The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed a few changes here in the "Journal" section of adactio.
First off, I’ve added a little search engine to the journal archives. It’s very basic and it doesn’t do boolean queries but it’s handy for finding old links.
If you want to use it from anywhere, drag this bookmarklet to your toolbar: Adactio Search and you can highlight words on a page (or enter them in a prompt box) and search for them in the journal archives.
I was prompted to make the search engine after reading an article at A List Apart on how to build a search engine in Perl.
I built mine in PHP but it works on a similar principle. It searches through XML files (the journal entries) on the fly. I thought about doing an index-based system where I would have keywords from each entry in a CSV file but the quick’n’dirty search seems to be working fine for now. We’ll see how it scales as the journal entries add up.
The other new thing I added to the journal page is a little list of the last 5 referrers to my site. These are taken from a little text file I keep of the last 50 referrers.
It can be fun sometimes to see what kind of weird search requests googlers have used to arrive here.