Following Ben Brooks’ lead, I’ve decided to replace my site’s search engine with DuckDuckGo. But all of the solutions he’s linked up have been a little fiddly and require editing your theme files. And while I’m okay with doing that, I realize a lot of folks probably aren’t.

So I pulled together this little bit of form code:

All you need to do is change “example.com” to your domain and drop the code in a text widget. Like this:

Easy, right? Now nothing is stopping you from using DuckDuckGo as your WordPress site’s search engine!

While helping someone with WordPress move earlier this week, I noticed a bunch of weird Unicode cruft (like ’ and –) in their posts and comments. Apparently, MySQL databases don’t like it when you switch their default character encoding. But different web hosts have different ways of doing things — so default character encodings can (and sometimes do) change while you’re moving a site around.

Anyhow, after a bit of digging, I found a really handy set of MySQL commands that fixed things up. But I like to save time, so I made myself a Gist for future use and decided to share it with y’all…

Hopefully someone else out there finds this useful! I know I’ll probably use it at least once or twice a week now that I’m doing a lot more work with MySQL imports.

Good luck!