This is a tip that may help you finding more TIPs of the day (or even other stuff).
Just in case you scratch your head now and ask "what are TIPs of the day and why should I care about them?" - well, basically they are forum posts which give usage tips, i.e. they explain things about how to use Logos (some in a broader sense, like "using XYZ in the Faithlife universe" or "doing bible-studyish things often associated with the usage of Logos/Verbum bible software"). If you were reading frequently in the Logos 6 forum, you might encounter them nearly daily, but some are also here in the General forum or maybe elsewhere. Some are digests of usage tips/answers given in the last week in the forums.
Credit goes to forum MVP MJ.Smith for having re-invented this kind of posts some time ago, posting lots of such tips by herself and collecting others.
MJ.Smith does ring a bell for you that sounds like "Reading List"? Great! Maybe you should write such tip postings yourself! Of course there's a Reading List collecting those postings - as I'm writing it lists 254 numbered TIP of the day postings, and you may check those you read/liked/tried for yourself:
but TIPs of the day not only give helpful usage advice, but often they show various ways to get to a result (and - as you've seen - not only telling, but really showing, with screenshots and links), sometimes even trying to give an exhaustive reference to the usage topic at hand. I won't do that here today (promise!), but when you now feel these forum posts might sometimes be a bit on the longer side, you probably are not very far from the truth.
Okay, I'll try to pick up speed. "Finding Forum posts - stupid thing, isn't there a search line at the top of the forum?" Yes, great observation (see how Faithlife even themed the Ad for Logos Cloud in sync to my tip?)
It even works:
well, somewhat. Seems the results ranking algorithm is not really top-notch.
Surely better when searching for hapax legomena (which are words occuring only once) - ha, try it: https://community.logos.com/search/SearchResults.aspx?q=hapax+legomena . Nope.
I'll need to qualify the 'somewhat' with 'sometimes'. But since this is a tip, not a bug report: Let's try a phrase search, i.e. putting what we look for in quotes:
much better: https://community.logos.com/search/SearchResults.aspx?q=%22Tip+of+the+day%22
You see that the search can be restricted to one of the subforums (green arrow) and even sorted (by newest, oldest and relevance - blue arrow) and is really giving some meaningful results. Great stuff.
I must admit that this section of my tip is just for the sake of the "showing various ways" - personally I never use the forum search. Well, maybe once a year to write a forum post about it. When I search something on the web, I use Google. And especially on the forums.
One aspect why that makes sense can be seen when looking very closely at the results in the screenshot above: the search index driving the results was last updated on Friday, Dec 11, as this is the most recent tip that is shown in the ordered results. Google may not be instantly, but it indexes the forum more often. The much larger issue is the greater reliability of Google (while not 100% exhaustive) and that many people know its search syntax with AND, OR, perentheses/brackets, commands etc.
So I restrict Google to the forum with site: and search for that phrase again: site:community.logos.com "Tip of the day" (which gives https://www.google.com/search?q=site:community.logos.com+%22Tip+of+the+day%22&rct=j for those wanting a link):
Just as an aside, Google can find threads about hapax legomena on the site:
But we were talking about Tip of the day postings. One of the great things Google search will allow us to do is to differentiate between text in the title and the posting texts, so we can diffferentiate the tips from those threads where someone just remarks "I once saw a tip of the day post about that":
The command is intitle: (I think Rosie shared that once on the forum) and this gives us site:community.logos.com intitle:"tip of the day"
There are other commands and tricks for Google that you might have picked up somewhere on the web - they work here as well. But I promised not to be exhaustive today.
Using Google like that can help you find Tip of the day postings for the Logos usage topics you are interested in. And if you now think "Currently I'm not interested in Logos usage tips, it's late at night in my timezone! Get me some Advent gifts! (And: didn't we see something like that in the results far up in this long post?)" Sure, we can do that: search for site:community.logos.com intitle:"advent gifts"
Google will find the two that currently exist:
Have a blessed Advent time!
