I’ve made a few improvements to the site over the last few weeks, and now that they’re working the way they should I figured I’d let everyone know that they’re there to use. I envisioned L&UL as a big collection of resources, readings, and (hopefully) useful information, and I think both of these upgrades are in keeping with that spirit. A big thank you, as always, to Renda for her help and advice.
Google Search
The first major improvement is that I’ve swapped out Wordpress’s search engine for a custom search engine (or CSE) powered by Google. I got this idea from Khoi Vinh of Subtraction.com, who’s switched his site over and written thoughtfully about that process in this post. The Google CSE is free and the only downside is that visitors have to deal with a few Google ads off to the side, which at this point I think everyone’s used to. The benefits, though, are huge. You can now search the library and the recommended readings much more comprehensively, for potentially long-lost things like this reading about the Hausdorff dimension or maybe a book by Clifford Stoll.
Designers, Booksellers, and Broadcasts
Delicious is an incredibly powerful tool for storing information, and one of my favorite things they offer is a Linkroll bookmarklet, which allows you to feed any set of links with a particular tag to your own blog or website. With this tool, I’ve built three new pages—one for Designers’ websites, another for Booksellers’ websites, and a third for Blogs and Podcasts—each of which will be dynamically updated anytime I tag a new site. I love scanning blogrolls for valuable new links, but often times lists can get so long that they become unwieldy. Hopefully this approach alieviates this problem by focusing the content a bit, as Delicious itself does. My links list has always lived in the library section of the site, since I think of it as a set of “online resources.” Scroll down and look to the right on that page, from now on they’ll always be permanently accessible there.