#calishat — Public Fediverse posts

Calishat: Local Search America Adds Local News Feed, Articles From 1K+ Sources Around the US. “Local News Feed gathers RSS feed items from 1003 local news sources across America and aggregates them into one state-browsable, keyword-searchable bundle.”

Calishat: Upgrading Wikipedia Seismograph. “Using Wikipedia Seismograph’s new zoom feature means you can explore over nine years’ worth of public interest data in any Wikipedia topic with one chart and easily turn it into date-bounded Google News searches.”

Calishat: Gift Article Gazette Upgraded. “Over the weekend I moved the aggregation part of GAG to a Google Sheet / Google Apps script where I can filter for duplicates and old articles. I also redid the display and added a bunch of sorting/filtering options. The URL is still https://mastogizmos.com/gag.html and it’s still free to use and free of ads.”

Calishat: The Calishat Jams of 2025: All Free, All Ad-Free. “When I first started creating search tools I thought I’d run out of ideas after a certain amount of time. That doesn’t appear to be the case. … Meet up here in 365 days and we’ll look at the Calishat Jams of 2026. In the meantime, check out these thirteen tools from 2025, presented in the order they were created. They’re all […]

Calishat: Turning Wikipedia Into a Word Game: Wiki Stack Game. “Wiki Stack Game starts you off with a big handful of random words. Your objective is to add words to a Wikipedia search with the goal of making the query as long as possible while still getting results.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/11/20/turning-wikipedia-into-a-word-game-wiki-stack-game-calishat/

Calishat: Browsing and Searching Members of Congress: Congress Corral. “Congress Corral lets you browse members of Congress via a number of filters and provides a page of details of useful links for each one, but lots of political directories do that. The magic happens with the four other tabs on the detail page.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/10/30/browsing-and-searching-members-of-congress-congress-corral-calishat/

Calishat: Exploring “War-Torn” Portland With Local Search America. “Local Search America is free to use and free of advertising. In this article I’m going to walk you through its three tools to find local TV stations, government agencies, and institutions of higher learning near Portland and search their Web sites.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/09/28/calishat-exploring-war-torn-portland-with-local-search-america/

Calishat: Researching Public Figures in the Epstein Birthday Book, Part I: MiniGladys. “MiniGladys is a collection of four research tools to use Wikipedia data. For this article I’ll use the example of Leon Black, who appears in the Epstein birthday book but is not on the public stage as much as someone like Alan Deshowitz. In the time it takes to click a few times and read a few news […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/09/12/researching-public-figures-in-the-epstein-birthday-book-part-i-minigladys-calishat/

Calishat: QueryAnvil: AI As Search Sidekick Instead of Main Character. “I was staring in frustration at a particularly annoying page of search results when I thought to myself, ‘Man, I wish I had some way of marking which of these results are useful and which aren’t, and then have an AI analyze the different sets for language use and give me suggestions for how I can revise my search to get […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/09/09/queryanvil-ai-as-search-sidekick-instead-of-main-character-calishat/

Calishat: Echo Chambers No, Everything Chambers Yes: Three Tools For Nook-and-Cranny Searching. “Yesterday I wrote about making search spaces and got accused of making echo chambers. So today I’ll show you how to get into the EVERYTHING CHAMBER with 3 tools for randomish and nook-and-cranny searching.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/08/16/echo-chambers-no-everything-chambers-yes-three-tools-for-nook-and-cranny-searching-calishat/

Calishat: Blaugust: Heard about Google’s “Preferred Sources”? Here are 4 Other Ways to Find Specific News Outlets. “In the last few years I’ve been working on tools to let you create lists of sites to search in Google. Unlike Google’s ‘Preferred Sources’ setting, my tools use external sources to show you news and media sites you may know nothing about. You can even find them by US […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/08/14/blaugust-heard-about-googles-preferred-sources-here-are-4-other-ways-to-find-specific-news-outlets-calishat/

Calishat: Temporary Obsessions RSS Feed Reader Updated and Now Available. “The Temporary Obsessions RSS Feed Reader is a Google Sheets-based tool that lets you schedule your RSS feeds and give them expiration dates. I have used TOFR for monitoring breaking news topics over the short-term, scheduling feeds in advance for a known business-/stock- related deadline, and to ‘audition’ keywords I […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/07/12/calishat-temporary-obsessions-rss-feed-reader-updated-and-now-available/

Calishat: Local Search America: Search the Web by DMA. “Today I finished creating Local Search America, a new way to create specific search spaces for authoritative institutions in American DMAs… Enter a city and state and Local Search America identifies the television stations and government agencies which serve that area as well as the institutions of higher education in that area. Up to […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/07/06/local-search-america-search-the-web-by-dma-calishat/

Calishat: Local Search America: Search the Web by DMA. “Today I finished creating Local Search America, a new way to create specific search spaces for authoritative institutions in American DMAs… Enter a city and state and Local Search America identifies the television stations and government agencies which serve that area as well as the institutions of higher education in that area. Up to […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/07/06/local-search-america-search-the-web-by-dma-calishat/

Calishat: ResearchBuzz Firehose Turns 10. “I started ResearchBuzz in 1998 after finishing the 2nd edition of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research. As time went by I started feeling the lack of organization. I was linking to and looking at lots and lots of resources, but I was posting them in aggregate newsletters which made specific resources tough to find. I spent some time thinking […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/06/22/calishat-researchbuzz-firehose-turns-10/

Calishat: VibesMasto Gets an Overhaul and a Web Version. “Saturday I dug out the VibesMasto News Monitor so I could monitor news about the protests around the country. It was very useful but it also made me cringe. I first made this tool about two years ago when I knew a lot less about JavaScript, and its code is CRUSTY. Uncrusting it became yesterday’s priority. Now there’s a overhauled […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/04/21/calishat-vibesmasto-gets-an-overhaul-and-a-web-version/