That really doesn't help with Tom's problem. They took all the reader posts off line with the software change in February and they have yet to load those back on the server, though they have promised to many times. Meanwhile, Google's spiders or whatever you call them, long ago overwrote their cache from the old site with the new site, so the stuff is no longer available even in Google's cache. Believe me, those of us interested in finding our stuff have been into figuring this out with helpful programmer types advising on a chat board off-site. There was a short window when things were on Google, but they quickly disappeared, were overwritten within days. (Even if they do load it back now, I wonder if it is going to be scanned by Google, that's an unanswered question in my mind, I suppose it depends upon where they would put it?)

I am not even sure if one can find all things posted after February by user name on Google, I just had a big nada on that looking for something by M.J. Rosenberg. I think the way the site is set up now is that Google doesn't pick up everything.

BTW, in all its past software incarnations, TPMCafe, since its inception, always had a complete archive of each user's posts and coments, back to their very first one of each, just by clicking on their name. Now it seems limited to 10 each. Josh Marshall did make a comment in the last month or two (which I can't cite because there is no archive of his comments, heh) that they were planning on expanding that, but he still didn't say how many posts and comments of each user would be available. They have not been clear about that.

Google used to work quite well for finding stuff here, I used it often (they always had a shitty search engine.) But that was when they had a good taxonomy here, now they don't. I really don't have many hopes about that, I see what a mess it is the way things have been stored here so far and I have a lot of experience using google, and I don't think it's going to catch a lot of things.

Examples: The only reader archive for stuff post-Feb. is partial, it's called Reader Blogs, by date:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives.php
The techies started out putting Contributor blogs there in Feb., and no Reader Blogs! Didn't bother to change the name when they did that, which I thought was particularly clueless, as if they didn't know the difference between the two.

I think they might have did that because the server that had the Reader Blogs were on got lost on a truck with the software change--really, that's true, been admitted by management--they got it back but quite some time after the change was installed. Interestingly, at the same time, when they did that, you could click on a Contributor name and get more than 10 posts. But then after a month or two of doing that, they switched to putting new Reader Blogs there, and no more Contributor Blogs were put there. And now interestingly, you can't more than 10 posts for anyone, Reader or Contributor, it seems. So the Contributors' posting history is difficult to find now too. For that reason, I suspect Contributor blogs since the beginning were all on Google's cache at one time, but now are being overwritten and erased because the database keeps changing...it just looks like a real mess to me, a real mess...people should really post here with the thought that their stuff will not be saved and won't be that searchable, it just doesn't look like it's in the cards unless they change the system again. And even then, they now have the new posts since February stored under a certain messy system and the old ones on another, it just looks like a ton of messy and arduous work to mesh that.)