Rebuild 09: Google custom search + mobile + related posts

The site search functions here have been pretty funky during the rebuild — sometimes working, sometimes not working, and more often than not displaying oddly as we tried out a variety of things. That should begin to settle down. We have now integrated the Google Custom Search API with a basic, clean, quite traditional implementation. (For example, search for HTML5.) There’s still some funk in play with auto-suggestions and auto-completion, and something is causing some jitters in Google Chrome but not other Webkit browsers. We’re hammering it out.

Two other site elements have also been added recently using WordPress plugins: related posts are now linked below each original posts as “other posts of possible interest.” We are also testing WPtouch Pro as a very easily implemented mobile solution.

The next step is to do a comprehensive code sweep of the rebuilt site to tidy things up, before we use the coding experience to update all of LSNC’s public websites. Having hammered things out here, we should be able to do the site updates to our other public sites efficiently. (That’s the theory, anyway.) There is a “Rebuild 10″ post coming up, where I will recap the code building blocks used to do the Webdogs 3.0 makeover. Stay tuned.