b2 hack ideas

A couple ideas for b2 hacks to file away until I have time in a month or so:

  • Enhanced search engine: This will require a moderate amount of work. The new search engine for the web log will be based on a concordance system, with two tables. The first table contains a list of words. The second table describes the many-to-many relationship linking words to post IDs. Searches will be done using the first table; the second table will be used to retrieve posts. The issues to work out have to do with a parsing engine for posts (something along the lines of perl’s split(/ /) to generate the word list, discarding common words) and an insertion mechanism that avoids dupes in this table. Some thinking might have to be done for fuzzy searches (e.g., “theory/theories”) and boolean constructions.
  • File uploads revamping: The file uploads process can be improved in a couple of ways. Right now, I’m running one of the thumbnailing hacks for image uploads. This is fine. What I’d like to do is do a mini-gallery, where clicking on an image brings up a new web page that allows the user to navigate among the various images belonging to that post. The easiest way to do this would be to redo the file uploads script, so that the uploaded files are stored in subdirectories of $fileupload_realpath, say, by post ID. This will make it easy for a script to do a simple directory listing to see what other image files are archived under that post. This modification shouldn’t be that difficult; one problem would be to rearrange the existing uploaded files into the new structure. This might be scriptable without too much of a problem.
  • This time around, I will properly version control everything.

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