comments:
Cool!
----
Mozilla Update: https://addons.mozilla.org/

Cool indeed! :-)

More The Merrier

We are having the Trexy Christmas party today.

We are going to nearby Greenwich to do a little sightseeing followed by Christmas lunch at Bar du Musee.

This is the first time Nige and I have had a work Christmas party with more than two people.

Photos to come soon...

Shockfire Support

One our new users, Shockfire Matt, has been a supporter of ours for a while now.

He helped us on Turbo10. He can even remember back to the days when Turbo10.com had the dark purple homepage.

We really appreciate his support. You can read some of his recent feedback in the forum.

"Hit" Me with a Clearer Result Display

A number of people have suggested making the results clearer. Our graphic designer, Marty, came to the rescue and sent us some excellent mock ups of how an improved results display could look.

So Meg and I went into pair programming mode and we made the changes in an afternoon. It's important for the result "hit" to not look like a normal search result. After all, Trexy is not showing traditional search results. A Trexy hit is a record of a real person traversing the web looking for what they want. That's why their country flag is displayed prominently in the top of the hit - a computer didn't make this trail - a real person did!

Here's an example of our new presentation:


But this isn't the end of the story, we will constantly tweak and change the interface so it "just works" and tunes in to your requirements. Any feedback you may have is much appreciated? The best place to give us feedback is in the forum.

Trexy Forum Up and Running

Sven has done a great job of setting up a forum for Trexy.

This is a place where users give us feedback and see what others are saying about Trexy.

You can post as a Guest or login. We've already had our first forum sign-up. It is of course one of our star supporters - Shockfire Matt.

Visit the forum at - http://forum.trexy.com

On The Feedback Trail

On Friday, Nige and I sent out some emails to friends and family asking for initial feedback.

It's great that people have taken a look and made helpful suggestions. As a result, Nige and I are implementing changes.

Some of the initial feedback includes:

• Too many distracting links on the homepage. One user found the 1 Goat, 2 People links at the base of the homepage quite intriguing but the not most useful for the first time visitor.

Nige and I have decided to reduce the number of links and no longer hyperlink 1 GOAT, 2 PEOPLE, 3,292 ENGINES, 216,014 TRAILBLAZERS, and 752,418 TRAILS.

• Description of Trexy needs to be more apparent.

We've decided to edit the text on the About page and the Tours to help make the description more apparent.

• Once you start blazing trails how can you switch engines?

The TrailBar works with hundreds of engines so you are not limited to just one engine. You can select which is your preferred engine to search with, but this doesn't prevent you from blazing trails on other engines. We'll add this to our FAQ to help make this clearer.

• When I visit Trexy, I get a popup asking me to save a file.

This is a nasty bug that happens occasionally. We are aware of it and have added it to the bug list.

The bug is caused because we are sending the document in GZIP >format. Normally it works fine, however sometimes the error happens when the user is behind a proxy and the HTTP headers are converted and the page is not automatically decompressed. This causes the "Save As" dialog box to appear.

Some suggestions for improved features include:

• Allow results to be grouped by rank, search engine used, country of origin.
• Allow trails to be edited or tidied up.

The feedback trail is on-going and we hope to mould Trexy in response to our users' comments to deliver the best search product we can.

Treking to the Roger Needham Lecture @ The Royal Society

Sven and I went along to a lecture on the "Semantic Web" at the Royal Society last night.

The Roger Needham Lecture given by Professor Ian Horrocks, clearly explained the ideas behind the "Semantic Web". It was an interesting tour around the "Semantic Web" which is just starting to show practical promise. But as Ian said to me afterwards, it is currently limited to discrete domains. It remains to be seen if all these domains will one day merge to form a Meta-Semantic Web?

The main problem is defining "semantics", or in other words, determining "meaning". "Meaning" is decided by human beings, not machines, and although "inference engines" can infer meaning they are only as good as their underlying facts - and here lies the problem. This kind of system only works well if we all think like Mr Spock: logical and ruthlessly honest.

Remember META tags in web pages? They worked well until everybody started to tag their pages inappropriately with terms that didn't really apply. And then things got really silly - we saw META tag trade mark infringement and bulk keyword stuffing - as a result, search engines now routinely ignore META tags.

The Semantic Web, and the recent trend of "tagging" will suffer from human nature just like META tags did. If these systems are to survive they need to take account of human nature at the outset.

I don't know about you, but I prefer to think like Captain Kirk than Mr Spock. Planet "Semantic Web"? Even Spock might say "does not compute." Quick Scottie ... Beam Me Up!

Trexy Tech Central

Sven has done a great job of setting up a forum for Trexy. Now we need to link to it on the Trexy website.

I think we need to create a tech area called "Trexy Tech Central" to contain the general Trexy Tour, FAQ and the Forum.