Search Everything looks to break five thousand downloads this weekend (if not today) on Wordpress extend. I lost the prior totals before I committed all my downloads to extend but I’m guessing the total downloads since version 1 is around 7.5K.
All this with the recent news that WP 2.4 will be including the ability to “search everything”, almost exactly how I laid out in my recent posts on wp-hackers, benifiting Wordpress and our community.
From Wordpress Tac #5149:
Description
Extend search to include pages and other things. The more comprehensive the better, limited only by performance considerations. Care will need to be taken when including pages in the search results since themes that display full post content may break. Putting a filter that strips tags from page content returned in search results would suffice. The search should be as hookable as possible to allow customization via plugin.
Possible things to search on:
- Post title, content, excerpt, author, tags, categories
- Page title, content, excerpt, author, tags, categories
- Comment content, author
- Post/page meta fields
Features that would be nice to have:
- Order search by relevance
- Excerpt relevant areas of content, search engine style
Relevant discussions:
This is great news, granted my sites traffic will take a major hit but I’ve felt strongly that one of the major issues with WP core is the default search functionality. But even though Search Everything will be deprecated and useless after 2.4 I’ll be looking to create a new search plugin that will filter the results, the opposite of what SE does now. Maybe I’ll call that new plugin search nothing.
2.4 looks to be a major milestone in WP, with the inclusion of search and the new backend redesign it looks to be the most noticeable upgrade since 2.1.
So some of you might have noticed that my feeds are completely out of whack. Well since the upgrade to 2.3 some plugins that say they are 2.3 compatible aren’t working. However, I’m not completely sure it’s the plugins causing the issue because I’m getting similar errors this very second while writing this post.
The auto save produces this error every time I write a post, no matter what I do:
WordPress database error: [Table 'name.prefix_categories' doesn't exist]
SELECT c.cat_ID AS ID, MAX(p.post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `prefix_categories` c, `prefix_post2cat` pc, `prefix_posts` p WHERE pc.category_id = c.cat_ID AND p.ID = pc.post_id AND p.post_status = 'publish' AND p.post_type='post' GROUP BY c.cat_id
I shouldn’t be getting these errors after the complete re-install I did this morning. I’ve been meaning to export the entire site through the export function WP provides and then loading that backup into a fresh installation for while, but this morning I was fed up so I just did it.
The syndication plugin is getting some similar errors that I can’t entirely explain how it happens, but the plugins I’ve used (I think) are creating posts with a dummy category name which is the same as the intended category. That makes me think the plugin just isn’t supported yet fully, even if it says it is on the plugin page but that doesn’t eplain the similar errors I’m getting on auto save.
I really don’t know what to do other then wait for 2.3.1 and hopefully some more updates from the plugin authors. For now all RSS readers wont be receiving my pownce posts, you’ll need to subscribe to them separately and will have to comment on Pownce.
This might be a good thing if it forces Jared, Nathan and Nate to create Pownce accounts in order to comment, that way I don’t have to pull in these posts at all.
I just released 4.0 of Search Everything. It’s 2.3 compatible, except the category exlclusion option, I need to figure out the new taxonomy schema a little more in order to fix this. Hopefully someone else will send me an fix before I get around to it.
Search Everything increases the ability of the default Wordpress Search, options included:
* Search Every Page
* Search non-password protected pages only
* Search Every Comment
* Search only approved comments
* Search Every Draft
* Search Every Excerpt
* Search Every Attachment
* Search Every Custom Field (metadata)
* Exclude Posts from search
* Exclude Categories from search (WP 2.2 only)… tagging support and category exclusion for WordPress 2.3 coming soon.
If you’re using any other version it’s a good idea to upgrade. I completely rewrote the admin backend with a much cleaner look while fixing that annoying initial save bug. I also move the options page to the manage area, which makes more sense and since Wordpress will not be seeing any Search Management in the near or distant future (which is for another post) it’s there to stay.
If you haven’t downloaded it, what are you thinking?
I just updated Search Everything with the ability to exclude specific posts, pages or categories. There are a few things I still need to fix like the entire admin panel needs an overhaul (props mikecherim) and a major release needs to come out of the release of Wordpress 2.3 next week. I haven’t put enough time in looking at 2.3 but the last thing I read the plugin will be broken with the update, not just the tag searching functionality (that just wont exist yet). I really need to find the time to update the plugin this weekend, or maybe I’ll wait for someone else to fix it; that’s worked out well before ;).
I went ahead and added a bunch of RSS options to my site:
Just click the RSS icon in your browser and you should see the options above.
