MovableType Search: Seeking, Finding and Editing Old Posts

I enjoy accidental discoveries (the title for this entry, Scott, is no metaphor reference to fences).

The search form on a weblog is very handy service for site visitors to find content you may have written. But it has an extra hidden value for MovableType (MT) authors. Once you have more than a handful of blog entries, going back to add/correct to a previously written post may involve a hunt and seek scroll through the listings of previous blog entries.

However, if you are already logged in to your MT account, the results of the plain old search tool on your blog provides an extra treat- the “edit” link.

For example, I may be trying to make an update to an old entry I wrote about my dear friend and colleague, Boris. But when was that? How many entries ago?

If I do a search on Boris in my blog, I see the normal public display of results, a listing of all entries that mentioned Dr. Boris, and a link to view them:
View image of search results

But if I first log into to my weblog and then re-do my search, the same search results appear, but now the excerpt is followed by a [Edit] link, which allows me to jump directly to the MT entry editing screen. No futzing around the list of entries to try and find it.
View image of search results when logged in

And it gets better. If you have several blogs on a server (I have 4), if you just log in to MT without selecting a blog to edit, when you do ther search, it extends the search across ALL of your blogs– it seems to take the first blog name in alphabetical order to use as the template as the results, but this last show shows that the search for Boris is organized into results for different weblogs:
View image of search across multiple blogs

I have found this a much easier way to do some updates / revisions for previous entries. Often I like to add later discovered relevant resources, or even retractions for a loud opinion to be reeled back in.

Of course if you are perfect and never have ~~typpgarphical~~… er, ~~typograpical~~…. oh typing errors, you may not need this.