Over the summer I added several keyword-based RSS feeds from WordPress.com to my homemade RSS feed reader. If you want to add some yourself they look like this: https://en.search.wordpress.com/?f=feed&q=example . I’ve had to play around a bit with the keywords I was using, but I’ve found a lot of interesting posts and blogs. Just people living their lives, sharing what they’re interested in and what’s going on. Reminds me a lot of the old blogging days, where most people were more focused on the writing than getting big sponsorships.
Using keyword-based RSS feeds to find WordPress blogs will only take me so far, however. I wanted a way to search WordPress where I could find that blogs that were more heavily covering the content I was interested in. I wanted to find a way to generate possibly-related keywords so I could build additional searches off the first one. Finally I wanted a way to narrow down to time-specific content that went beyond sorting by date. The search offered at WordPress.com did not have all the features I was looking for, so I made my own, wrapped it all in a hiking metaphor, and put it up at http://bloghiking.com/ .
Blog Hiking starts with a search, in this case agrivoltaics. The search initially pulls 50 results instead of 10 to make analytics more useful. Now, if you’re just interested in browsing search results, you can stop here; plenty of results to see. Results include date, originating site, brief excerpt, and a link back to the original post. If you want to do some exploring, though, turn your attention to the nav bar on the left, the “Trail Map,” which starts with an “Elevation” (timeline) section.
Elevation / Timeline
The Elevation (Timeline) section divides your search results by year, with a dropdown menu further dividing the results into months. Click on a month and the search results will filter by that month. In the case of the agrivoltaics query, the vast majority of results are from 2025. That will tell me something about the search. If you have a query where the results go back several years, or the results were more numerous in early years, that will tell you something else.
Underneath the timeline section is “Nearby Sites,” which lists domains by how often they appear in the search result. Clicking on one gives you a tool to explore that domain more closely.
Nearby Sites
Let’s look at how Cleantechnica.com appears in these search results. In the nearby sites list, you can see it appears in the initial search result four times. Those results appear in a carousel. If you use the site search form above, those results will appear in the carousel instead. If the site allows embedded content, you can click “full post” and the entire post will appear below the carousel. If the site doesn’t allow embedded content, you’ll get a link to the original post.
At the very bottom of the trail map are the “Connecting Trails,” words which appear most frequently in the search results.
Click on one to open up Keyword Junction, a tool to give you more information on these words with an option to build a new search query.
Connecting Trails
The Keyword Junction tool not only shows you the words which appear most frequently in the search results, but also indicates how often the words appear and where the words are appearing. Clicking on a word adds it to the search form, from which you can start a new blog trail.
Improvement Plans
I’ve had a lot of fun using Blog Hiking to explore the blogs of WordPress, and with the connected trails feature I’m getting some vocabulary around the topics I’m searching as well. One thing I want to add is the ability to export a session so I have a way to come back and review that vocabulary later. If you have any other ideas about what I might add, lemme know. Happy searching!
