Housekeeping

In between mowing the hay, getting the garden ready and chasing the kids, I got a little housekeeping done on the site today:

• Fixed the search engine. It was pointing to the internal WordPress search engine, which wasn’t working. I didn’t have the energy to debug that, so I punted and just pointed the code at Google Co-op. Which rocks.

• Added a blogroll. No, it’s not complete. And if you’re not listed there, drop me a line. This was a response to the recognition that blogrolls do matter. (Side note to Erik – linking directly to feeds is probably not the best practice from an SEO perspective. That means links aren’t reciprocal, which means that you’re less likely to get the benefits of having the links on your blog in the first place. At least as I understand it, links to other sites are better, since those sites can reciprocally link back to you, which establishes legitimacy in the link and adds value for both. SEO pros, feel free to point out just how much of this I don’t understand in the comments.)

• Reinserted a “subscribe” widget on the sidebar, so that, you know, the guy who runs publisher services at FeedBurner actually has a visible RSS feed icon on his blog, along with an e-mail subscription form and one-click options to add the feed to Google and NewsGator. Many thanks for not pointing out the hilarious absence of said widget from the latest redesign.

• Used the BloggingPro bottom “sidebar” (that’s what they call it, stop snickering) to display most recent inbound links, most recent posts, and most recent comments. I actually like the way that lays out (though I want most recent comments set to 10, and so far I’ve had no luck figuring out where that preference is set).

Remember, before you complain about the content-free nature of posts like this, far more interesting things are in my recommended links (feed).