Taking Shape

Published on: Thu, 17 June 2010

I've spent the last couple of weeks thinking back about the most crucial features of my old blog and have been trying to re-implement them as quickly and as reliably as possible.

The blog itself is powered by a modest PHP script. The features that I thought would include RSS subscriptions and some way to find posts with keywords.

hostmyrss.com

The free site http://hostmyrss.com made it pretty painless to set up a new RSS feed.

I entered a handful of blog post URL's in the textarea provided and hostmyrss.com mined those posts for information that it could use to build an RSS feed. You can try out the RSS feed on the right-menu.

This is a free service.

Keywords

I had to think back about this one. The old blog had the ability to index by keywords and categories. I know that I'd received a few hits by keywords and some hits by category after someone had already found out about the blog, but I just wasn't sure that either was necessary.

I went as far as building a tag-cloud generator for the blog, but I had decided against using it.

I did want to provide some way for readers of particular posts to be able to find similar posts. For some odd reason today, I found myself googling SLIQ and SALT as I couldn't remember which one was Qmodem's internal scripting language and which one was Telix's internal scripting language. ( Both of these programs are terminal programs that we used to have to use back in "the day" to visit electronic Bulletin-Board Systems.)

Of course, SALT stood for Script Application Language for Telix which meant that SLIQ was the one offered up by Qmodem.

In my searches, I happened upon a site for a regional magazine called BABBA ( the Bay Area Bulletin-Board Advisor). The magazine's creator ( Mark Shapiro ) has all of his paper magazines from the early 90's converted to HTML and available on his site here.

When visiting his main web page, I noticed that he had a small form at the bottom that said "Pico Search". I tried it. It looked like the search mechanism only searched his site.

I then looked around the Internet for Pico Search to see if it was some open-source software that I could run on my site.

I found that Pico Search is actually a web site that provides a search service. See http://www.picosearch.com.

I set up a free account and let the search-engine spider my blog and other parts of my site. I then was able to add the small search form of my own at the top of the right-side menu.

Unfortunately, I placed too much information in the right side of the view area so there's some noise when you search. For example, if you search for "forth" you are likely to see links to pages that have nothing to do with Forth, but when Pico Search spidered them, the pages may have listed some Forth-related posts in the random links section. I'll have to work on this so that the right-side links don't show up the next time I ask Pico to spider my site.

Reader Comments

I know there are other sites that will host comments, but I don't know that I want to use them. I'm still debating on how I want the comments to work and how I want to filter out spam.

More later.

Unless otherwise noted, all code and text entries are Copyright Š2010 by James K. Lawless

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