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Dave's Daytona blog search engine
This summer, I helped Dave Winer test his new Drummer blogging and outlining software. I’m very much enjoying it, as it complements my 17-year run of using Textpattern. Recently, Dave built a search engine for Drummer, called Daytona. See it in action, and find what he’s written about the engine, here. In all his years, Dave seems never to have had a search engine built into his blogging. Like him, I’m finding Daytona useful for searching my writing in Drummer across the blog and other public outlines.
Anyway, Dave’s Daytona made me take a look at the search on my two Textpattern blogs built into the archives pages at zuiker.com and mistersugar.com. I’ve fine tuned both and want to thank the Txp devs for the great tag documentation. I’ve relied on Txp search for all my years with the system, and my friends and family are regular recipients of links I’ve found to my previous blog posts.
General question, then, is what, if any, evolution to search in Textpattern may be possible? Here’s one post by Ken Smith about how Daytona/Drummer offers “search term returned richly wrapped in its context” although I think Textpattern already gives us that.
Again, thanks to the devs and this great community.
Last edited by mistersugar (2021-12-19 22:07:38)
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Re: Dave's Daytona blog search engine
Great to know the docs are improving. We had scheduled this year to give them a kicking (with community input) but it’s stalled a tad after a promising start. Still on the cards, and the tags are being updated as and when I make a few minutes here and there. When we move to self-hosted docs this might become even easier. Then, ironically given your post, we’ll need a good search engine built-in because the current (JavaScript?) one baked into Jekyll is… somewhat lacking.
Drummer sounds very interesting. I’ll have to give it a whirl sometime and see if it can help formulate the whirlwind of thoughts I have that I’m feeding into various writing projects.
As far as evolving the Textpattern search, I’d very much like to improve the <txp:search_result_excerpt> tag output. It is sometimes a little skimpy on content. We can already use the Txp tags in a Form to format the search results, which is brilliant, but we can perhaps go further with this specific tag to improve what it indexes.
We’re constrained by SQL of course. It’d be great to improve the scoring mechanism and also permit more fuzzy searches (a bit like smd_fuzzy_find without the horrible baggage and memory usage that plugins adds) to permit typos to still return results, for example.
I’m interested in OPML – especially given spinning out syndication to forms but whether it can be used here to help build multiple feeds, I’m not sure at present.
Lots to think about. If anyone has any ideas on how we can improve searchability of content in Textpattern, we’ll always listen.
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Re: Dave's Daytona blog search engine
Talking about searches, I wish they could be more flexible to give us section specific searches, and search results.
That is:
- Ability to search just specific section
- Ability to hierarchize the searches on a per section basis such as:
<txp:if_search>
<txp:article pgonly="1" searchall="1" searchsticky="0" sort="section1,section3,section2; Posted desc" />
<txp:if_search_results>
<txp:search_result_count /> articles.
<txp:else />
nothing here.
</txp:if_search_results>
</txp:if_search>Yiannis
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Re: Dave's Daytona blog search engine
colak wrote #332264:
Talking about searches, I wish they could be more flexible to give us section specific searches, and search results …
Not quite what you describe but for one slightly more complex site with many sections, I output the section as a class name with each search result and then built a small sidebar filter for the search results using list.js. That will create a filter based on the class names. While that doesn’t prioritize or limit the search to a particular section, it means you can click on the section name in the sidebar and see just the search results from that section.
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