New Blog Features

I promise I’ll stop talking about the blog pretty soon. But I just added some new features I wanted to talk about.

First of all, the post URLs are now pretty. For example, instead of /posts/23, this is now /posts/23-new-blog-features. This is mostly because I was getting annoyed looking at Google Analytics and being unable to remember which links went to which posts.

Actually, the pretty-URL thing has been around since the big major update, but it wasn’t as visible as it is now. Links from the front page used the pretty URLs, but links from the feeds didn’t. That’s fixed, now.

Luckily, the old URLs didn’t cause any compatibility issues. /posts/23 goes to the same page as /posts/23-new-blog-features. In fact, it doesn’t matter what you put after the number; /posts/23-the-way-you-can-go-isnt-the-real-way goes to the same place as well. This is so that, in the event that I change the title of one of the posts, the old URLs don’t break.

Second, you may have noticed the search field on the sidebar. This is also mostly to get rid of a pet peeve of mine; I’d occasionally want to site old posts, and it was a pain to look them up in the archives.

The search works in two different ways; if you just type into the field, it’ll auto-update the list below with matching titles in real time. If you click “Go” or press Enter/Return, though, it’ll send you to an actual results page, much like the main page.

This is all structured very RESTfully, too. I’m kinda proud of myself for that. The normal search page is just /posts?query=whatever, and to do the live update, it just grabs /posts.js?query=whatever which has the code to do the update.

Thanks to make_resourceful, I only had to add six lines of code to my controller to make this work. Moreover, two of those were negligible. I changed the current_objects method from

def current_objects
  @current_objects ||= Post.find(:all, :order => 'created_at DESC', :limit => 6)
end

to

def current_objects
  @current_objects ||= if params[:query]
      term = "<span>#{params[:query]}</span>" 
      Post.find(:all, :order => 'created_at DESC',
                :conditions => ['content LIKE ? OR title LIKE ?', term, term])
    else
      Post.find(:all, :order => 'created_at DESC', :limit => 6)
    end
end

From there, it all just worked. But enough tooting my own horn¹; there’s certainly plenty wrong with my search. For instance, it’s really not very flexible, and probably wouldn’t be very fast if I had a lot of posts or requests.

I thought about using something more powerful like acts_as_ferret or MySQL’s built-in FULLTEXT search. I decided not to mostly because I wanted to get searching working immediately. I’ll probably make it better later, likely when I get annoyed by some limitation of content LIKE %foo%. For now, this works fine.

¹ I really love that metaphor. I like thinking of my ego as some sort of noisemaker that makes a buoyant tooting sound when I compliment myself.