My preferred way until recently was Deviant Art, because it had a lot of content and very nice filtering – I could specify my exact resolution.

However, as of some time ago, Deviant Art browsing by resolution disappeared, as evident from trying to find it on their site and from the comments on this post announcing the capability in the first place.

The Solution

Sometimes the solution lies right in front of our eyes – we just have to open them to see it.

A while ago, Google Image Search expanded their support for image size filtering (small, medium, large) to include the actual image size via this query:

imagesize:NNNNxNNNN

And because it's Google, you can add search terms to narrow down the subject.

Here are some examples.

Example 1: "wallpaper"

imagesize:1920×1200 wallpaper

The image size is so specific that it's usually not even necessary to include the word "wallpaper" – most of the results will already be wallpapers, except maybe for a few desktop screenshots.

Example 2: "nature"

imagesize:1920×1200 nature

Example 3: "futuristic"

imagesize:1680×1050 futuristic

Example 4: "cars"

imagesize:1680×1050 cars

Example 5: "babe"

imagesize:1680×1050 babe (be careful if you have SafeSearch off ;-] )

Starter Links Per Resolution

Here are some quick starter links for common resolutions to get you started:

320×396

320×480

800×600

1024×600

1024×768

1152×864

1280×1024

1280×720

1280×768

1280×800

1280×960

1360×768

1366×768

1400×1050

1440×900

1600×1200

1600×900

1680×1050

1920×1080

1920×1200

2560×1024

2560×1600

Conclusion

What sites do you use to get your wallpapers, specifically allowing filtering by resolution? No spam links please.

• My New Desktop Background On The iMac Running Window 7 – That's Right, It's Awesome
• How To Make Your Site Lightning Fast* By Compressing (deflate/gzip) Your HTML, Javascript, CSS, XML, etc In Apache
• More On Android – A Mobile OS With A Clue
• Parsing JSON In Perl By Example – SouthParkStudios.com South Park Episodes
• How To Find Out The Number Of Videos On Youtube

Similarities

• Both Solr and Sphinx satisfy all of your requirements. They're fast and designed to index and search large bodies of data efficiently.
• Both have a long list of high-traffic sites using them (Solr, Sphinx)
• Both offer commercial support. (Solr, Sphinx)
• Both offer client API bindings for several platforms/languages (Sphinx, Solr)
• Both can be distributed to increase speed and capacity (Sphinx, Solr)

Here are some differences

• Solr, being an Apache project, is obviously is Apache2-licensed. Sphinx is GPLv2. This means that if you ever need to embed or extend (not just "use") Sphinx in a commercial application, you'll have to buy a commercial license.
• Solr is easily embeddable in Java applications.
• Solr is built on top of Lucene, which is a proven technology over 7 years old with a huge user base (this is only a small part). Whenever Lucene gets a new feature or speedup, Solr gets it too. Many of the devs committing to Solr are also Lucene committers.
• Sphinx integrates more tightly with RDBMSs, especially MySQL.
• Solr can be integrated with Hadoop to build distributed applications
• Solr can be integrated with Nutch to quickly build a fully-fledged web search engine with crawler.
• Solr can index proprietary formats like Microsoft Word, PDF, etc. Sphinx can't.
• Solr comes with a spell-checker out of the box.
• Solr comes with facet support out of the box. Faceting in Sphinx takes more work.
• Sphinx doesn't allow partial index updates for field data.
• In Sphinx, all document ids must be unique unsigned non-zero integer numbers. Solr doesn't even require a unique key for many operations, and unique keys can be either integers or strings.
• Solr supports field collapsing to avoid duplicating similar results. Sphinx doesn't seem to provide any feature like this.

Related questions

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1284083/choosing-a-stand-alone-full-text-search-server-sphinx-or-solr
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1132284/full-text-searching-with-rails
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/737275/pros-cons-of-full-text-search-engine-lucene-sphinx-postgresql-full-text-searc

Conclusion

In my experience, Solr is very-very fast on the query side. It is also very powerful. The indexing side is very CPU and memory intensive and is an unfortunate side effect of having such a feature-rich, fast application. Nevertheless, I highly recommend Solr.

