I’ve added the search widget from Lijit to the left column (after upgrading Expression Engine and ridding myself of an odd bug that targeted, mostly, javascript throughout certain pages on the site) and I’m kind of digging it. It’s free, easy to set up, and has more features than you might guess.

The first thing that it does is set up a search engine for your content. Notice that I didn’t say it sets the search up for your site, it sets the search up for your content. Content over multiple sites, all of the big social sites (MySpace, flickr, whatever) and lets users search your content. When a person uses the search widget to find a term on your site, they not only have the option of seeing the answers coming from your blog, but they can also expand the search to include your content on other sites, content from your network (sites that you have linked in your blogroll or that you add manually to your network), and, of course, a full Web search.

For ResurrectionSong, the expansive view of content isn’t particularly useful. The content that I have is, in the main, on this site; for people that either run a number of sites or make extensive use of social networks, this is great. For me, the ability to search “my network” is pretty damned nifty and the (admittedly basic) reporting tools under “My Stats” provide a quick snapshot of what people are looking for on your site.

Over the last few days, I’ve had it on the front page of the site and I’ll be adding it to the template of all of the archive pages, too. It’s a neat little tool.

For those of you who attended the last Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash, you’ll remember meeting Tara, who was handing out free t-shirts.