An online notebook
With the release of WordPress 2.7.1, I realised it is about time I upgraded this blog to the latest version – not least since having played with it on some other sites I work on, I have realised how awesome it is.
I’ll be following the excellent instructions provided on the WordPress codex.
Things might be screwy round here for a little while as I get everything reconfigured. Bear with me.
…is the title of a wonderful blog, which describes itself thus:
This blog is written by 2 friends. One lives in Sajaia refugee camp in Gaza and the other lives in Sderot, a small town near Gaza on the Israeli side. There is ongoing violence between Israel and Gaza which has intensified greatly since October 2000. Many have been killed and many have been injured. The media coverage on both sides has been extremely biased. Our Blog is written by 2 real people living and communicating on both sides of the border.
My good friend William Shaw has started working at the RSA recently, and is writing a blog called Arts & Ecology.
William is a fabulous writer and has been blogging for while, and really Gets It. He also has some great ideas for mashing up creative work with online stuff. Well worth subscribing.
The team behind the UK Parliament‘s website – which also includes accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others – have launched a WordPress blog. The Purpose of the blog seems to be focusing on the development of the Parliament website, including the development of a number of social web services.
I’m subscribed to the feed, and have added it to Public Sector Bloggers too.
Google’s customised search engine service is really cool, useful and dead easy to use. It’s what I used to create LGSearch, which is one of the most successful bits of online work I have done. What Google CSE does is allow you to create a ‘whitelist’ of sites you want to limit your search to, so it’s a way of guaranteeing relevance in search results.
Another use of it is to replace your default blog search functionality. For example, it’s better than the WordPress standard search because it searches pages as well as posts; and it allows you to run contextual ads next to the results – taking people away from your blog but providing you with a little income, which is always nice.
The functionality is improved even more by using the new AJAX results overlay, which means there is no need to create a results page. Try it out on DavePress using the search box on the top right.
To get this on your WordPress blog, all you need to do is head over to Google CSE, create your search engine, remembering to only add your blog’s URL to the whitelist, and then copy the search box code into a text widget. Easy!