> BTW: Your email client is broken and not wrapping words.
I know--sorry. I'm fixing that this week. I'm just going through the RFCs to see
exactly how to implement this right... (The email client is a web-based thing I've
written in mod_perl--of course ;-)
>
> 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.
Sounds good. Personally, I'd rather a simple engine we can fiddle with ourselves than
a big system written in C. Does your engine generate a database from flat files? Is
there some basic parameterisation (a 'stop list' for common words, definable 'keyword'
characters, ...)?
>
> 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.
>
Your word highlighting statement is, I suspect, controversial. On the other hand,
converting to docbook is unlikely to meet much resistance from users--as long as Stas
doesn't mind maintaining it!... To get the best of both worlds, why not simply chain
the search engine result through a filter that does the highlighting. I bet someone's
written such a filter already--anyone?
> > 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.
>
So I've heard, but:
* Where is it? (doing a Find on the front page doesn't show it)
* Does it do highlighting?
* Can you select a subset of the site? (e.g. just the Guide)
> > 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 ?
>
Looks like modperl.org is taken:
Domain Name: MODPERL.ORG
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: www.networksolutions.com
Name Server: DNS2.BASCOM.COM
Name Server: DNS.THAKKAR.NET
Updated Date: 24-nov-1999
They're not using it though--maybe they would transfer? Probably better to stick in
the perl.apache.org domain though.
BTW, thanks to everyone who's already responded privately to my renewed request. Keep
it up!
--
Jeremy Howard
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
