Saturday, March 25, 2006

Jack Lewis Makes Searches Easier

This is a post from Jack Lewis about how to make your searches easier. You can actually check for the news you choose to find, instead of having to go through all the nonsense you get from Google, etc. Check it out.

I'd been wanting this for a long time, and now I have it—an online aggregator/search engine of my own, that includes the sites I choose.

I'd been slacking off linking to other blogs that were covering the same story because it was so time consuming, and MovableType Three Point Too-Idiotic-to-be-Endured was screwing most of them up anyway. I set out yesterday morning to try to see if there was anyway to compile data from XML feeds into a search engine so I could search a collection of blogs for keywords. Technorati, Google and the other blog search engine deliver way too much useless junk to be of any real use.

By the time I grew frustrated at writing my own and was searching for PHP classes and scripts that might provide shortcuts, I'd found a script that did almost exactly what I wanted.

You can check it out at http://JackLewis.net/aggregator/. I have 89 blogs included, but I may drop or add some as needed. I will need to keep the total number within a reasonable size so I don't overwhelm my server. It's refreshing the feeds once and hour, and displaying the most recent posts. The search part is what I really like, because now I can locate those posts to link to in almost no time.

Help yourself, and use it all you want. I've disabled as much of the customizing parts that I could, so I don't think anyone can screw it up. If you want your blog included, email me, but I'm limiting it to blogs that have at least 200-300 visitors a day, post on a daily basis and focus on Conservative politics and news.

That is the end of his work and the beginning of mine. lol. Jack is a very nice man who is also a great writer. You may want to visit his site once in a while. I find it very interesting. Thank you, and have a great day.