For disclaimer purposes, I have not had much experience with Sphinx and, again, all credit for this comparison goes to mausch.

By the way, here's a really good resource for Solr 1.4 that just came out: Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search. I have this book and it's quite helpful in explaining such topics as multicore setup, search methods, replication, etc.

• [Solr] How To Fix java.io.IOException: directory FOO exists and is a directory, but cannot be listed: list() returned null
• Delicious.com [Quietly] Rolls Out Domain And Url Searching/Filtering. Finally!
• Hidden Features Of Perl, PHP, Javascript, C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Python, And Others [Collection Of Incredibly Useful Lists]
• My MySQL Conference Schedule
• [Updated x3] Goodbye Outlook, I Don't Need You Anymore – Gmail Now Lets You Paste Images Directly From Clipboard

I love Delicious. It allows me to store my bookmarks, tag and search them, and, best of all, have access to them from anywhere on the web.

Searching bookmarks by keyword is easy – just enter a bunch of keywords into the search page and off you go but what if you want to confine your results to a certain domain? The main reason I wanted to do it personally is so that I could see all pages of my site bookmarked by Delicious users and the corresponding number of bookmarks. However, the only url based search Delicious offered was a full url lookup:

This search is very limited – it accepts only a full url to the page in question.

Such limitations were unacceptable and prompted me to file a suggestion/idea on the Delicious forum earlier this year to allow searching for *all* bookmarks in a given domain. To my pleasant surprise, Delicious rolled out these new search features within the last month (very quietly for some reason, are they in alpha?). There was no mention of them on their blog or anywhere else on the web really.

So how does the new search/filter work?

Check it out:

site:yoursite.com allows searching by domain

For example, site:beerpla.net currently returns 104 results and I can see all of my sites' pages and their bookmark numbers on a single page:

Moreover, you can combine the site: query with tags

Like so: site:beerpla.net hidden php to filter the results further.

You can also search part of a url using the url: construct

For example, url:beerpla.net/2009/ finds bookmarked blog posts from 2009 only:

I'm not really sure why one would use site: if they could just use url: – it seems like the latter can do everything the former can do and more. Perhaps Delicious can clarify that.

Also, doing something like url:hidden-features-of doesn't bring back any results, even though I thought url: is supposed to search parts of the url. A bug or a feature?

Conclusion

Thanks to Delicious for following through with the search improvements and listening to your users. Special thanks to Delicious's own britta for being on top of things and responding to an 8 month old forum post.

Now perhaps someone will write a plugin to figure out the TOTAL number of bookmarks for a specific domain or modify an existing one (*cough*, ImprovingTheWeb, *cough*)?

• Hidden Features Of Perl, PHP, Javascript, C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Python, And Others [Collection Of Incredibly Useful Lists]
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 1 :: Tips
• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
• Google PageRank Update Happening Now
• Monitor All Your Domains From One Location

Let me briefly discuss some of the other methods first.

Limited

Using glob() (or <>, TODO verify) you can find files in a single directory, using only the limited shell wildcard support. For example,

1

my @files = glob("tmp*");

Boring

File::Find is the de facto standard for searching in Perl.

This method finds files that end in .pl in "." and "../SomeDir", following symlinks:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
 
use File::Find;
use Data::Dumper;
use File::Basename;
my @directories_to_search = (".", "../SomeDir");
my @file_list = ();
 
find(
  { wanted =>
    sub {
      if ( basename($File::Find::name) =~ /\.pl$/i )
      {
        push @file_list, $File::Find::name;
      }
    },
    follow => 1
  },
  @directories_to_search
);
print Dumper @file_list;

It works fine, except it's horribly ugly and boring. Let's have a look at something more fun.

The Fun And Elegant Way

File::Find::Rule. Just have a look at this beauty.

