This page is a place to share good ideas and ways of using the Landing. If you find or invent any good tricks or ways of doing things, please share them on this page.

Saving a search and showing it in a widget

I quite often find myself performing the same searches and would quite often like to see them on my dashboard or profile. The 'external feed' widget comes to the rescue here, because you can make an RSS feed from any search. That way if, for example, you want to show the latest blog posts that are tagged with a keyword that interests you, you can always see them when you arrive at the Landing. Here's how...

1.  enter your search term in the search box and press return. After the results are returned you can optionally, specify whether you want to see blogs, wire posts, everything (if you choose 'all' it seems you get titles only but more posts, while filtering for blogs in particular means you get the whole entry) by clicking these options in the return window on the left. Then re do the search to get specific categories.
2. click the 'subscribe to feed' link (top of the left pane window). Your browser may then fill with undecipherable XML text- this is fine.
3. highlight and copy the URL (the address of the RSS feed) from the address box at the top of the browser (select the URL and use Control-C or, on an Apple machine, Command-C).
4. now go to your dashboard or profile and click the 'edit page' link.
5. drag a new 'external feed' widget to where you want it to appear and save the page
6. click the 'edit' link of the new feed widget
7. paste that URL of the RSS feed into a new external feed widget.

Voila - saved search!

Using HTML

There are limitations on the HTML that is allowed in things you create here, but that shouldn't stop you being able to use style formatting inline within your code: you should (with care) be able to copy HTML created by an HTML editor or hand-code it yourself if you know how to do it, simply by clicking the HTML button on the editor and editing the code directly.

Editing text with an iPad or similar device

As of June 2010, the iPad or Google's Chrome browser used on the Android devices are incapable of editing the rich text fields used to create blogs, Pages, comments and so on. However, it's easy to get around this, simply by clicking the 'Add/Remove Editor' link below the data entry area.

Organising files and posts

The Landing has folders in which you can organise your files, though you don't have to use them and you can simply choose to look at them as a long list even if you have also organised them into folders. For most things, including files, tags are an effective way to keep things organised, allowing you to group together many different kinds of item and search for them quickly and easily.