making my website searchable

[gusl]

I want to make a personal website that is searchable with a Google-like interface. How hard is this?

My idea is to make sort of index of keywords in my life, and other things I think are interesting or may have an opinion about (like Cosma's notebooks). Each item will have my description of the concept and my relationship to it.

For example:

bluegrass

"high lonesome sound";
"fiery soulful music";
a modern rearrangement of old-time-music[link] with influences from blues[link];
a style of country music invented by Bill Monroe featuring string-only band, and with the distinctive presence of mandolin[link], fiddle[link] and finger-picked-banjo[link];


BLUEGRASS & ME

I play bluegrass fiddle[link] since 2001 and am learning banjo[link]. I get a manic feeling from fast tunes (especially breakdowns[link]), and especially during hot improvisations[link to John Mc Gann's impressionistic aesthetic of improvisations]. I am a big fan of bluegrass crossover such as Béla Fleck and David Grisman; but not as much of what is known as "modern bluegrass", such as Alison Krauss.

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Comments

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

Something like that isn't too hard to set up, but it depends on how far you control the machine that hosts your site (optimizelife.com?).

Is it your own machine? Shared hosting? University machine? Free webspace? Does it have PHP/MySQL installed?

The VERY easiest way is to set up a search-box that links to Google's sitesearch (http://www.google.com/help/features.html#sitesearch).

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I don't have a host for it. I was hoping to sign up for a cheap one which already included the search facilities.

But I'm not even sure I want my articles as HTML pages. I want the search to be up to date, so Google sounds like a bad idea, unless I get their paid service for indexing my site, but that's probably too expensive.

Hosting

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

A colleague of mine has pretty cheap hosting, and I'm sure he'll be willing to help you out with the search stuff. Check it out (http://www.tngsoftware.nl/webhosting.php)

He's on vacation now, but will be back friday.

Google It

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

Just use google to spider your site and then link your search box to google. See www.php.net for example, how they handle searches through google.

Another nice google addition is to search for sites that link into yours. If you wanted to be very cool, you could use the Google API to set up the search and display code on your own site and make remote calls to Google.

A more localized search would be to spider your site with SwiSH and then hit that index for results. It's nicer because you can control the output better with a stylesheet, or you can even create XML output for syndication.

Or Blosxom It

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

The site you linked above has the searches powered by blosxom + find plugin. I just set up blosxom here last weekend, so let me know if you need help with it, blosxom kicks ass. :-)

Re: Or Blosxom It

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I'd like to check this out. Can you host me?

host it

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

Sure I can, take a look at the plans. Let me know if you need anything special.

Re: host it

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I want to be able to easily restyle my articles, so I'll probably want a script to convert XML -> HTML. (I can do this myself)

Something else: automatic indexing of the articles. Whenever I add a new article, this page should get updated with the article's title. I also don't want to have to choose a filename for each new article, but I suppose I can live with it.

And of course, I need to make sure the search works.

Finally, I also want to use the disk space for general storage and backup purposes, so it should be FTPable and I should be able to access it as a "web drive" on Windows.

Is this doable?

Re: host it

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

1. With XML it would get converted to HTML via XSL processing. But easier than that, I assign CSS styles by tag. It depends whether you prefer working with CSS over XSL (I sure do).

2. I use an RDF reader to update my front page with the new articles. I'm not sure if that's what you mean by indexing.

3. You don't need to choose filenames because PHPetal does that for you when you post.

4. Search depends on the code implemented, as I said earlier.

5. Disk space is 200 MB with the cheapest plan I offer, but if you need more you can have more. Of course its FTP'able, as well as access by SSH, and there's everything else that you would expect a host to have, and what it doesn't have, I could install.