I've recently been transitioning to a statically generated blog and this threw any plans for a home brewed search functionality out the window.

Fortuitously, I ran across a blog post by Pat Dryburgh that describes how he setup a custom DuckDuckGo search box that was well integrated stylistically into his site.

I took his lead and did the same with the code below:

    <form method="get" id="search" action="http://duckduckgo.com/">
        <input type="hidden" name="sites" value="amdavidson.com"/>
        <input type="text" name="q" maxlength="255" placeholder="Search&hellip;"/>
        <input type="submit" value="DuckDuckGo Search" style="visibility: hidden;" />
    </form>

If you're looking for a search box for your statically generated blog, I heartily recommend it.

Chainsaw wins.

Shot with a Canon EOS-1 and a Canon 50mm F/1.8 using Ilford Delta Pro 100.

Shot with a Canon EOS-1 and a Canon 50mm F/1.8 using Ilford Delta Pro 100.

Above is a graph of my personal email volume between 2004 and 2011. I made it just now after archiving away 2011's mail.

It shouldn't include any work email, or any mailing lists or other junk. Just mail that has been sent to me or from me since March 04.

A couple interesting things, my email usage dropped off significantly in 2007 despite a general upward trend in all other years. I wonder if I lost some mail at some point during transitioning between servers. Also interesting about 2007 is that it had the largest average email size: 129kb. That's about double the overall average since 2004.

Email usage jumped by a huge amount in 2009 when I was traveling and spending approximately 50% of my year abroad and then fell significantly in 2011 when I got a job that keeps me here in the US full time.

For those interested, I created the chart using http://sparklines-bitworking.appspot.com. The constructed url was: http://sparklines-bitworking.appspot.com/spark.cgi?type=impulse&...

I recently went on a business trip for a few short days and decided to go "laptop free" and just bring my iPad with an Apple Wireless Keyboard.

To make a long story short, I loved it.

I bring my iPad anytime I travel. I read on it, watch movies, play games and otherwise pass the time. Up until this trip, if I had to do real work, I would bring a laptop as well as it's just a bit better for cranking out email and the like. With the keyboard, the iPad was just as productive or more than my laptop had been.

Benjamin Brooks just posted that he is trying the same experiment but can't quite get away from his MacBook Air because he needs to be able to upload content to Amazon S3 in order to post to his blog. I host my imagery on S3 as well and ran into a similar situation that was preventing me from easily posting from my iPad or iPhone.

The solution that I came up with was to write a script that allows me to send a Markdown formatted email to an email address that my custom blog software checks. Images that are attached are resized, uploaded to S3, and embedded in the body of the post.

It totally changed the way I blog and made it so much simpler to just shoot off an email to the server. This post was written in just that way, using a keyboard paired to an iPad.

I don't know what platform he uses, but I'd guess there's something pre-written for his platform. I know there is for Wordpress, Posterous, Tumblr, and others.