FSTDT

(Edit: New Post on Volunteering read if you want in)

Alright folks, I'm looking for people to replace me and make sure the site keeps going now since I'm not hanging around for too much longer. Frankly there's a lot to do and I've neglected a fair bit of it for the sake of personal life and it hasn't done the site any good.

I figure a team of people would do a better job and make one person leaving a little less traumatic. If you want to help but aren't sure how, here's the kind of people involved in keeping the site:

Owner
* Who's paying the domain name and hosting charges. Hosting runs about ten bucks a month, registering the .com domain name is 10.29 a year and .net is 12.08 a year.
* I'll help you out with domain registration and have a few recommendations for hosting(including NOT arvixe)
* As a note, the site has never turned a profit and donations don't often make a dent in hosting costs, be prepared to pay the lot of that.

Developer
* This is what scares most people, working with the code and doing work to improve the site's speed and functionality.
* We've got a volunteer for this already, but if you're interested offer up, more eyes is better.

Quote Admin
* Take the time to curate quotes, this means you approve them, make corrections and generally keep up the quality of what's sent to the main page

Quote Volunteer
* Vote on which quotes will make it to the main page and help catalog things that need to be corrected.

Community Manager
* Spam hunting mostly, you skim comments for spam and excessive trolling
* Read and respond to Admin email, let developer or quote admin know about issues outside your scope.

Odds are you could take a few of these, but doing all of it is pretty pain in the ass.

I'm not going to ask too much from those who pick up the site after me, all I'm going to ask is whoever winds up with the rights to the domain name itself makes sure it moves on to someone else when they move on from the place.

What else I will do is work on finishing up the code for the new revision of the site(soon as I get the host for it straightened out). Either by myself or in concert with any new volunteers. I'll follow up with what needs to be done if folks are interested.

So I have a much more solid idea of what needs to be done for the search since I've been actively playing with the mechanics involved. I've found something suprising, it actually works better than I expected.

Say I search for David J. Stewart. The new functionality I'm using would find that term, or David J Stewart or David Jay Stewart. The new search functionality i'm looking at has some built in thesaurus comparisons it will make, while it won't automatically look for everything starting with a J, it will look for anything that actually sounds like J. And this is all accomplished using one of the simpler syntax possiblities.

Which brings me into the next part, the differences between what I can do and what I probably should. This is the definitions for the term I'm using, you may note it's a tad complicated and well it gets a whole lot worse with more search terms. If I took the time and had the knowledge I could setup all kinds of potentially useful syntax to the search page. Except I'm a lazy git despite having changed the name of this little bloggy bit.

What I'm most likely going to do is setup the search interface so that the given search parameters are handled appropriately based on the type. Which is harder said than done. For instance that David J. Stewart example above has some problems depending on the syntax used, if I search for all three parts of that separately by sending in '"David" AND "J" AND "Stewart"' into the contains function, so it will try to find each word in the author field, it returns nothing. Still figuring out why, but if I just search david and stewart it returns everything, this was a few hours of my week. But oddly enough, if I send in '"David J Stewart"' I get the results I mentioned above, where it checks thesauruses and is generally really bloody useful.

But there's still a catch there, all that nice functionality, yeah it involves very carefully deciding how something is searched. When I send it all in wrapped in "" it's looked for as phrase, fine for authors or sources, maybe even URLs, but completely useless for searching the content of quotes. Wait, it gets even better, this search relies on full word matches unless explicitly told what it is receiving is a prefix, and then requires that it MUST be a prefix or nothing will be found. Send in Test* and you get back Testing but not Test. Which has all been fun to play with, but frustrating to figure out how to really implement.

What I could do right now is just always assume people are searching for phrases, but I know that's not true. I do keyword searches regularly and I know a few others did back when search worked reliably. What I need to do is figure out how I'm going to parse what is received in a quote or comment search and best instruct the search engine to handle it. I doubt people want to have to figure out this syntax for themselves, so I'm going to do what I can to simplify it a bit and take care of assumptions. This is my project for the next few days, and I'll poke my head back up when I have something to mention.

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