If you’re reading this post, then my blog has been fully moved over to my new dedicated server. If you notice anything wrong, please post a comment on this post.
Archive for the ‘Updates’ Category
New Server
Friday, January 23rd, 2009Feed Address… Again
Sunday, August 24th, 2008Due to some complications with the way I previously displayed my Feed at feed.mattsblog.ca and FeedBurner not properly seeing subscriber numbers, I am once again changing my feed address. My FeedBurner feed has also been migrated to my Google Account. My feed will now be at feedproxy.google.com/MattsBlogCa. All old Feed URLs redirect to the new ones, so there should be no need to adjust your feed reader.
Feed Address
Sunday, August 17th, 2008Just a quick note to say that my feed address has been changed from http://feed.mattsblog.ca/Main-Feed to just http://feed.mattsblog.ca/. There should be no need to change your Feed Reader, as all old addresses redirect to the new one. A minor glitch while moving the feed address around has caused my FeedBurner numbers to drop, but they should be back to normal by tomorrow. 
Matt’s Blog Search, Now Powered By Google
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
As many people who use WordPress to power their blog know, WordPress’ built-in search isn’t exactly as useful as you’d expect it to be. Recently, I’ve become quite frustrated with this fact.
So, a couple of days ago, I decided to setup Google Custom Search and see how I like it. It was fairly painless to setup, and I had it up and running in less than 5 minutes. I decided to host it on my domain, instead of directly on Google, so that I would be able to style it to look the same as my blog.
I’ve found Google Custom Search to work much better than WordPress’ built-in search. It returns more relevant results, and doesn’t provide you with tons of pages that are hardly relevant to your search terms. I’ve decided to completely replace WordPress’ search with Google Custom Search, and you can now use it in the sidebar of this blog, or from right here.
I’ve also made the meta descriptions of post pages to be relevant to what the post is about, and also blocked Google from indexing some pages (such as yearly/monthly archives and category pages) that contain duplicate content. So, in the next coming weeks, as Google reindexes pages in my blog, the search results should become even more useful (and not contain links to yearly/monthly archives and category pages, which aren’t really that useful if you’re searching for something).
What do you think about Google Custom Search, and do you think it works better than WordPress’ search?
New Theme
Saturday, March 29th, 2008I just put up the new theme I’ve been working on for the past… well, who knows how long. The point behind this new theme was to create a clean, simple and good looking theme. The old theme had numerous problems including being hard to read, being downright ugly, having cross-browser compatibility problems and being cluttered with useless stuff.
I believe I have addressed all these issues in this new theme. All the blog post text is black text on a white background, for easy readability, it looks nice, it looks practically the same in the four most-common browsers and I’ve thrown out the useless junk that was sitting around.
Here’s a before and after of Matt’s Blog (click the images for a larger view):
Before:
After:
As you can see, it’s quite an improvement.
If you’re in a feed reader, click here to see the new design.
Any feedback on this new theme for Matt’s Blog?
