Pablo Averbuj

Tonight’s WordPress Rabbit Hole

So here’s how I got sucked into spending way too much time working on WordPress tonight.

1. Hey, I really want to use feedburner, but my ajax-y search (that I’m sure nobody uses) broke last time I used the feedburner plug-in. (1 minute)
2. I’ll just set up a Google Custom Search (20 minutes, mostly messing around with it).
3. Now that I think about it, I was just looking at the Google AJAX API and Google Custom Search, I bet those two things could work… (2 hours)
4. Neat, but my search results are crap because everything is under “index.php”. I should turn on permalinks (15 minutes)
5. Well, now it’s going to take Google for ever to index my site, I should submit a sitemap…
6. Here’s a neat sitemap plugin! (15 minutes)
7. Crap it wasn’t really designed for sites that have multiple blogs in a single directory structure, I’ll just put it in /sitemap/sitemap.xml (10 minutes)
8. Crap Google wants sitemaps in the root directory. I guess I’ll fix it with a mod_rewrite rule (30 minutes, most of it editing wrong file)
9. Ok, fixed now submit the sitemap to Google and wait for it to update (5 minutes)
10. Wait, all of the search results are prefixed with “Pablo Averbuj” I should fix that. (30 minutes, taking over UI from Google)
11. Ok, now I’m ready to install my feedburner plugin!

At the conclusion of which I’ve spent more than a couple of hours and learned a few things along the way. The Google Custom Search Engine stuff is pretty neat, and it ties into the Ajax API nicely. The Ajax API takes a lot of fiddling to make it behave the way i wanted (ie, seamlessly fit in with my previous look and feel). The sitemap plugin I linked to above is very nicely done, especially the management page. And soon I’ll learn how many people read this site via feeds. I’m sure it will be almost as exciting as Christmas.