Dea neville,
As usual, you have placed your astute finger on a problem the solution to which would help us all!
The basic problem is that the Flatstick Forum is currently not an integrated component of the Puttingzone website, but is a forum provided by Network54. I have tried to work around this by creating
a complete INDEX of posts as a web page inside the Puttingzone.com site. This INDEX is always accessible from the top right of the MAIN page of this Forum. Once on this INDEX page, anyone can "search" all posts at once using their BROWSER'S "EDIT>FIND" search function, which searches all text on the current web page in the browser. Then the links on the INDEX page to specific posts are live.
The limitation of this system is that it allows searching of only the main posts by the words in the title of the posts (e.g., Hitting Putts Fat), and this is not a search of the full text of all the words on the Forum, and the search does not include the words in the posts of any of the REPLIES either.
The real cure is to transfer all the existing posts onto a FORUM function inside the PuttingZone.com website. That way, a Google search engine that searches the website full-text will also search all the text of all the posts. This is coming fairly soon, as the PuttingZone.com website will be transferred to a new server this month, with fancier administrative tools. At that point, I will start transferring the 500+ threads onto the PuttingZone.com internal forum system, along with a Google site search function.
By the way, the PuttingZone.com site already has
a Google "search this site" function on the Home page. This function will search the text on my forum INDEX page now, along with all the text throughout the site, but that is not different from using your BROWSER EDIT>FIND function to search only the INDEX page.
HOWEVER, there is a trick: you can use the Google site search to search ALL THE WEB and include in the search the terms "mangum flatstick" and this search will search all the words in all the Flatstick Forum posts on the Network54 system! You will have to click on "Show Omitted Results" to get everything. A sample search would be "mangum flatstick breath" with the choice "Search Web."
With reference to covering the same ground for the benefit of new visitors, this is really something I don't mind at all. I usually get a slightly different take on a subject, and re-visiting these topics is beneficial, I think. I certainly hope what has been written thus far is not regarded as carved in stone, and the door to new ideas and approaches is WIDE OPEN 24/7!
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone
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