Enhancements

I am almost ready to release the new UUpdates. Two changes have been made to the current site and will carry over into the new one:

First is a set of optimizations to the database. I did some things to make results faster, and some of you may have noticed the total page count was lowered. By looking at the web traffic I noticed that people are far more interested in the latest information than they are in digging in deep, at least not routinely. So, I lowered the number of "feed items" stored to 10 items per site. Some sites had up to 30 items of monthly updates, which were unlikely to ever get read. The filter is just that -- not an extensive search -- as it is limited to pulling from only the excerpt and the title, so it's best used to track hot topics which are likely to appear in the title or first part of the post like filtering on "Second Life" which is getting a lot of press. But the more limited number of posts means searching back is less productive.

The second enhancement is really to offset the first. When it comes to searching I can't compete with a service like Google, so why bother trying? Thanks to Paul Wilczynski I don't have to compete, I can use Google. If a filter on UUpdates fails to find any results, the user will be directed to a page that contains the search results for the same term on Google Search of UU Blogs. Try an obscure reference like "equus" and UUpdates will return no results (at least it didn't when I tried it, Harry Potter's (Daniel Radcliffe) photos could change that). But UUBlogSearch.com will return results.