Now Fully Cooperating with Google

If you’ve ever used the built-in site search on Subtraction.com then, well, my apologies. Believe me, I was fully aware that searching this site via that creaky old CGI script was more or less the equivalent of mailing in a question to the Library of Congress and checking your mailbox every day for a reply after working in the fields. That is, it was slow search. I just didn’t have the means to fix it.

All that’s changed, because searching this site is now powered by the brute, irrepressible and undeniable force of Google. They’re a little company on the West coast that specializes in helping you find stuff on the Interweb. And they’re quite good at it too, so the results should be pretty satisfying. Give it a spin; you’ll notice a bajillion-fold speed increase. Now all you have to do is figure out what you’re going to do with all that extra time.

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A Subway System in Your Pocket

If you’re an iPhone owner and you live in New York City, you want to be able to carry around the official Metropolitan Transit Authority subway map on your iPhone. There are a few options for this, including using a tool like FileMarker which locally saves a PDF copy of the map to be accessed through Safari. It’s a clever approach, but it seems too tricky for me.

Instead, I prefer using Photo Albums in my iPhone to view cropped versions of the subway map, a simple but effective technique I first saw demonstrated by Mike Essl, and which doubtless many others have also used.

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Sunday in the Times: Choking

Choking on GrowthThe front page of tomorrow’s New York Times will feature the first installment in a series called “Choking on Growth,” an in-depth examination of “the human toll, global impact and political challenge of China’s epic pollution crisis.” It’s a major piece of reporting, and as usual you can find it at NYTimes.com alongside similarly excellent, complementary video, multimedia and interactive infographics.

There’s a little more value add this time, though, in the form of a special section on the site devoted to “Choking on Growth.” It’s essentially a micro-site that showcases the entire series — traditional journalism as well as Web-only content — as a coherent package, and it will be updated and added to over the coming days and weeks as the series continues. It’s also the result of a tremendous and not-as-frequent-as-I’d-like instance of our designers collaborating with editors from both the print and Web side, and with our multimedia, video and information graphics teams.

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