June, 2, 2002 archives

some mnogosearch thoughts:

• the documentation is out of date and generally unclear. (at both ends of the scale—it's missing some things that would help a new user get going, and the information to stretch it in more interesting ways is hard to find.)
• the order in which Disallow and Allow configuration options are processed is not documented. (the first rule matched from indexer.conf will be used.)
• the minimal configuration file is so minimal, it lacks the bits that causes page content to actually get indexed. (you need the various Section lines that you can grab from etc/indexer.conf.)
• the indexer doesn't have a mode that corresponds to index the whole site right now. it only indexes pages that are new or expired when the indexer is started, and records the address of new pages it finds so they will be indexed later.
• while it checks robots.txt files, it doesn't use the information to avoid storing the url in its table of urls to be visited. (it just deletes it when it goes to index that page and realizes that the robots.txt disallows it.)
• oh yeah, the robots.txt support is broken in the most recent version. (here is a patch to fix this.)
• there's no simple command-line search tool. you have to run the cgi version and deal with the html output.

all that said, the results seem to be pretty good, and searching is fast (using mysql for the backend, of course). once you've figured out how the disallow and allow rules work, they appear to allow for more flexibility than htdig does.

chart four. not as big a jump as the one to chart three was, but this is a very intimidating chart. forty-two pushups in a minute, at the top of the chart! fortunately, it's also the chart with my target level. no chart five for me. (maybe. now that i take a look, i may at least mix in some of the exercise variations from chart five.)

i've been very slack on the walking/running part of the plan, mainly because i'm in the midst of an asphalt jungle which just tears up my legs if i try to run. i'd love to live closer to a beach so i could start beach running.

inspired by mark's experimentation with finding related blogs through blogrolls and google, i've added a feature to blo.gs that shows related blogs based on the list of favorites that people have set up. it's pretty fun to browse around, even with the fairly small number of people who have set up their list of favorites on the site.

(a feature that will have to wait for a few weeks is looking for rss feeds by using the <link/> elements that everyone is adding. i don't want to do too much with the polling and ping-handling side of blo.gs until i get a better hosting situation sorted out.)

after picking up a bunch of interesting sodas at galco's soda pop stop, i've reviewed the new taste sensation that will soon be sweeping the country. or not. i've also joined the ranks of people too chicken to review moxie. (can you blame us? there's a moxie militia, after all.)

a fascinating tidbit from this article from the moscow times about how the prevalence of smoking in russia is hindering efforts to promote sports is that putin is a black-belt in judo. as we all remember from the great pretzel scare, our president has a lower-than-normal heart rate because he runs regularly. but does he know kung-fu? (doubtful: this article says the last american president schooled in the martial arts was teddy roosevelt, the first american brown-belt in judo.) maybe russia is still more of a super-power than we've been lead to believe.