26 Mar, 2007 by Mr. Compulsive
Now that the Mini is up and running, I’ve got to get jiggy with XML transformations using XSL. I’ve dabbled in this before and have even bought a book, but being as busy as I am I usually never get to the books I buy until I actually have to use the technology featured in said book.
XSL is really pretty simple. You have to be able to use XPath syntax, but that’s not that big a deal. W3Schools.com is your friend. Fortunately the Mini comes with default XSLT that you can edit. Trust me, this is a good thing, because it wasn’t until after I looked at the default stylesheet that I realized two things:
- I’m a real amateur at XSLT. What I don’t know about XSLT would fill a small country, larger than Luxembourg but smaller than Madagascar.
- There was quite a bit I hadn’t even considered having to process. Search within results pages, advanced search pages, etc.
The great thing is that the Google people do some things with XSLT that I hadn’t even considered possible (or necessary). They manage to provide a very modular approach to the stylesheet that makes modification and extension of the code very simple.
Them Google folks, they know their bidness.
16 Mar, 2007 by Mr. Compulsive
The Google Mini is here!!! It arrived on Tuesday and our network administrator got it installed and ready to go at about noon yesterday (Thursday). Huge kudos to him for getting it up and running so quickly, seeing as we had another minor little project this week.
I set it up to crawl the site straight away. It ran overnight…and hit the threshold of 50,000 documents rather quickly. Looking through the logs, it looks like the SEO-friendly URL ISAPI transmogrifier is causing some issues. So I’ve got to program the device to exclude non-friendly URLs and have the Mini recrawl the site.
Even with this minor issue, the potential of the Mini is really exciting. The device has a test page where you can run sample searches and it is already stellar. The improvement over our current site search will be exponential.
1 Mar, 2007 by Mr. Compulsive
No, not one of those silly little BMW-made Coopers from The Italian Job.
A Google Mini. A sweet little box that for a few thousand brings the power of Google searching to your intranet or corporate website.
And my employer is this close –>||<– to signing off on the purchase!!!
I am way too excited. Seriously. Almost giddy. The site search has been a headache from day one and the possibility exists that inside of a few weeks the whole issue could be resolved.
I’m super psyched. SUPER PSYCHED!!
