The entry you've been waiting for
At least anyone that tried to connect yesterday evening (UK time).
I tried the DD search tool yesterday.
After I decided I couldn’t wait until my pension was ready at the Post Office, I figured I had better do something about it. So I did. What I DIDNT realise was that the 5 minute job would turn into an all nighter….
It was a simple idea. Add FULLTEXT indexes to MySQL, and update search.cgi to take advantage of them.
2 x FreeServe disconnects later (ie, 4 hours!) and I decided to let it get on with it. It was 1am and I was tired, and it was showing no signs of being ready any time soon. So, I’m afraid I left it and went to bed.
However, this morning it was all done, and after an hour or so tweaking the search.cgi to take advantage of it, you can now use the Search feature again without risking a died of boredom certificate. I suspect also that the Search feature was one of the causes of the wonderful ‘Database Connect Error’ problems because anything that takes a long time to run stands a chance of making things pile up.
So, sorry it was down for so long. It wasn’t meant to be. However, searches are now almost instantaneous again, and search the title and text of a diary for keywords. It also ranks the result and displays them in (what it considers) the most relevant first.
Go check it out and see!
Steve.