Free Republic Article Search

Bahits.com ^ | 01/25/2014 | Doug Weems

[FreeAtlanta]

I have developed a bookmarklet that can help you find if an article has already been posted on Free Republic. You put it in your favorites bar or save it as a bookmark. While reading a news article or web page, you click the "FR Search" link. A window opens with the FR search page and with a good guess what the article title is.

Screen shots of me using "FR Search" to see if an article was posted.
I have tested it with Chrome 32 and IE 11.

Here are the results of testing 20 articles posted on FR. I clicked on the first 20 posts on tag/*/index. Two were not articles, so I added the next two posts.
From the post, I went to the linked article. I used the "FR Search" bookmarklet tool to see if the article could be found on Free Republic.

Article	link	Did FR Search Find Posted Article?	If no, why?
Pentagon: U.S. Not Capable of Detecting Foreign Nuke Threats (US unclassified report)	http://freebeacon.com/pentagon-u-s-not-capable-of-detecting-foreign-nuke-threats/	Yes
NOAA Winter Prediction	http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2013/20131121_winteroutlook.html	No	Actual article title is "Drought likely to persist or develop in the Southwest, Southeastern U.S. this winter"
‘Blind’ Man Caught in Disability Fraud After Seen Driving a Speed Boat	http://freebeacon.com/blind-man-caught-in-disability-fraud-after-seen-driving-a-speed-boat/	Yes
Wal-Mart to cut 2,300 workers from Sam's Club stores	http://www.nbcnews.com/business/wal-mart-cut-2-300-workers-sams-club-stores-2D11994626	Yes
chimera global holdings ?	http://chimeraglobalholdings.com/	Yes	*a wierd one, but found it!
Testimonies from ex-Roman Catholic Priests	http://carm.org/testimonies-ex-roman-catholic-priests	Yes
The Refreshing Li Na	http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/tennis/li-na-gives-the-best-australian-open-victory-speech-ever/story-fnkrowp0-1226810463530	No	actual title "Li Na gives the 'best Australian Open victory speech ever'"
Tulsa (Oklahoma) Man Accused of Taking Toddler on Drunken Horse Ride	http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/crimewatch/tulsa-man-accused-of-taking-toddler-on-drunken-horse-ride/article_510f7f2c-82cd-11e3-81c5-001a4bcf6878.html	Yes
Good Samaritan paralyzed in Myrtle Beach purse snatching settles with Kmart, looks ahead	http://www.kansascity.com/2014/01/25/4774564/good-samaritan-paralyzed-in-myrtle.html	Yes
Aide: Political Logic of Angering GOP Base Over Immigration So Close to Midterm Election "Baffling"	http://reaganiterepublicanresistance.blogspot.com/2014/01/house-gop-aide-political-logic-of.html	No	actual title 'House GOP Aide: Political Logic of Angering Party's Base Over Immigration So Close to Low-turnout Midterm Election "Baffling"'
China on the radar, India invites Japan for Indo-US Malabar naval war games	http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/China-on-the-radar-India-invites-Japan-for-Indo-US-Malabar-naval-war-games/articleshow/29368706.cms	Yes
Schumer: Democrats Enable Tea Party to Bash Government	http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/01/23/schumer-democrats-enable-tea-party-to-bash-government/?mod=WSJBlog	Yes
FReepers: We need your help to keep the lights on!! [FReepathon thread XIII]	http://freerepublic.com/%5Ehttps://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/	No	some things are self explanatory - actual title, "Donate to Free Republic"
Pray for our American Heroes		No	not an article
The New Ammunition That Has Gun Owners Drooling	http://thelibertydigest.com/2014/01/24/the-new-ammunition-that-has-gun-owners-drooling/	Yes
St. Pete police shoot German Shepherd while trying to apprehend a man	http://www.abcactionnews.com/dpp/news/st-pete-police-shoot-german-shepherd-while-trying-to-apprehend-a-man	Yes
Caption This: What is Lincoln saying to Obama?	http://www.thelookingspoon.com/conservative-lol/106-tls-original-humor/5155-caption-this-what-is-lincoln-saying-to-obama.html	Yes
Religious Statues Vandalized At 2 Churches In Vineland	http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2014/01/24/2-south-jersey-churches-vandalized-overnight/	Yes	found 2 posted
Chuck Schumer Calls For The IRS To Stop The Tea Party	http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/012414-687587-chuck-schumer-targets-the-tea-party.htm	No	hmm, the title tag of the page is different than the article title "Chuck Schumer Asks The IRS To Target And Stop The Tea Party - Investors.com "
Man accused of killing police dog sentenced to 35 years	http://www.thestate.com/2014/01/06/3192806/man-accused-of-killing-police.html>http://www.thestate.com/2014/01/06/3192806/man-accused-of-killing-police.html>http://www.thestate.com/2014/01/06/3192806/man-accused-of-killing-police.html	Yes
Afghanistan-US deal 'hinges on Taliban peace talks'	http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25893296	Yes
[Why I Am Catholic] Sec John Kerry Gets Earful From The Vatican SecState Regarding The HHS Mandate	http://www.patheos.com/blogs/yimcatholic/2014/01/secretary-john-kerry-gets-an-earful-from-the-vatican-secstate-regarding-the-hhs-mandate.html	No	Post title different from article;

5 out of 20 posts were not found. 4 had different titles on Free Republic than on the article. One had a different article title in it's title bar than the article. That isn't too bad! I can't do anything to find articles posted under different titles, so hopefully, most people keep the original titles to make searching easier.

