Resurrecting jsFind
So one of my favorite blogs is a blog for GMs called Treasure Tables (http://www.treasuretables.org), it is one of the few blogs which strikes a perfect pose of being player centered and system neutral. It’s generated some great ideas and mad me think about GMing and gaming in general in new ways.
Sadly the gentleman who writes has declared himself burned out and is taking an indefinite hiatus. Wanting to make sure the content didn’t simple disappear I fired up wget and downloaded the site. 800+ posts, 8000+ comments. wget set it up all nice and clean, but there was a problem.
In the scheme of things a corpus that size doesn’t count as large, but it is big enough that the search feature of the site is more than just a mere convenience. Treasure Tables had doled out search to google, and since I was operating under the idea that I’d burn the site to a CD, I certainly couldn’t burn google to disk.
So I was looking for a client side search mechanism. After a bit of searching I found reference to jsFind. There is actually a pretty good write up of its working at Linux Journal (http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/6932/print). You may notice that the article is from 2004. All the resources point to www.elucidsoft.net/projects/jsfind which fell off the Internet in 2005.
Spending far too long searching I couldn’t find an opensource replacement for jsFind or anywhere that jsFind is currently available. There was some perl code on CPAN but not only did it not seem to work for me it was mostly a Btree population system it didn’t seem to have a simple method to call passing in a path to create an index. I was feeling stymied.
So went to the way back machine (http://www.archive.org/index.php) and pulled the original code back from the abyss. I spent Sunday night getting swish-e (http://swish-e.org/) working and writing some python to export the index into the form desired by jsFind. Before going to be I fire up mkIndex.pl which seems to work fine and I have a nice btree.
To be continued.