I’ll leave it there as that domain isn’t holding a live site fully at he moment and so the site serach test can site there for a while until we unpack it.
Its a 3 page site. Its got stupid statements repeating the words ‘dog’ ‘cat’ horse’ and ‘pony’. You can search for those. There’s a navbar for the 3 pages plus a site search. That’s it.
I would assume for example the Rapidweaver Search plugin is indexing
the site “before” its uploaded, and then uploading a datafile into the
web site directory as a lookup. Perhaps Freeway could do this kind of
approach?
We have a basic “one click” install search function script on our
hosting, which searches html pages. The script needs to index the
site at some point to gather a datafile of what it knows to search for
you need to manually get the script to do this. And inevitably you
need to to cater for the pages it does not want to show up into the
results. The basic script is server side, accessed from a web page on
your site, totally outside of Freeway, but with a little work can be
incorporated into a Freeway results page.
Just for the hell of it, on our main site I incorporated http://www.sphider.eu/
into a Freeway page here http://www.printlineadvertising.co.uk/
search/ its quite powerful and quick but essentially indexes our php
dynamic pages. You can even set it up to index a whole group of web
sites.
David
On 12 Aug 2009, at 13:10, Keith Martin wrote:
A site search integrated in freeway would be amazing tool!
I don’t know how possible this is. That’s why I’m curious about how
that other tool works. Does it contain its own index? Does it
silently piggyback onto a remote service?
When Martin gets an example online we can tear it apart and see
what’s involved. But please, don’t get your hopes up. I’m not an
Actions writer but I do know about software development, and I’m
certain that this is not a quick-fix thing at all. There are
numerous gnarly issues to deal with.
I’ll leave it there as that domain isn’t holding a live site fully
at he moment and so the site serach test can site there for a while
until we unpack it.
Its a 3 page site. Its got stupid statements repeating the words
‘dog’ ‘cat’ horse’ and ‘pony’. You can search for those. There’s a
navbar for the 3 pages plus a site search. That’s it.
That’s well spotted-I hadn’t gone hunting myself, not knowing enough. Am I right in thinking that Freeway could have an action made that would do the same? Seems this isn’t tantamount to taking Weplus’s idea-it’s just a simple use of code… am i right?
The WebPlus search builds a JavaScript file that contains text it has
scraped from the site on export. This page text, the page location and
the title are all held in a multi-dimensional array within the
JavaScript and can be searched quite easily by way of a simple search
function. One the matches have been found the code then writes these
to the current page using a simple document write.
I wrote a similar action a few years ago called Simple Site Search
that did more or less the same sort of thing (it scraped the data from
the page description and keywords metadata) and was used to search
pages distributed on a CD-ROM. I’ll see if I can dig it out although
it may be on one of my Macs that are currently being shipped from the
US.
Any solution has it’s pros and cons and here are my views on JS
searches;
Pros;
With JavaScript enabled they ‘just work’
They rely on nothing on the server to run correctly
They can be very fast
They can be used offline (on a CD-ROM project for example)
For the majority of users they ‘just work’ as expected
Cons;
With JS switched off or unavailable the search simply fails
Indexing and searching a large site can be slow or prone to memory
limitations
A Freeway action to do this would need to build the internal index
every time the site is published which may slow down the publishing
process and would almost certainly force a republish of every page
I’m happy to update the Simple Site Search action to work with Freeway
Express & Pro once I can lay my hands on it.
Regards,
Tim.
Hi Martin,
Well even that code will be covered by someone’s copyright, which is
why I’m not going to even look at it, but it’s not that tricky to
reproduce the functionality using fresh code and techniques. The basic
principle is to scape and store the site text in an array (JS database
of sorts) and search on it from there.
Regards,
Tim.
On 12 Aug 2009, at 14:06, Martin Bullivant wrote:
That’s well spotted-I hadn’t gone hunting myself, not knowing
enough. Am I right in thinking that Freeway could have an action
made that would do the same? Seems this isn’t tantamount to taking
Weplus’s idea-it’s just a simple use of code… am i right?
Tim
That’s probably more than I (and possibly others) here could have hoped for. As to the pros and cons, my attitude is that that is the nature of the web universe and a full republish every time rather than smart republishing would be a price I would be prepared to pay-and with Javavscript off, there are so may things that a client machine couldn’t do, this would just be one of them. If we look at how people have coped for donkeys years with IE6 (a massive ‘con’ perpetrated by real ‘pros’ in my book!) then a simple possible and workable potential disadvantage would’nt for me be a deal breaker.
