Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

trust your instincts

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	March 11, 2003

SOPHOMORE BLOGGER GROWING PAINS What do you do when you can't find an archived post (yours or a fellow Slogger's) on a particular subject? Do you have to browse day-by-day through your blog calendar until you find it? And what do you expect a visitor to do when, as a result of a search engine result they link to your home page or a day page and are completely lost trying to find the article in question? These are issues I never worried about as a newbie blogger, but now I'm a sophomore they've become daily problems. I've taken the following three steps to solve them, and would welcome other bloggers' advice on additional or better solutions: I've added a 'Search My Site' Google bar in the right column. Very simple, and seems to work really well. I've added a Table of Contents, listing my major posts alphabetically by subject. You access it by clicking on 'Table of Contents' at the top of the left column. I thought about putting the whole table of contents on the home page but I hate clutter. I also looked at several automatic blog post indexers but found them inflexible, and their results can look a bit geeky. My answer involves one more piece of daily maintenance however. I've asked Scott Rosenberg to add a 'Search Salon Blogs' bar on the Salon home page and/or a third Salon Blog support page (in addition to the Ranking and Recent Post pages). This should be dead easy for them to do (identical to the 'Search My Site' bar except it excludes the 'inurl:000xxxx' tag). If they don't do it I'll put it on my site and encourage others to copy it to theirs. We need a better way to find posts across the whole blogs.salon.com domain. It's a community necessity. By the way, my Referrer list for today indicates that my blog is being accessed by a site in Romania. Unfortunately it points to my home page and not the blog post (on Blogs in Business ) the Romanian article seems to be about. Hope they know how to use my search bar, and that their English is better than my Romanian! 9:19:54 PM  trackback []  comment []

AMERICAN GULAG "There are 650 people from 43 countries being held at Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of links to the al-Qaeda terrorist network. The people have not been charged and are not allowed lawyers. Sixteen are known to have attempted suicide." - CBC News, today 12:31:07 AM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dave Pollard. Last update: 19/02/2004; 2:41:11 PM.