BTW: Your email client is broken and not wrapping words.
On Wed, 17 May 2000, Jeremy Howard wrote:
> Stas Bekman wrote:
> > Hold on, at this very moment a few mod_perl fellas are working on having a
> > good search engine for the guide. Just give it some more time, I'm trying
> > to bring the best so it'll take a while...
> I'm glad you brought this up again. Since I mentioned I'd be happy to
> host such a thing, and asked for suggestions, I've got a total of one
> (from Stas--thanks!). That suggestion was to use ht://dig
> <http://www.htdig.org/>.
While htdig is a reasonable engine, Stas's idea is this needs to be "guide
specific". Meaning what I'm not sure, but I'm assuming it means to pick
out only certain words to index...
> Has anyone got a search engine up and running that they're happy with?
I just wrote a very simple SQL based engine - so I would say I'm happy
with that. It's fast and it's all in perl. I could very simply rip out the
search parts of the code for someone to play with if they wanted to.
> Stas has made the good point that it needs to be able to hilight found
> words, since the pages are quite large. If anyone has a chance to do a
> bit of research about (free) search engines, I'd really appreciate it
> if you could let me know what you find out. It'd be nice publicity if
> it was mod_perl based, I guess, but it doesn't really matter.
I think word highlighting is overrated. It's only necessary in this case
because the guide is so damn huge now. The size problem could be
eliminated by making the guide split itself up into smaller sections. My
proposal would be to do that by converting the guide to docbookXML and use
AxKit to display the resulting docbook pages. The AxKit docbook
stylesheets are nice and friendly, and written in Perl, not some obscure
XML stylesheet language. And after all that, it would make converting the
guide to a format O'Reilly likes to publish (i.e. docbook), trivial.
> My only concern is that it seems a little odd to keep this just to the
> Guide. Wouldn't it be useful for the rest of perl.apache.org? I
> wouldn't have thought it's much extra work to add a drop-down box to
> search specific areas of the sight (the Guide being one)...
perl.apache.org already has a search engine.
> If there's a good reason to have the Guide's search engine separate to
> the rest of perl.apache.org, should it have a separate domain
> (modperlguide.org?, guide.perl.apache.org?)?
guide.modperl.org ?
--
<Matt/>
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