Hello again dear readers!! (Although I’m not even sure we have any readers right now, I think we neglected the site for too long…).
Anyway, even if nobody else is reading it (HELLLLOOOOO OUT THERERERERERERERE), this is a good way for me to keep track of the progress that’s being made on the site, so here’s another cool update.
THE SEARCH ENGINE WORKS!!
Yes, Justin came up with a pretty cool way to keep track of links, etc on this site. It’s not a crawler or anything yet. Since the majority of the website is actually database content that shows up in the right places, I wrote a script to grab all of the relevant information directly out of the database and create an index table. It automagically generates all of the proper tiles and links for the pages as well and then the search engine (seen the upper right hand corner of any page) grabs appropriate information out of that.
I actually considered using MySQL’s Full-Text Search functionality, but it has the annoying property that it only matches full words, so I decided against it and simply used a LIKE query on the content in the search index. Anyway, it does work now! I’ll improve it as time goes on and will eventually have it attached to a crawler that I am working on in my spare time (hahaha, spare time…… hahahahah). If you have any specific issues with it, please do let us know (leaving a comment here will work just dandy).