Search for search

Search engine added!

Site improvements: nice new weather icons, improved search ranking and a decent 404 page.

Well, having implemented my own search engine for clagnut, I’ve just discovered (via Dean) that MySQL now has its own search engine built in: As of Version 3.23.23, MySQL has support for full-text indexing and searching. I suppose I should be pleased and excited that…

I recently started listing Google search terms with each blog post. This was done as a matter of interest, but it had an unintentional effect: the search terms fed back into Google and boosted my page rank. I explain the feedback process.

Yahoo! is becoming less and less relevant by the day, as it relies more and more on Google. From the Yahoo! Help pages: You may have noticed that the Yahoo! Search results look a little different. As part of our ongoing efforts to offer you the easiest and most rewarding…

Technorati recently released cool charty goodness for any keyword search, and what’s more you can post the graphs right into your blog. And then there’s egoSurf.

Google has 136 references to the phrase “ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long”. 137 by the time it gets around to indexing this page, assuming it ever does. [and 12 hours later it’s indexed] Oh, and someone should ban the use of spray deodorants,…

A handy little article illustrating a simple search engine in PHP (guess what I’ll be doing with it). Weather feed added courtesy of Multimap, of course. Finally, navigation added too (needs fixing in Opera)!

Good stuff on design, usability and elegant coding from Adrian Holovaty and Tantek Çelik. And Dean has introduced a great Google highlighting tool which highlights your Google search terms. See it in action here (click the top link to clagnut). Update: Cal Henderson…

Using the DOM to automatically underline the letter of a link text which matches its accesskey.

Recently I’ve been playing around with MySQL full-text searching, including integrating it as Clagnut’s search engine. It’s good, but there’s a few limitations I had to get around.

Googlewhacking may well be the latest time-wasting trend for Googlenauts, and it’s even more pointless than Googlefight. It is mildly addictive though. One locates a whack by finding two (and only two) words which, when entered into Google , receive a single result.…

There’s a couple of new (to me) features on Google that I wasn’t aware of.

A while ago I pointed that more and more, Yahoo is relying on Google for it’s search results. Tim Parkin pointed out that a Yahoo listing will give a higher Google ranking, so from that point of view being on Yahoo does still have some importance. In fact, the reason a…

Epizootic is to animals as epidemic is to people. And a brief exploration of putting Unicode characters into Web pages.

The wonderful thing about Italian food is its simplicity. Anyone with a soul can cook a good Italian meal when they put their mind to it. Thats why I don’t much go in for Italian restaurants.

My favourite fifty albums of the Noughties.

So d.Construct is over. It all seemed to go swimmingly well and there has been a fantastic positive response from everyone who attended.

One of my goals for Clagnut is to make it accessible beyond good alt tags and valid code. Providing keyboard shortcuts through the accesskey attribute for important parts of the site, such as search, help and home, can help. It struck me that there should be consistency in…

The vote for clagnut link is up. Zeldman has stopped his third party links opening in a named window. And about time too. 37 Signals have designed a better Google.

So I just bought a Herman Miller Aeron chair for the home office. Extravagant? Perhaps; but it was it worth it?

Clagnut posts have been getting longer and less frequent of late, which means a bunch of sites are going noticed but unreported. So it was time to emulate the trend of a rolling list of links – hence the creation of blogmarks.

TouchGraph GoogleBrowser is a fantastic Java-based tool for visualising Google:related results. The automatic labelling is impressive in itself (the algorithm appears to work in realtime) and all the nodes are clickable to provide more information. Nice to see Clagnut has…

Just been finishing off a contract left over from before my move to Multimap (going very well thank you). I’m building a site for a client (thanks Carbon) with a traditional heirarchical navigation, however the client insists that all their navigation be images. Top level…

Discussion of the evolution of triple tags to machine tags, in particular Flickr’s handling thereof, and how best to represent an ISBN in machine tag format.

