Hello. I am Paul Kinlan.

I'm having a hard time finding content on my own website, so I'm looking for a good site search engine. I'm considering Google Site Search for potential ad revenue but don't think that is important. Any recommendations for good, free site search software? Email me at paul.kinlan@gmail.com or leave a comment if you have suggestions.

This blog post, the third in a series about my first AJAX application, focuses on the disastrous visual design. While the functionality is there, the UI is frankly terrible. I've realized my design skills are lacking, and though I have a vision, I struggle to bring it to life visually. The problem is that the application's logic is tightly coupled to the UI. Moving forward, I need to decouple these components. The next version will have a UI-agnostic data structure that the UI can interrogate. This separation will allow me to work on the AJAX framework, business logic, and UI independently.

In part two of this series on the failures of my first AJAX application, I discuss how my initial plan to reduce bandwidth by having the client directly access third-party web services didn't work out. Due to cross-domain scripting issues in Firefox and IE 6/7, I had to implement proxy scripts on my server. This means all client requests now go through my server, increasing my bandwidth demands. While using a proxy server offers benefits like hiding security information (like Technorati developer tokens) and enabling data manipulation/request merging, it comes with the major downside of increased bandwidth usage and the need to create/maintain proxy scripts. I hope to support cross-domain data sources in the next version to mitigate these issues but acknowledge there might still be scenarios where proxy scripts are necessary.

My Technorati ranking has finally improved thanks to an incoming link from another blogger! Feeling grateful and a little guilty after past criticism of the service.

While spell-checking my latest blog post, Blogger suggested "Degenerate" as a correction for "Technorati." I found this amusing, given the generally poor quality of Blogger's spell-check. It doesn't even recognize words like "blog" or British English spellings. At least it keeps things interesting!

I checked my website logs using AWStats and noticed a few searches from Google and MSN, but none from Yahoo. One search caught my attention: "does blogging make money." I tried searching this phrase on both Google and MSN but couldn't find my blog post within the first 15 pages of results. If the person who searched for this and found my blog is reading this, I'd love to know how they found me! And to answer the question, no, blogging doesn't make me money (yet!).

I'm continuing my rant about Technorati. While my posts eventually get indexed, I agree with Zoli Erdos's point about their terrible communication. Technorati desperately needs better customer support, including a FAQ or knowledge base. Emailing the CEO shouldn't be the only way to get a response. While I appreciate Technorati's free service and API, the lack of support is a major problem.

I encountered an issue where my FeedBurner RSS feed wasn't displaying any article content. I've implemented a fix, and you should now be able to access the feed through the FeedBurner icon at the top left of the title. Alternatively, you can subscribe to the ATOM feed at http://www.kinlan.co.uk/atom.xml.

Start.com's AJAX web portal, which displays web feeds in an HTML interface, has been promoted to the main site. However, a persistent issue remains: the inability to cancel the close event on RSS feed panels, a problem previously highlighted and still unresolved.

In this follow-up post, I want to clarify the issue I had with Technorati. While some of the search results I was looking for are now appearing, my main concern remains the lack of communication from Technorati Support. A simple email explaining the situation, such as a blacklisting, a temporary problem, or an indexing issue due to site downtime, would have been sufficient. Despite this, I still appreciate Technorati.