This is a guest post by Doniree, who’s recent work with a company called Lijit has lead to our announcement today of a pilot program to upgrade search on 20SB. We are using a technology that’s made for blogs. If you’d like to use custom search too, it’s free and its coolness factor is outlined below…this is our partnership link, so please use it if you’d like to help support 20SB’s overhead costs.
For me personally, one of the best things about being a member of 20 Something Bloggers is the introduction to new people and ideas, as well as new products and experiences. 20SB has opened the doors for amazing new relationships, exciting collaborations, awesome free goodies, and the chance to travel around the country to meet some of my favorite bloggers.
Lijit Search – A New Search Tool and Partnership
More recently, I’ve had the opportunity to work with 20SB as Charity Co-Admin, working with Nate at ItStartsWith.Us. I’ve done some work as an unofficial partnership manager too, helping the Admin team facilitate new relationships that just make sense for our community.
I started working for Lijit Networks in early February and immediately became excited for the partnership potential between an innovative tech start-up with a sweet spot for bloggers, and our own 20SB blogging community.
What Lijit Does
Lijit provides a custom search and stats tool for bloggers that indexes and organizes not only your blog itself, but also your social content and network as well.
This means that when I search your blog for “weekend,” I will not only see what you’ve recently blogged on the subject, but will be able to see your tweets, your pictures tagged “weekend“, and posts covered by your blogroll/network about “weekend“.
It pulls in results from everywhere that you are posting, sharing, and talking. Your readers get to really search you.
Search On 20SB
Derek and I have spent the last few months testing and tweaking Lijit’s search tool for 20SB.
We’ve been indexing the network so it’ll be easier to find things. We’ve added the community’s social profiles to a tab in the results. We’re gradually adding your blogs into results, which is incomplete but growing daily.
Sidenote: Below we suggest you add Lijit to your blog. Note that Lijit users will see their blogs indexed faster and added to our 20SB Blogger network tab on the network much easier. If you want to see your blog information in our network tab sooner, let me know and I’ll work with you on getting that in there.
Today, we are excited to announce its installation on the 20 Something Bloggers community site.
Please Be Patient
While we’ve reached a point where we’re thrilled to release this tool to the community, the sheer size of this network (almost 12,000 bloggers!) means that we’re still indexing and there’s some lag time between activity on the network and what’s available in search results. Usually the real-time lag will only last a matter of hours, or even minutes. For profiles, it could be a day or two.
Lijit is working with us to customize a system that work for us. We want the community to be easier to search and navigate, so let us know in our support forums if you find something wonky.
Put Search On Your Blog
This search solution is made for blogs. It adds your social profiles to search results, so your readers can find what they’re looking for no matter where you said it.
Typical search, like the WordPress or Blogger search bars, just search your posts.
If you want to check out Lijit for your own blog – click here to sign up. Full disclosure; that’s a referral link and will credit us for your joining them. We are bloggers, and wouldn’t recommend this if it wasn’t better than other options.
If you want to learn more or have any questions about Lijit Search on 20SB, or installing Lijit on your own blog, send me an email at doniree@20sb.net, and I’d be glad to help you!
For those of you who are afraid of change – note that the default Ning search bar at the top of the page is still available.
Give It A Test Run!
In closing, I am stoked that my job overlaps with being able to work so closely with the growth of 20SB, as it’s been such a significant piece of my life for the last couple of years. I hope you find Lijit useful, and it helps our community to improve for everyone.
If you have questions or suggestions, let us know!
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[...] details are on the 20 Something Bloggers blog, but essentially the jist is this: Derek and I have spent the last couple of months talking through [...]