December 28, 2007 at 6:01AM Lijit
I’ve added the Lijit search widgit to the site in the hopes that it’ll be a bit better than the crappy Technorati one I’ve been using so far. I really can’t be bothered building search functionality into the weblog myself, especially when somebody else can possibly do a better job.
So far my feelings are a little mixed. I picked up a lot of stuff just fine, but missed by the <link/> tag pointing to my blogroll/subscriptions. It also, for some reason, refuses to index my linklog, though as I added that after I’d signed up, it might just be queued or something.
Let’s see how it goes.
Update: Well, it appears to have indexed my linklog. How well, I’m not sure. It’s not terribly critical anyway; I’ve been thinking of merging it into my blogging software for quite a while anyway. Still not picking up my blogroll though.
Update (Jan 3rd): I’m doubly impressed with Lijit. Not only does it seem to be a pretty decent blog search engine, but they take the time to talk to their users, which is a huge bonus.
I think the core issue I had with Lijit is a UI one. It has a great UI for adding sites, feeds, and blogrolls during the initial signup, but when you’re adding them after you’re signed up, it’s hard to know if something went wrong, or if the added site/feed/blogroll simply hasn’t been processed yet. It ought to indicate that it’s been queued for processing later. Still, this is a rather minor nit, and I have to say I’m very happy with it so far.
1 On January 2, 2008 at 23:55, Tara Anderson wrote:
Keith, I wanted to thank you for giving our search wijit a try and for the nice post about Lijit. I had one of our developers look at the issue you brought up about our system not picking up your blogroll. Since you link to your blogroll, but don’t actually list them on your blog, there are two manual options for you to choose from; both will solve the problem. You can add http://talideon.com/linklog/ to your network on Lijit or export an OPML file containing your blogroll. On your network page within Lijit, you’ll see an empty box at the bottom where you can add URLs or OPML files.
This should take care of the missing blogroll issue. Let me know how this goes of if you have any questions at all.
2 On January 3, 2008 at 14:48, Keith wrote:
Wow! Thanks for getting back to me, Tara.
I think my main issue was that Lijit has a small UI flaw: when you add something, it doesn’t indicate that it hasn’t processed it just yet, aside from the fact that there’s a URL where the site/feed/blogroll’s title ought to be. This made me think that Lijit wasn’t able to process the file for some reason.