Adding a Blog ‘Post’ Search to your Typepad Blog - Based on Google

Posted: February 2, 2007 at 7.09 pm
Filed under Blogging Subscribe to comments

So one of those really annoying aspects of a Typepad blog is the inability for a Blog reader to search your own Blog for previous listings, should they so desire.

Seems a pretty fundamental omission.

So I have been hacking away at my own Blog for some time now, getting my hands dirty with the CSS styling and adding custom code to enhance my Blog. All fun,

As you will have noticed, I have one of these search boxes on my Blog, a combination of code from a couple of different sources, one being AskDaveTaylor.com

The first 2 steps are all about turning your Blog into a Google friendly Blog. We do this by creating a Site Map or Index of your Blog and/or domain. Once we have done this we submit that Site Map to Google. This gives Google all the information it needs to index your Blog, thus
creating a searchable site.

1. The first thing you need to do is submit a Site Map of your Blog to Google. This you can do here at MyPageRank.net. This is a great site anyway, gives you many options to Ping, spider, engine submit and stats.

What you need is the SiteMaps Creator, which is one of the Free services. I shall omit explaining in detail what you need to do, if you are like me, you’ll want to figure it out yourself. But it is actually very straightforward. All you are doing in essence is submitting your Blog to MyPage rank so that it can create a ‘map or structure of your Blog so that Google can more effectively Google ‘Index’ it. You end up with a file, your Site Map, that’s the end goal for this first exercise.

2. Now you need to submit it to Google, where you need to go is here… Google ‘Webmaster Tools’. I can’t link it as you need to set up a Google account, which will then allow you to access WebMaster Tools. Again, I shall omit the detailed approach. Once you have set-up an account, the idea is to ‘upload’ the SiteMap that was created above.

This gives Google all the information it needs to index your Blog, thus creating a searchable site. It is pretty self explanatory once you get there.

It can take Google a few hours or more to effectively Index your site, depending on the size of it, how many pages etc. In this period, any searches done are likely to yeild not a lot. So a little patience is required after you have finished the next step

3. The easy bit. Create a new Notes Typelist in TypePad. In the Note field, paste in the following code:

<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search">
<div style="border:0px solid black;padding:1px;width:20em;">
<table border="0" cellpadding="2px">
<tr><td>
<input type="text" name="q" size="25"
maxlength="255" value="" />
<input type="submit" value="Search my Blog" /></td></tr>
<tr><td align="Left" style="font-size:.98em">
<input type="checkbox" name="sitesearch"
value="grahamsblog.typepad.com" checked /> GrahamsBlog<br />
</td></tr></table>
</div>
</form>

This creates a no frills search box. If you want to add a border then you can do so by changing the 2nd line of code, where it says ‘border:0px’ change the ‘0px’ to a ‘1px’ or however thick you want it.

The other 2 main changes are on line 10 in green.
Change "grahamsblog.typepad.com" to your domain name. The text at the end needs to be altered as well.

If you left both these values as they are then the search will be done on my Blog not yours!

That’s it. Any results will come up in a Google style list, but hopefully just results from your Blog.