I’d like to thank everyone else who has contributed to this discussion-don’t think its over yet.
Not being an actions writer myself I don’t what is doable on the
Freeway side to create a data file “before” the site is published.
Another approach would be use an external service after the site is
published and hook an action into this. Looking at a rapidweaver
search plugin here http://files.joshlockhart.com/themes/rapidsearch/
this uses what looks like a Yahoo API - with I assume some cost
recouped by Yahoo somewhere down the line.
David
On 12 Aug 2009, at 14:06, Martin Bullivant wrote:
That’s well spotted-I hadn’t gone hunting myself, not knowing
enough. Am I right in thinking that Freeway could have an action
made that would do the same? Seems this isn’t tantamount to taking
Weplus’s idea-it’s just a simple use of code… am i right?
Tim
As to the ‘code’ I’m speaking very loosely-I wasn’t suggesting copying anything-as an artist I have to be very robust about unauthorised use of my images, eg. I was really meaning just understanding a basic aim and then writing something to achieve it, using the best code for the job. Hope that’s clear!
Would this ‘javascript search action’ work if your site is made up of more than one Freeway file? I work on some larger sites and have split them into several Freeway files for each of updating and uploading.
I believe that the only way forward here is for all those with the skills and motivation to mess with it and test it until it stops breaking. I will leave the test site there for now. At some point I will need to remove it but I will give notice on here before I do. I also would like to go on record as saying that if anyone wants to download/ftp or whatever the files I created for this test and you are able to do that with the permissions my server gives you I have no objection-or we can find a way for me to make them available. Or I could even e-mail a copy of the files for the whole site to anyone who wants them just to play with it. Finding a solution to this is in everyone’s interests.
It is an interesting (and important) idea as to how a wave of willingness
could be created-interesting because it would save us all a headache and
improve an already excellent piece of software, but important too for the
reason below-and perhaps this next comment would help to motivate a
developer.
I am currently (and will in future) building a site for a charity which helps
victims of crime. This means that firstly they have little (or no) money to
pay for an ad-free search facility, and secondly they don’t want ads on the
site for obvious reasons-imagine a female abuse victim accessing a site in
distress needing support and seeing an ad for certain shall we say "male
enlargement and enhancement’ services…on the very support site she is
turning to. No, I don’t think it bears thinking about either. I’m not being
melodramatic. We also have the scantily clad girls appearing on the site too,
advertising all sorts of stuff. Not an option. Double whammy for the charity.
Got to have site search-can’t have one. This is in my view an example of a
compelling moral issue which is broader than designer convenience. How could
we stir up a positive storm to get this ball rolling? Any ideas? I would be
happy to write directly to the Freeway guys but if it wasn’t just me then
there’
s more chance of the suggestion being listened to.
Just a notification that at some stage in the next 24 hours the temporary site search dummy pages will be removed (or at least moved) from where you last accessed them. If anyone needs them for development purposes please email me or post on here-I will get a ping telling me you have posted.
Thanks Martin. I’ve only just returned (from yet another festival!)
and I’ve had to finish some writing work, but I’ve just read through
the thread. I think this subject has been well and truly resurrected,
and there’s now fresh thinking happening as well as a simple option;
Tim’s Simple Site Search action (once he can dig it up).
I hope the ringing in your ears dies down Keith!
Today is the day that our stuff is due to arrive from the States
(although it’s already delayed) so if I can dig the Mac server out and
get it up and running I’ll see if I can locate that action. Over the
weekend I started rewriting it from scratch (well, from 1s and 0s in
fact) and I would say I’m half way there. A lot of the advances in
action development are getting thrown in as well; folder actions, live
previews etc, so I’m hoping that it will work out OK. When I’ve a
version I’m happy with I’ll throw a version out for general testing
and feedback.
Depending on how disruptive the unpacking is that may happen later
this week.
Regards,
Tim.
On 17 Aug 2009, at 10:44, Keith Martin wrote:
Thanks Martin. I’ve only just returned (from yet another festival!)
and I’ve had to finish some writing work, but I’ve just read through
the thread. I think this subject has been well and truly
resurrected, and there’s now fresh thinking happening as well as a
simple option; Tim’s Simple Site Search action (once he can dig it
up).
Tim
That’s excellent news-I am now getting to grips with Freeway-it is such an impressive piece of software. I’m working full-time to design a portfolio of sites to promote my business. If you want me to test anything just let me know.
