Free Tubes update 91 new images, search engine comments
diana
construction barricade, eyes of Texas, farm windmill, 3 flowers
growing, 4 plants growing, Holland windmill, 2 burning Texas (for
white or black backgrounds), 3 Lear jets flying (for black, white,
blue backgrounds), shame on you finger rub (made after reading the top
search words), small plane, Texas swing and the Easter bunny with
basket of goodies. My animations are designed to be used on the
background color they were created on. I have provided versions of
some images for both white or very light pastel backgrounds and black
or very dark colored backgrounds, a few look ok on most any color
background, some do not have transparent backgrounds.
I've added a big batch of images for two of the top 20 searched for
items, after I waded through all the dirty words people have been
typing in the search window. :-( (you would not believe what folks
type in there, like I have a porn site or something!) There are 20
lens flares (twinkles, sparkles), 24 decorated eggs (some Easter type,
some just colorful), cascaron (confetti filled egg), pink and beige
fractal edge banner, curly cords, a curly cord frame, 2 floral frames,
8 stars, 2 versions of two dancing block style people and an eagle in
flight at dusk.
Many of my latest pngs are made with Stephan's kill transparency
filter (see my main page) and will look downright awful in the browser
but look spectacular when lifted from the alpha channel. Since flares
and such are not normally used as standalone graphics on white
backgrounds, it should not be a factor in the usefulness of the pngs.
The Atomz search engine is trying to index my Xoom site right now and
it's going very slowly. The new items won't be in the index until it
is done. I've listed every new item on the main page anyway.
Xoom is slower than molasses today but I tested all the new pages and
loaded all the images despite the long waits, sometimes reloading the
page twice to get all thumbnails to show up - they are all there.
With the new search engine I'm finding people don't read my search
tips all that well. I've specifically noted that I don't have and
never will have any commercial images like Disney, Precious Moments,
Morehead, Holly Hobby or copyrighted images scanned from books,
magazines or greeting cards, etc. on my pages but they are high on the
search list still.
Despite my first tip, folks still type in the word "tubes" and get a
hit on 380+ pages because that word is in the link back to the main
page on almost all my pages. I don't distribute images in tube format
so the word won't be relevant to an image unless I make a tube-worm or
inner-tube png or jpg, which I doubt is what they are looking for so
often. ;-)
Folks are missing a lot of matches to their searches by not using the
*name or name* as suggested. Most of my filenames were created to fit
under thumbnails better and are run together words. If I used dashes
between words, you'll find them - which I'm doing with all the new
graphics. I'm also adding more keywords where the file names or page
titles may not be adequate to describe the objects on the page.
You can't find objects within a string without dashes with the search
engine unless you type the asterisks as explained on my main page.
*cat would find whitecat housecat tomcat blackcat, cat* would find
cathouse catspaw caterpillar catnap, etc. but cat alone would only
find the words cat and cats alone or in-between dashes, not the word
cat strung together with other words. I'm still working on some ideas
to improve search results without losing all the automation I have for
page building but folks can help themselves a lot now by using the
asterisks.
If any of you are using the search engine, please do let me know what
you think of it if you have some strong opinions for or against it. I
don't know if it is worth the space on the page actually. It's getting
heavy use, but the results are not stellar because folks don't follow
my instructions. It's very disappointing to me to know I have
something they want but they can't find it unless they are going into
the archive and actually browsing the categories if their search turns
up empty.
Oh - sounds alike is now by default off, but it you are a bad speller
or typist (guilty!) it might help you find things to tick that
checkbox. It returns a lot of dumb sound alike words that don't really
sound much alike to me but it will find sparkle if you typed sparkel
and that sort of thing.
Diana
________________
Free Tubes & clipart --> http://members.xoom.com/tubes/
email dtodd AT satx DOT rr DOT com
diana
until Xoom gets in gear speed wise. My index of the site took longer
than allowed by the free search service (2 hours) and stopped before
reaching most of my site. Last time it took 16 minutes to index 386
pages and only 74 pages are indexed now after 2 hours because of Xoom
being so sluggish, so the search results will be abysmal. I'll try it
re-indexing again later.
Sorry - this is one of the reasons why I'm thinking about dropping the
search engine.