ZombieFind is a renaming and by necessity a branching of jsFind written long ago and as of late 2007 it seemed to have fallen off the Internet. It was originally written by Shawn Garbett in 2003 and hosted at http://www.eLucidSoft.net. Searching for jsFind returns several pages discussing jsFind but all or them point to eLucidSoft.net as the source of the code. eLucidSoft.net no longer seem s to be an active domain.
For reasons that aren’t clear, even to me, I decided I needed to burn a CD containing an offline version of some online content. jsFind seemed to have been the correct solution: It was an entirely client side search engine written in javascript optimized for content that didn’t change often.
After looking for equivalent modern software and not finding any opensource solutions I went to the Way Back Machine (http://archive.org) and downloaded the last version that the Way Back Machine had. Surprisingly enough you can’t just take a patch that is supposed to be applied to the head of a SVN tree from 2004, apply the patch and have it work.
I spent a few hours and put together some python code to translate the swish-e index exports into the format jsFind expects. There are a number of updates I’d like to make so I thought I’d put it up here in case anyone else could benefit from my efforts.