The blogs.educationau.edu.au site has now been going for nearly 2 months, and has been quite successful. There have been over 80 posts by 9 different authors, over 10,000 pageloads and around 40 subscribers according to FeedBurner (as well as many subscribers who subscribe to individual blogs).
This success has caused a few problems, most notably the problems with finding older, interesting posts.
We have a number of excellent ideas for fixing this (most notably an integrated search and tag-cloud based navigation), but I’ve been busy on other things.
Fortunately, yesterday Google released their new Custom Search Engine tool, which let me implement a search engine on blogs.educationau.edu.au in around half-an-hour - and most of that time was spent fooling around with CSS (thanks to Miles for help with this).
If you’ve ever doubted the power of mash-ups, then playing with a tool like this should convince you that they are for more than toy applications.
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[…] Google Custom Search has recieved a lot of attention since its release. One thing I discovered while developing an implementation at work was exactly how customisable it is. It isn’t clear from the simple examples, but some of the more advanced examples and the documentation show how it is possible to do facet-based navigation of search results, refinement based on lables and more. […]
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