This morning I have added a new site search to this blog to make life easier for anyone wishing to find some of my older posts now that I have moved across onto the .co.uk version of my domain.

I tried this out with the standard Wordpress search functionality but have never been impressed with the results. So I installed my own, it looks like this: -

But you can see that as its right there on the sidebar, hey its Sunday morning and my head hurts OK?

The advantages of the new search system are: -

It ranks the search results better

It offers suggestions as you type (I love that feature!)

It indexes sub directories of the blog

The last one is the key for me as I have a number of tools off the main blog on their own pages and this well search them too. Cachechecker is an example of this, heres the search page for it

Last job to do is set up a Cron job on the server to re-index the site every day.

So how can this be done? Thought you’d never ask…

I am using Sphider which is a free PHP based spider. Very quick and simple to set up and offers a huge number of features.

Its installed on a subfolder on the site and then I just copied and pasted the search form into the blogs sidebar, bit of css and we are good to go.

Let me know how it works for you!

Incidently loving POPrl at the moment for sharing this link

If you use a free theme from a Google advert you are an idiot..

Yeah you are, admit it. You would have to be unless you knew what you were doing. Having spent some time recently helping out when people have had their blogs hacked I decided to take another look at the free theme scams and was shocked by what I found.

I say I was shocked, thats a lie really. I knew what to expect and I knew where to look. I have to also admit I know all this and how effective it can be as I have done some of this in the past too.

OK so what I did was nip over to Google and search for ‘Free wordpress themes’ and heres what we get: -

Now as you can see we have a few paid adwords ads for free themes, suspicious? Yeah me too…

We also have a couple of decent organic results from upstanding places like Smashing Magazine etc.

So what we will do is grab a random theme from the top adwords adverts and the top organic result and have a poke around to see whats there.

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I created this new theme for my blog today. It took me a little over 3 hours work so there may be a few things left to fix.

Its nice when you have a few hours free on the weekend to get down to sorting out a few jobs that have been around waiting for me to sort for a while. Thanks to Dave who commented on the theme during the development – I am afraid that as its my own personal blog I don’t bother with the professional thing of making a duplicate blog and testing it before live.

Dave also spotted that I have made a few changes to the way the link juice flows through the site, I will probably do a few more posts on that as it settles in and I tweak it to make best use of where the inbounds head now. Not that anyone should take my advice on SEO – the clues in the name after all

I have also made a few adjustments to the way I handle the links outbound from comments and links in comments. If you comment on a regular basis then your links will now be Followed. One note of caution look carefully at any dofollow plugins you install, I checked the code on one or two and at least one of them was calling home with the urls of each post with followed links on. Crafty stuff that, just a little embarrassed I didn’t think of it as I could have built up a nice little target list of pages to spam!

Let me know what you think of the new theme, all built from scratch ….

P.s. Remember I do create custom wordpress themes for anyone who wants them over on my business site

Addition:

Just been looking at the way the site now loads too and its far far faster than before