From time to time I will post updates to the tool on my blog. (This is version 1.2) I hope many of you will use it both for checking an article before posting and for finding threads on articles to see what Freepers are saying. If you leave a comment on this thread, I will ping you on updates.

thanks, FrAtl

Also, leave comments or suggestions to improve the tool either here or on my blog. The bookmarklet is ad free, but my blog has a few google ads. If you click one or two, it helps. :-)

[FreeAtlanta]

Just delete the Bookmark by right clicking it and clicking delete. It isn’t anything more than a link. Nothing gets installed.

The exception is the “Freeper Blocker” bookmarklet will hide various freepers on a post. That one reads and writes a cookie.

Was there a concern that you had with the search bookmark?

thanks,

FRAtl

[FreeAtlanta]

great! If you have any suggestions or ideas about improving it, let me know.

FRAtl

[Berlin_Freeper]

Last night I used your Search and Post This bookmarks with Firefox, deleted them and today noticed a problem.

I wrote a css style for FR that is dark grey and light grey but the links to external webpages are now dark blue and there is a thick red outline to the search box when active.

[FreeAtlanta]

Hey Berlin,

If you are curious about how the Bookmarklet works or would like to change it yourself, you can also "right click" the Bookmarklet and in Chrome you click edit and in IE you click properties. You then select the URL (Ctrl-A) works when you have the cursor in the url box, and then copy it (CTRL-C).

You then can paste it into notepad, but it will be one long ugly line. I usually take it to a beautifying tool like "Dirty Markup" http://www.dirtymarkup.com/ and paste in in. On "Dirty Markup", you click the javascript button and then clean. This gives you the code in a more readable format.

Copy it back to notepad, make changes, then "minify" it into one line using something like "Online YUI Compressor" http://www.refresh-sf.com/yui/. Take that and either replace the url in the original bookmark, or make a new one.

It is a bit of a process and a little tedious, but anyone can do it.

The good thing about bookmarklets is that the code is easily available for anyone to examine.

You do need to be aware of ones that bring in external .js files. Some of mine use the standard jquery files from googles cdn. You will have that one loaded just by browsing the internet. It is shared by any site that calls it. My "FR Post This" calls a .js file on my server (http://code-happy.bahits.com/js/fr_linkonly.js It is a very complex bookmarklet. The file on my server is used to hold all the sites that have some type of exclusion from posting on Free Republic as well as the selectors for guessing the authors, dates, title, keywords, etc.

A final note, all these scripts will only run one time when you click the bookmarklet on a web page. If the script is used to modify something on a page (hide a freeper post), a refresh blows away the modification and you have to run it again for the same effect.

Let me know if you have any more questions. I am happy to share what I know.

FRAtl

[FreeAtlanta]

Did you just delete the bookmarks? I can’t think of anything that bookmarklets would do that would cause that issue.

I am curious about the css you wrote. What does it do and how is it used?

Also, have you closed and reopened your browser?

thanks,

FRAtl

[Berlin_Freeper]

OK FRAtl. Thanks for the links, I will look into them.

I wrote some css styles for FR, if you use Firefox and get the Stylish add-on for it.

I fixed the link problem by adding "body.index-page ul.listing .meta .attrib a"

Not a 100% fix but good enough for now.

[Berlin_Freeper]

If you like to write a style for a webpage, you could paste the url here and get a good look at the css.

CSS Validation Service

I wage war against the internet. When one thing bothers you, it bothers you everywhere.

[ShadowAce]

[GeronL]

very interesting

[Egon]

Nicely done!

[GeronL]

Freeper Blocker??

Did I influence that??

[lbryce]

Sounds like an utterly fantastic tool. Thanks for creating it for us all. Hope it works as advertised. :-)

Already dragged it to my bookmark bar.

[FreeAtlanta]

lol, I don’t think so. I love our all our fellow freepers, but some like to cut and paste huge posts of the same thing... links and links and links in particular. The freeper blocker can clean up a thread page really quickly.

[FreeAtlanta]

Please report back with success or failures. It looks like Fire Fox may have an issue. I haven’t used it in years, but I will install this week and test it out.

[Responsibility2nd]

I'm using an older version of IE.

Do you know why I got a Security Warning?

You are adding a favorite that may not be safe. Do you wish to continue?

[GOPJ]

bump to the top

[FreeAtlanta]

That is common in a lot of browsers when saving a bookmark that has javascript.

This bookmark is safe. If you want, you can look at the code by right clicking the page and viewing source. From there search down to the FR Search link. You can see all the script. If you have questions about what any of it does I will be happy to answer.

It is good to be wary. As much as I know about the internet, I have often wanted to just pack up and move to an island without electronics.