Sunday, December 28, 2003
(4:09 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
New Feature: Searching and Trackback
I have added a rudimentary Google search to this site -- it is located on the sidebar, at the very bottom. There are a couple of drawbacks to this feature. First, it only goes to the appropriate archive page, not the post itself. This is a limitation of the Blogger format, which only divides each post by an "a name" tag, rather than putting each into a separate file (a la Movable Type). If you were searching, for example, for "gay bath house," you would go to the archive that contains that post, but you would have to dig through all the other posts in order to find it. Your web browser's "search on this page" feature should be of some assistance here. Secondly, the background color of the search results is an ugly teal blue color. I would imagine that this has something to do with the fact that I basically stole the code for this feature from Juan Cole's site and made only the most obvious changes. I don't know exactly what to change, and I'm too lazy to update my template as many times as it would take to figure out. In any case, if anyone ever wanted to find a specific post, this is much better than manually scanning through the archives.
Someday I'll switch to Movable Type, which will make all these problems go away entirely. For now, though, it just doesn't seem to be worth it.
UPDATE: As part of my continued Internet binge, I have also added a Trackback feature. I'm not at all sure how it works, but I'm sure it will be great. I am adding this link to a John Halbo post on which I commented several times, to see if my post will show up under his trackback.
