At the bottom of a story listing page, you will see the Ephemeral display controls. With these settings you can control which stories to display, how many to display at once, and in what order to display them.The browse controls contain the following fields:
- Sort Order: Either Ascending or Descending. The stories are sorted from small values to large values of the Sort By field in Ascending mode, or from large values to small in Descending mode.
- Sort By: Changing this field alters how the stories are ordered. You can sort by Date, number of Recommendations, or number of Hits.
- Show: The number in this field specifies how many stories should be placed on a list at a time. The default value is 10 stories.
- Skip: This tells Ephemeral to skip over this many stories when you return the result. The "more" button affects this field by increasing it by the value in show each time you press it.
- Search: Show only the stories that match a certain search condition. This is described in more detail in the next section.
Searching in Ephemeral is a powerful feature. You can find suggested stories by title/author or search directly for text appearing in the story. The search controls contain two fields:
- Search In: This selector picks what part of a story to look for the search words. It can be either Title/Author, which searches in the title or author fields of a story for the words, or Text, which searches in the first 250 words of the story's text.
- Search words: Here you specify the words you wish to search for. Ephemeral will return only stories that contain all of the search words specified in this field.
One thing to keep in mind if you get what seems to be bogus results back from the search engine is that Ephemeral will automatically strip some common words (like "a", "an", "the", "this", etc.), as well as any non-alphabetic character. Ephemeral will also try to split your search words along word boundaries. Below are some queries and what they actually search for
Search query
Actually searches for