Adsense Idea

Asides

Wouldn’t it be neat if instead of requiring a crawler bot to visit the page the adsense javascript could actually scrape the page text that the user sees (like a screen reader like JAWS) and use that to formulate the ad in real-time? That would prevent people from cloaking pages for the adsense bot an would allow it to be used on pages that you must be logged in to view the content. I know it’s probably impossible, but it’d still be neat.

Blog Appeal

Asides


“I’ll have you know, that WordPress is very sexy. Just ask any WP site owner, they’ll say that their sex appeal has increased by a factor of 2 since they moved to WordPress. And you’ve never been moved until you’ve been moved by someone like me.” I can attest to the first part. Shelley is doing WordPress/blog consulting to raise money for a new camera. If you’re in the market for that sort of thing, may want to drop her a note.

Link Thanks

Uncategorized

I just wanted to take a moment to thank those people who give proper attribution (aka a hat tip) when they post about something they found here. More and more lately I’m seeing things that I know started here show up from blogs of people I know and respect with nary a note or link back. Taking the time to properly attribute things can be a drag sometimes, but I think it’s important to maintain the credibility of weblogging as a medium and to reward those who bring new things to light. If you are someone who does properly credit things please know that I appreciate it quite a bit, and I hold you in a higher esteem than more “professional” blogs who are sloppy at best with their attribution.

WordPress.org Search

Uncategorized

I’ve ripped out the guts and redone the search on the WordPress.org support forums in the hopes of making it something more people will use. Try it out! The new system searches the wiki (hosted on a different machine), thread titles, recent posts, and does a FULLTEXT post search for the most relevant posts. It has contextual search highlighting (like Google).

When I have some time to get back to this every section will have a “more of this” link to take you to more results (paged). It does this currently with the wiki search, counting the total results and linking to the wiki search directly if there are more than 5 results. Probably still a few bugs to work out. The fulltext query was taking over two seconds to run until I tweaked the JOIN type to get the MySQL optimizer to use the proper index and join order. Everything should validate as XHTML.

A new system is also in place to inject custom results at the top of the page. We’ve been logging searches for the last few months (over a 129,000 so far, about 43,000 unique searches) and I’m going to be working closely with the documentation team to identify which searches are most common and what tailored information would be best to present the user with when they search for targetted terms, be it a blog post, an external resource, someplace on WordPress.org itself, a wiki page, or a specific thread. We can watch trends and spikes in searches to identify any problems in the application itself or features that may be insufficently documented or hard to use.

The work is far from finished, but I think it’s a strong first step into fully integrating search as a support mechanism and bringing the WordPress team even closer to the pulse of the users.