Help Your Readers Search Your Blog

After your blog starts to get bigger, you'll want your readers to be able to find the content easier, sometimes looking for more detail than can be found in the Archives index. You can generally use Labels for a more comprehensive index of the blog contents, but both labels and titles index the posts based on your vision of the blog. What if you want your readers to view your blog, on their terms?

This is where the Navbar, with its search box, becomes useful. That's assuming that you don't block the Navbar, and assuming that your readers like using the Navbar. But you're not confined to using the Search box on the Navbar - you can make your own search box, and position it where you like.

Setup a new HTML / JavaScript gadget, to get a very simple search box for your blog.

Just copy the code to the new gadget.

<form action="/search" method="get">
<input name="q" type="text"/>
<input value="Search This Blog" type="submit"/>
</form>

Having setup your new gadget, you can position it anywhere on the page. Or, you can have a search box inside a post, as I show above. That's your choice.

You can get way more fancy, for instance search multiple blogs at once, using a Google Custom Search box, but for a 5 minute blog upgrade, this is all that you need.

• Search only your blog.
• Search your blog directly, not from search engine cache. No waiting for search engine updates.
• Display search results as part of the blog display, with all blog accessories and decorations visible.

This is very user friendly - your readers will appreciate it.

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