Matt’s Blog Search, Now Powered By Google
June 26th, 2008 at 12:22 AM by Matt Freedman
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?
SpotPlex Closed Down
May 10th, 2008 at 11:01 PM by Matt Freedman
SpotPlex, a Digg-like site based on page views instead of voting, has shutdown their site and their hyper bot.
TechCrunch reports that SpotPlex ultimately closed down due to insufficient funding.
I had an account at SpotPlex, and had their widget on this blog. According to my stats, over the time the widget was on my blog, they sent me a whole 2 visitors… Wow… Interestingly, I never received an email from them that they were closing down. I only found out because their widget was no longer displaying, and I went to their site to see if it was down, and I found that they had shutdown. I confirmed with Michael Kwan that he had not received an email from them either. The least they could do would have been to email their users to let them know that they would be closing down, and that they should remove the widget from their blog…
FeedBurner will be Integrated with Google Accounts; White Background to Follow
April 30th, 2008 at 9:09 PM by Matt FreedmanFeedBurner, which was acquired by Google awhile ago, announced today that they would be beginning the integration of FeedBurner with Google Accounts. They said that in the coming weeks, “selected publishers” will be given the option to merge their FeedBurner account with their Google Account. I’ve yet to be presented with this option. 😛
They also mentioned that FeedBurner will start to be integrated into other Google Services, like AdSense. Also that “FeedBurner will start to look and feel more like a set of Google services”. Which can probably be interpreted as getting the “Google style”, a clean design with a lot of white and blue.
Hopefully, FeedBurner will start to be integrated with Google Analytics soon, as that would be extremely convenient. I wonder when the FeedBurner blog will be converted into a Blogger-hosted blog…
Update [April 30, 2008 at 9:18 PM]: I just went to the “Monetize” tab in my FeedBurner account, and saw that I can now associate my FeedBurner account with my AdSense account. Upon doing so, it now allows me to add AdSense advertisements into my Feed. Interesting.
Update 2 [April 30, 2008 at 10:18 PM]: The AdSense part currently only adds the ads to your actual blog (through the general FeedBurner site stat tracking/FeedFlare code), and not into your actual feed. A little deceiving…
iPhone Finally Coming to Canada
April 29th, 2008 at 8:47 PM by Matt Freedman
Rogers Wireless announced today that they have reached a deal with Apple, and will be bringing the iPhone to Canada “later this year”.
They also said that they couldn’t say anything more about it currently, meaning that we’ll probably be getting the 3G iPhone, which is rumoured for release this June.
It’s definitely about time that the iPhone made it’s way into Canada. We really don’t have any particularly amazing phones here… Rogers currently only carries one phone that features WiFi. It’ll also be interesting to see the kind of plans that will be available for the iPhone. Canada has notoriously expensive data plans, which contrasts the unlimited data plans the iPhone gets elsewhere.
Oh course, quite a few Canadians already have iPhones…
WordPress 2.5.1 Released
April 25th, 2008 at 12:11 PM by Matt Freedman
The latest version in the WordPress 2.5 branch, 2.5.1, has been released. WordPress 2.5.1 contains a couple of serious security fixes and approximately 70 bug fixes and enhancements. It is recommended that you upgrade your blogs immediately.
I’ve upgraded already, have you?
