Warning. No baseball content today. Just more administrative stuff. Proceed at your own risk.

For those who may have missed it yesterday, some changes are taking place here at Ducksnorts. Because the original announcement may have come across as a bit cloak-and-dagger, I thought I’d give a brief explanation of what exactly is happening and why.

For reasons that are technically obtuse and really not worth getting into, I’ve decided to drop the Google search engine. Although I still think Google is a great engine (it’s pretty much the only one I use these days), it’s not quite as flexible as some other available tools for use on a small web site.

So, I’ve been out looking around and found a neat little engine called FreeFind which should better suit our needs. The only drawback is that it is an ad-supported service. Don’t worry, there are no annoying popups or flashing banners; believe me, I would never knowingly foist those little buggers on anyone. There are just a few small, unobtrusive advertisements on the search results page. Click on ‘em, or not. Makes no difference to me.

The important thing is the results are good, and the engine is more customizable than Google. Oh yeah, and it’s free, just like Google. If you’re still nervous, know that I’ve actually used FreeFind on professional sites. It’s solid.

While that’s all being set up, search functionality will be unavailable for a short period of time. Hopefully it will only be a couple hours but it may be as long as a day or two. I’ll try to keep the downtime to an absolute minimum. No other parts of Ducksnorts will be impacted by this action. In other words, you can still hang out here while upgrades are being made; you just won’t be able to search for a while.

As a side-effect of the new search engine being installed (I feel like one of those drug commercials on TV: "side effects may include nausea, heavy breathing, foaming at the mouth, and flipper babies"), Ducksnorts now must be accessed by its proper www.ducksnorts.com URL. For the technically inclined and/or masochistic among you, this is due to something known as a base href tag.

In a nutshell, Ducksnorts is now standing on its own two feet and no longer has a formal relationship to geoffreynyoung.com. Technically, you can still access the site through the other domain (and this, too, may change at some point in the future) but the site won’t look all nice and pretty if you do that.

Okay, that may have been more information than you needed but as someone who uses the Web daily, I appreciate knowing what’s going on at the sites I visit. I figured the least I could was to extend the same courtesy to you. So bear with me, and soon we’ll be back at full speed. Meantime, go watch (or play) a ballgame!