It's time for a search box.
As the number of blog entries on the site has grown, I've found it increasingly hard to locate posts. Sometimes I can remember the month, more likely the season, but even that leaves me sorting through 30 or more alternatives.
Tag cloud searches are also clunky. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I'm somewhat sparing in the number of keywords assigned to a post. I pick the themes that I think matter most, and I seldom identify individuals or companies. Retrospectively, though, some of those kinds of keywords are useful.
Google and other search engines help bridge the gap. Enter "Magellan Media" and "Shirky" on Google and you'll get a pretty good cross-section of our posts. Still, there's a lot of overlap, because Google archives our archives as well as our posts. The excerpts are also quite short, sometimes too short to parse unless you click through to the entry.
I'm at fault here, as well. My titles are sometimes (often?) obscure, short references to a range of inspirations. I don't write headlines that are as mindful of search as they can be. I gave brief thought to making my URL titles internet-clunky, but it's more fun to write "50 shades of DRM".
So Dave Ross, who has worked with Magellan on design and web site projects for the last decade or so, has added a search box to the site's home page. The search box also appears when you click through to any blog post.
A search for "Shirky" on the blog now yields a much more targeted list of posts, along with four lines of text taken from each. That's more satisfying, at least to me, and hopefully for you.
A bit of a note about Dave Ross: We met and started working together when his practice was based in New Jersey, and we've continued that relationship since his relocation to Asia a few years ago. The blog was conceived in New Jersey and first went live from his base in Hong Kong. It helped to have worked with him directly before his move, but our continued partnership is testimony to the ease of communications in this global age. That, and Dave's great at what he does.
