Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 25th April 2003

Site search finally available

I’ve finally got around to adding a search page to this site. It uses MySQL’s full text indexing, which is extremely fast and provides good results but comes at the expense of flexibility. Search terms less than 4 letters long are ignored, and multi-word searches are handled using OR rather than AND. This nearly put me off using it, but the relevancy algorithm is excellent which I think outweighs the disadvantage of not being able to use pure AND queries.

[... 138 words]

Experimental feature: Related entries

I’m experimenting with using MySQL full text indexing to generate a list of “related entries” for each entry (click on an item’s permalink to see it in action). It works by concatenating the item’s title and entry body together and running a full text search on it, which sounds horendously inefficient but seems to work surpsingly quickly. If I decide to keep the feature I’ll probably cache the results somewhere to reduce the overhead, but for the moment it’s fast enough.

[... 141 words]

position:fixed in IE, no Javascript required

Via Craig Saila, a method for getting IE to apply position: fixed without resorting to Javascript. It uses a conditional comment (slightly ugly but perfectly valid HTML) and works a treat. Kudos to Eric Bednarz for clearing up another of those niggling CSS problems.

2003 » April

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