New Results Format!

[Searchtempest Nathan]

If you're having trouble with the new mode, please check out the help section first. Then post here if you're still stuck. (I'll update that page periodically as problems are found.)

There is a brand new results format available. It fixes the two most common complains about Searchtempest - cities with 'no results found', and duplicate results because of the craigslist "here are some nearby results" 'feature'. You can read a bit more about how it works here.

To give it a try, click on the Options link at the top of the search or results page, then choose Enhanced under the results tab.

I hope you like it! Please take a moment to post here and let me know what you think. Whether you love it, have suggestions, or both, I'd like to hear your thoughts. Two things I'm working on right now are

• Give an indication of cities that have automatically closed due to zero results - most likely this will be an expandable or mouse-over list at the end
• Once the chosen search radius is reached (ie 250 miles, or whatever the user has selected), give the option to 'Expand Search', or some such, which would basically increase the search radius without the user having to start again from the beginning.

Those should both be fairly quick. Then I'm planning to work on Hank's Helper for a bit. When I come back, the next thing on the list is an index that will allow the user to jump directly to a given city or state, or to a certain distance away. And once that's done, we should be about ready to roll out the brand new site design, which is already well underway! Exciting times.

[dh1120]

Thank goodness we can get rid of those annoying "There were no local results" pages! However, I'm not a big fan of the stacked format, which I find difficult on the eyes. I'd much rather have the index of cities on the left side of the page, but with those cities that have no results automatically excluded from that list.

[Searchtempest Nathan]

You mean like the single-city mode, just with no-results cities removed?

The difficulty is that each city has to actually be read from craigslist before it can be determined whether it has results or not. We can look a few ahead, but can't grab them all at once, which would be required to weed out the index.

That said, it would be possible to do something like remove (or gray-out) cities in the index on the fly. So like the single-city format, but as you click 'next' to go through the list (or when you click on a city in the index) it would automatically 'next' through the list until it found one with results, graying out the others along the way.

It will take some work though obviously, so we'll see. Before that will be the index for the current format, as mentioned briefly in my first post.

Thanks for the feedback!

[rmcknight]

Is there something special I need to do for the new format to work in Firefox? The results come up quickly, but when I click on a link, a blue triangle (or up arrow) appears next to the link but it doesn't display the ad.

[runna]

Is there something special I need to do for the new format to work in Firefox? The results come up quickly, but when I click on a link, a blue triangle (or up arrow) appears next to the link but it doesn't display the ad.

Same here. Using Firefox.

To view the ad, I right click and choose "Open link in new tab."

Also, the scroll wheel on the mouse no longer works. Have to use the scroll bar at the right of the screen.
[edit] WTH? Scroll wheel started working.

Nathan, is this how you intended it to work?

[Searchtempest Nathan]

Nathan, is this how you intended it to work?

Did I intend the scroll wheel to work and not work randomly? No.

Ditto for the links not opening properly. You are supposed to have the option to open in a new tab, but no, clicking on them should open them inline. Are you using Firefox 2 by any chance? I've had a couple people emailing me to say it doesn't work in FF2. (Although in my test copy, it does... ) Can you try something for me? Try opening an ad that does not have a picture. (ie doesn't have 'pic' beside the title.) Does that work? What about the ones that *do* have pic?

Also btw: if you just click with the mouse wheel (use it as a button), it will open a link in a new tab.

[Poolio]

Having same problems - using Firefox 3.5. With pics or without pics, no open.

[Searchtempest Nathan]

Having same problems - using Firefox 3.5. With pics or without pics, no open.

New question: do any of you (or maybe... all of you ) have AdBlock installed? It seems that adblock (and maybe other similar programs) thinks that the craigslist results are ads, and so prevents them from opening.

[runna]

Having same problems - using Firefox 3.5. With pics or without pics, no open.

New question: do any of you (or maybe... all of you ) have AdBlock installed? It seems that adblock (and maybe other similar programs) thinks that the craigslist results are ads, and so prevents them from opening.

Yes. I have AdBlock. I'll put up with clicking the mouse wheel to view the ad in a new tab to keep AdBlock.

Also, I found that clicking once anywhere on the screen enabled the mouse wheel to scroll.

Thumbs up on your new format, Nathan!

[Searchtempest Nathan]

Why not just disable adblock for searchtempest only? I don't and won't every have any annoying pop-up ads. The only ads on the site are out of the way on the left and at the bottom of the page.

Edit: Or not.. I just looked into this a bit more, and the problem was that I was opening the craigslist results in windows called "adframe". Because they were craigslist... ads. Apparently adblock plus in all its wisdom prevents you from viewing anything called adframe, regardless of what's actually in it, and so blocked them. I just changed the name, and now it works.

PS: Having looked at how adblock plus works, I think I could pretty easily write some code to stop it from blocking my actual ads too, but I guess I won't. Do keep in mind though that free sites like mine are supported by ads that you're not seeing.