Just like above, find all .pl files in "." and "../SomeDir", following symlinks:

1
2

print Dumper (File::Find::Rule->name("*.pl")->file->extras({ follow => 1 })->
in(".", "../SomeDir"));

Same as above, except bypass .svn directories (shaves off a ton of time with a lot of directories):

1
2

print Dumper (File::Find::Rule->not(File::Find::Rule->directory->name('.svn')->
prune->discard)->name("*.pl")->file->extras({ follow => 1 })->in(".", "../SomeDir"));

Find all .log files that are older than 24 hours in "."

1
2
3

my $epoch_time_1_day_ago = time() - 60*60*24;
print Dumper (File::Find::Rule->file->name("*.log")->
mtime("<$epoch_time_1_day_ago")->in('.'));

Be sure to read the File::Find::Rule perldoc for more options and remember: have fun with your code!

Thanks to Perlbuzz and Andy Lester for pointing me to this library a few months ago.

• [Perl] How To Get The Path Of An Included Library (.pm), Regardless Of Current Directory
• FTPRush Cleanup Script
• Quick Perl Snippet: Finding If A File Has A Media Extension Using Regex
• How To Check If The Local SVN Revision Is Up-To-Date
• How To Sort Folders The Same Way As Files In Total Commander

You could only dream about such twitter improvements… that is until you use the Troys Twitter script. Just perform the following steps and you will have the features I describe in this article. Here we go:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

Once you are done with the above steps, head over to twitter.com (there’s no need to restart Firefox). You will then be able to enjoy the following enhancements, which I ordered here in terms of usefulness to me:

Autocomplete

Do you have a few friends with names so complicated, you can’t type them out by hand? Troys script autocompletes your friends’ names – just type @ and a few letters of their name. This is my favorite feature.

Before:

After:

Search Bar And Favorite Searches Saved

A search box is added to the sidebar. You can make a number of favorite searches, which then also remain sticky on the sidebar above the search box. When you click on a search term, the current page is updated without reloading the whole thing. Note that the favorite search terms are saved locally in your browser and won’t show up on your other computers.

Before:

After:

Auto Expander Of Shortened URLs

Automatically expands url shorteners, so instead of seeing a load of tinyurls and bit.lys, you see proper urls and their native page titles (neat!).

Before:

After:

Auto URL Shortener

Updated: The URL shortener auto shortens urls as you type them but only if they will overflow the 140 character limit, otherwise they stay as they are (it now works flawlessly).

Before:

After:

Auto Pagination

As you reach the bottom of the page, more earlier updates are automatically loaded after a few seconds. This means you don’t need to click or leave the page in order to see earlier updates. It could get a bit annoying, so I requested an ability to turn off certain script features. Update: you can now turn off every feature of the script individually.

Auto Media Embed Expander

Pictures and videos are automatically embedded.

Before:

(Uhmm, I don’t know why I highlighted “sack” but I don’t feel like retaking the screenshot… Yeah…)

After:

Retweet (RT) Button

Adds the missing RT button to each update.

Before:

After:

Autopopulate Bios on User Listings

Updated: This function will save you hundreds of clicks – when viewing someone's followers, rather than just seeing their names, the script adds their bios.

Before:

After:

Hyperlinked Hash Tags

Hash tags are now hyperlinked to the twitter search page. Seriously, twitter can’t do that by default?

Before:

After:

User’s Local Time

The script adds a user’s local time. See the example below using the profile of a lovely Kamikazekitty. This feature seems unpublished and I found it by accident.

Before:

After:

Nested Replies

This is a great feature – it gives context to @ replies. For example, @ev’s reply to kevin is boring and out of context until you see what they’re talking about, all without looking up @kevin’s updates.

Before:

After:

Mutual Friends Marked

Updated: This is a new feature. People who you follow and who also follow you back (mutual friendship) are marked with a little smiley face.

Before:

After:

Auto @fxxxmylife Expansion

Updated: Woot! Following the infamous @fxxxmylife is no longer annoying: all posts get auto-expanded. Brilliant. For those who don't know, FML is a site collecting short stories that all start with "Today," and end with "FML". Here are the top FMLs to get you started [hooked].

Before:

After:

That’s it for now in the current script version (6.5) but what a world of difference, isn’t it? Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)