yes, we can do it right away, in fact it's already done!
Umm, no?
I wrote the search engine. It took me time. It was not a done deal, just because we run the database. I had just written it before anyone asked.
River: I didn't think you'd come for me. Simon: Well, you're a dummy.
'Serenity'
Buffistas Building a Better Board
Do you have problems, concerns or recommendations about the technical side of the Phoenix? Air them here. Compliments also welcome.
§ ita § - Sep 26, 2002 3:55:08 pm PDT #434 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
John H - Sep 26, 2002 4:00:16 pm PDT #435 of 10000
I wrote the search engine. It took me time.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to diminish the work you'd done.
But if someone wanted to know some searchengine-type thing right away and it was important, you could actually log in and get it from the command-line just with a one-liner, couldn't you?
Fundamental point still stands. The workings of this site, the database contents, the storage setup are not hidden from us the way they used to be.
To write Mister Pointy, I had to get all the transcripts one by one from the site in Germany, and do some complicated scripting on them to count all the words, sort the counts, list the sorted counts by document name, blah blah blah, and why? So I could reduce the contents of those pages to something I could put into a database -- because a database is the best way to look stuff up quickly ... here everything's already in a database.
§ ita § - Sep 26, 2002 4:03:35 pm PDT #436 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
if someone wanted to know some searchengine-type thing right away and it was important, you could actually log in and get it from the command-line just with a one-liner, couldn't you?
Well, yeah, but the premise behind constructing and executing a single SQL format and coming back and telling the results isn't the same as making a search engine, which is what your post described.
We have more direct access to the data, but it would be misleading to imply that adding a tool is trivial. Jon B designs the HTML, we go back and forth while I get it right, it gets fully integrated with the existing template, etc, etc.
Sure it can (and probably will) be done. We're out of hacking, is all, and into production.
John H - Sep 26, 2002 4:10:52 pm PDT #437 of 10000
Again, sorry to make it seem like it was trivial to do all the wonderful work you've done, and I know its not -- all I wanted to do is make people aware that we finally have a board where the workings are not obscure to us.
This should really be divided into two parts:
- People are asking for cool site features. They should respect the fact that those features will take work to implement.
- They're asking for them in a way that almost makes me sad, because they seem not to understand the complete coolness of what you've already done, that we have taken control of the data once and for all.
So plaintively asking "can we have a search engine?" or any other feature, makes me want to do the evil laugh thing -- of course we can, because we own the data and we know where everything is.
"Can we have one right away?", different question.
John H - Sep 28, 2002 3:23:29 am PDT #438 of 10000
It's just happened to me again that someone has posted a URL so damn long that it's stretched out my screen so far I can't read the end of posts.
If I was thinking straight I'd actually post some kind of fix, but what we obviously want is, when replacing
http://something/really/long/with
<a href="http://something/really/long/">http://something/really/long/</a>we need a subclause along the lines of "unless it's longer than eighty characters, in which case replace it with a truncated version" so you'd get
<a href="http://something/really/long/">http://something/...</a>
Noumenon - Sep 28, 2002 3:38:06 am PDT #439 of 10000
No other candidate is asking the hard questions, like "Did geophysicists assassinate Jim Henson?" or "Why is there hydrogen in America's water supply?" --defective yeti
I noticed your example stretches out my screen -- looks like I get about 65 characters to a line.
Sophia Brooks - Sep 28, 2002 6:52:59 am PDT #440 of 10000
Cats to become a rabbit should gather immediately now here
Is it possible to add the HTML that makes us able to do the pretty links to the lovely HTML instruction pop-up? Because every tim I do one, I think that I have to go to the FAQ and cut and paste, and I am to lazy and end up with a long ass link.
Megan E. - Sep 28, 2002 8:29:55 am PDT #441 of 10000
Just thought I'd say that now that this board has been live for a while, I totally love it. A big thanks to everyone who was a part of creating this user friendly and beautiful place. I love you all!
Rebecca Lizard - Sep 28, 2002 9:12:12 am PDT #442 of 10000
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket
John, that would be a really neat thing.
Rebecca Lizard - Sep 28, 2002 2:46:56 pm PDT #443 of 10000
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket
t cough
Someone-- ita?-- mentioned the Neat Thing that you can request a full view of the entire contents of the thread (s/he also talked about a feature where you could ask to see posts 40-150, which would be even cooler, but I think that one was still in hypotheticality?) -- is that a feature right now? I thought they said it was, but I can't find the button on the page