03.14.10
Posted in General at 7:26 pm by Chief Bottle Washer
Hi folks. We have a new SortMyList update in the works, but it’s taking a back burner, as we babysit our latest project, ‘Call the Web’.
CallTheWeb is a telephone answering machine in reverse. It lets you leave messages for your friends, family, and fans, from any telephone in the world, that your audience can listen to on your website.
We hope you’ll support our new site by checking it out and giving us feedback. The URL is http://calltheweb.com
We hope to roll out the new version of SortMyList in the next month or two, so stay tuned!
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10.31.08
Posted in Bug Fix at 12:19 pm by Chief Bottle Washer
When you’re alphabetizing your list of movies, songs, or books, it’s desirable to ignore words such as “The”, “A”, and “An” at the beginning of the titles, as they provide no information and result in a less optimal list.
That’s why we created our ‘Alphabetize Titles‘ sort, shown in the menu as A-Z Title, which answers the question, “How to alphabetize a list while ignoring articles?”.
We were imperfect, however. Some titles start with numbers, and it’s desirable that those numbers are sorted AS numbers, rather than by normal alphabetizing rules. So, we want “The 40 Year Old Virgin” to come BEFORE “101 Dalmations”.
This is now, exactly, how our ‘Alphabetize Titles’ sort works, finally matching the number sorting prowess of the other sorts on Sort My List.
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10.07.08
Posted in General at 6:36 pm by Chief Bottle Washer
Many of our users are unaware of a feature we’ve had since the very beginning. For every feature except ‘Search and Replace’ we allow you to operate on only a section of your document, rather than the entire thing.
To operate on only part of your document, use your mouse to highlight what you want to work on. Then, select the sorting, cleaning, or labeling operation that you desire. We will process only the part of your document that you’ve highlighted, leaving the rest unchanged.
We use this a lot when sorting a list with a heading, by selecting everything except the heading, we don’t lose our heading into our list. We also use it for labeling. If we have a list of items that we wish to apply lables to, such as [work], [home], and [boat], then we can select the section of our list having to do with home, and then add the label [home] and so on.
Enjoy working with partial lists next time you use ‘Sort My List’.
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10.04.08
Posted in Bug Fix at 8:25 am by Chief Bottle Washer
During one of our previous feature updates to add Evernote compatibility, we broke the printing feature. This feature is now back online. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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10.02.08
Posted in Bug Fix at 1:00 pm by Chief Bottle Washer
Our “A-Z Names” sort is a powerful sort that goes through your complex list of names, and sorts them by last name. To do this, it has to make some judgements about which name is the last name, based on clues like “Mr.”, “Mrs.”, “Jr”, “Dr”, “and”, “&”, etc.
We were remiss, however, in handling a very common name list convention, where you say something like
- Bill Clinton +2
- Mr. Paulton +1
- Mr. Brady + 8
with the number after the plus sign telling you how many people will be coming with that guest. Well, we handled this case badly, but we feel it’s now being handled properly, so enjoy!
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Posted in General at 12:13 pm by Chief Bottle Washer
Hello, and welcome to the ‘Sort My List‘ blog.
To be frank, (and we’re always frank), we had no intention of doing a blog. Why would our users care about the trials and tribulations of keeping the site up? Do I read the Google blog, the Yahoo blog, the Zillow blog, or the Ice Cream Eaters Anonymous blog? No I do not! I just use the sites and happily go about my merry way.
But, alas, we find that we are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the world of blogging about our site. Why, you ask yourself? I blame Google. No, really, it’s their fault. We have recently noticed that the people who are looking for us on Google are needing to look on deeper and deeper pages to find us. Since we once enjoyed “Page 1″ status, this is a source of frustration for us. “What’s gone wrong?”, we mutter despairingly into our beers..
Well, it is the opinion of many, that Google judges a site that changes often, such as a blog about what a 13 year old wants for Christmas, higher than a site that doesn’t change often, such as a data sorting and parsing web application used by thousands. Since our phone calls to Google to have them change their algorithm in our behalf have, to be honest, met with a certain amount of “I’m sorry, who are you again?”, we’ve decided that if you can’t beat them, join them.
So, ‘Sort My List’ users, here is what we’d like for Christmas, this year.
- A condo on “The World”, so we can travel the world, work and raise our kids.
- A case of Madiera Wine.
So, that’s why we’re doing this. We’ll probably post some more site related things to the blog as well, and perhaps you, our users, will be able to use the blog to tell us what features you want added and/or changed.
Thanks for your interest, and thanks very much for using ‘Sort My List’!
Chief Bottle Washer,
Tom
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