Cross-Browser PNG Translucency in the current issue of SitePoint. Useful, but won’t validate: Let’s just hope that Microsoft wise up and support PNG transparency with the standard <img> tag in Internet Explorer 7! Westciv (makers of Style Master) announce the…

Gaz Combes, he of Supergrass fame, lives just around the corner from me. So when, the other Sunday, we both turned up at my local, it was not really a surprise. But what is the etiquette in this situation? Here he is: a neighbour, but also the lead singer of a rock band. One…

I have rediscovered the long-forgotten link tag. Use it to make your site more accessible.

Help save BBC 6 Music by getting Joy Division Oven Gloves to number 6 in the singles charts.

Over at UKbloggers we have started collecting submissions for our geographical directory of British blogs.

Notes from the Macromedia MX 2004 seminar. In particular how Dreamweaver pleases and disappoints and how Flash video gets better and better.

I’ve never been a big fan of sitemaps on Web sites, perhaps because I’ve too often seen them done badly. A recent Boxes & Arrows article explains how to do them properly.

Thanks for your support. I don’t normally get political here at Clagnut, and even less often do I get angry and sweary, so I thought I’d show any new readers what I normally write about, by way of a top ten most visited posts this fortnight.

When I started this blog, I built the CMS myself. Not using off-the-shelf software meant designing and building things like next/previous links and comments. But it seems I got it wrong – should I change things and go with convention?

You may have noticed that Clagnut was down for most of last week. The culprits were referrer spam robots maxing out my database connections, resulting in my ISP putting my account on hold.

A discussion of the Upgrade Your Browser message so often placed at the top of web pages which can only displayed as intended by browsers with good CSS capabilities. Personally I find find it annoying…

Christina Wodtke has created Widgetopia, a collection UI elements, and discusses solving user interface problems – by best practice or common practice?

Tomas Jogin has started an interesting discussion reflecting how heading level choices can give a different perception of document structure. I’m suggesting that adding hidden headings for document clarity would not be a bad thing.

First impressions of Tiger (and its in-built rip-offs). Also DigitalRefueler and Mark Pilgrim’s IBM blog.

I’ve been somewhat quiet of late, which as usual means busy, busy, busy. And without further ado, the fruits of my labour can be found at Multimap.com – a complete rebuild using Web standards, semantic HTML and CSS layout.

The Lomographic Society website has much to admire from a design and marketing perspective, and it encourages a great photographic philosophy. But is a 35mm camera really the right medium for a snap-happy ethos, or does digital win hands down?

The Disability Rights Commission publishes an inaccessible website demonstration. Try the simulation of a user who has difficulty controlling a mouse. Nielsen argues for separate interfaces for sighted on non-sighted users, saying that auditory methods need a 1-D approach.

Out of the box, the Apache Web server that comes with OS X does not take any notice of .htaccess files. It took me a while to figure out how to get them working, so I thought I’d share.

In recent commentary, people have lumped together Google Analytics, Mint and Measure Map as three new traffic analysis tools all competing with each other. The reality is somewhat different.

As is no doubt being reported across the entire blogosphere and tech news feeds everywhere, Apple had a bit of a bumper Macworld 2005, introducing in particular a new desktop, a new iPod and a new software suite.

This month in DigitalWeb mag, Jeff Lash talks about using Information Architecture to promote business goals as well as user needs: Using information architecture to meet business goals by focusing on user needs not only proves your professional worth, but makes users happy…

There have been some great articles published recently on the accessibility of Ajax and DOM scripting.

The new W3C Validator has come out of beta and released unto the world. There is an improved UI and loads of links to the Specs, as well as help, documentation, tips and improved accessibility (accesskeys a-plenty). There also seems to have been a few changes to the…

I’m really pleased to finally announce the release of a brand new website, The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, or Web Typography for short.

Why I haven’t been blogging much recently and what I’ve missed over the past few weeks. Highlights include Todd Dominey’s PGA Open Championship and Phantom Power, the new album from Super Furry Animals. Also a brief critique of the new Pixelsurgeon site.