Update:
If you’re wondering how, all I did was put the rss feed in the header.php file of my theme. Example,
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – Main” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – Comments” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/DanCameroncomments” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – No mini-posts” href=”http://dancameron.org/category/general/feed/” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – Pownce” href=”http://pownce.com/feeds/public/DANCAMERON/” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – Google Shared” href=”http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/17910337670127747913/state/com.google/broadcast” />
I do apaligize for the duplicates yesterday. After migrating to Pownce and shutting off twitter tools to pull in posts Twitter Tools went crazy. Every time I deleted the twitter posts they automatically were added minutes later without my doing. I’m thinking it was a cron issue because only after I deleted the cron value from the options table did it stop, but I did delete the plugin instead of just deactivating it and also deleted the tweets table so I don’t know.
Anyways for the people who do not prefer my mini posts (now from Pownce) I do have other feeds for you to use, depending on the category:
http://dancameron.org/category
http://dancameron.org/category
In my next theme I’m going to make these more clear for readers because this morning I received a concerned e-mail,
I’m interested in what you write from a web design point of view and would certainly resubscribe if you create a feed for entries only
Since I’m talking about Pownce as my mini-blog tool; I really don’t know how I’m going to manage it in the future. I do want the posts in my feed and I do want everyone to be able to comment, not just Pownce users. So for now I’m going to keep them the way they are. Currently they’re being pulled in by feedwordpress and then a post is created. This is actually the same way I used twitter tools with the only caveat that my site’s sidebar will now link directly to Pownce. My reasoning is my “fans” will read my RSS and will be able to get to the post on my site to comment, my guests on the other hand will just go to Pownce directly if they click a link in the sidebar and hopefully they’ll just followup at Pownce.
In the future I do want to seperate the two becuase I really want the ability to segmant out my actual friends so I can post whatever I want and send whatever I want without any questioning about it being appropriate. And Pownce does that for me. An easier transition would be for them to fix their damn commenting if you’re not logged-in/registered.
I mentioned a new theme and I want to say that I’ve been inspired by simplicity of some major blogger sites, namely Dave Winer’s site. The plan is to either get going on a new theme for the sandbox competition or wait until the entries are released so I can fork one of the entries. The later seems more reasonible at the moment however I don’t know what I’ll be doing on some Friday night at midnight in the coming weeks.
I changed up my permalinks to be more SEO friendly just now. Since WP 2.0 I’ve been wanting to change the permalinks on the site but never did because when that upgrade was released WPs use of the .htaccess file was completely reworked (for the better). At that time I didn’t have the hours to create a plugin to provide the migration and in the meantime I just placed it aside since it didn’t bother me enough. Well, tonight after a 2 minute Google search I was able to find someone already did the hard work and released Permalinks Migration Plugin. I completed the migration in a fraction of what it’s going to take to get this post published. I love WP; the engine and the community.
Now, I’m using the more sensible structure:
/%category%/%postname%/
Since I have to post about something other than Apple I thought I’d share some of my reader trends. Hopefully it’s as interesting to you as it is to me, or helpful.
One thing I wanted to bring up with all the GTD hubub going around was how I categorizing my feeds (it’s also similar to how I manage my tasks through e-mail). I forget what podcast and who I heard used this method but I’d like to thank him since it’s helped me tremenously. The simple method is to prioritize your feeds that way your not digging through a ton of categories to just get your favorite/”Important” feeds. In the past to keep up with unread feeds while I was busy I’d just clear out all them, marking me all as read . disregarding that there were some “important” things I ended up wanting to read. So missing items is not the wonderful thing about this method, the most important is to not read what you don’t care too much for.
You’ll notice below I’m sticking to my prioritization.
And no, you don’t have to make “dumb” names. I’m just using numbers so they’ll be in order.
Another interesting trend that I’d like to share is when I read. Not important at all but it’s just fun to see my peek is during TV hours and the end of my shift.
I have a lot of shared feeds on my links page.
Well, I talked about hiding categories one the homepage earlier here and here and it took no more then 5 minutes to fix. I had originally dreaded thinking about it since I thought the process would include manually modifying my theme but with a 2 second search on Google I found the solution. Category Visibility Plugin solves all my problems easily and with a few more usable features like hiding posts from non-registered users. Maybe I’ll request an option to hide posts for registered users to handle the review-me posts.
Hopefully the tweet digests won’t overwhelm your visit now. They’ll still show in RSS which I prefer.
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January 25
