Sunday, May 11, 2008

Searching on Django Snippets

One of the key websites about Django is Django Snippets, by one of the key Django developers, James Bennett.

I've followed many of the James work, and it's awesome; but I've a complaint on Django Snippets. It's the inefficient way to find anything there. The only ways that I've found is searching using a paginated list by author, language or tag (sorted alphabetically), where you can spend a huge amount of time if the tag you search starts by Z.

Of course that I can go to Google an search using site:www.djangosnippets.org, and it would work for all indexed snippets, but I think that at least this search box should be added on the site (until anybody writes the generic search engine for Django). It would also help adding result page numbers (with links) at the end of the paginated list.

8 comments:

  1. I agree! Sometimes it's just easier to ask on IRC and get someone paste you the correct URL, but it's a waste of resources!

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  2. I do agree but (from the FAQ http://www.djangosnippets.org/about/faq/):

    Why isn't there a search system?

    Because no-one's yet written a good generic search system for Django. When somebody does, I'll look into adding it.

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  3. David biologeek, I mentioned it on my post (even with the same link), but IMHO until that is done any other option would be great.

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  4. Oops, sorry I thought it links to djangosearch project: http://code.google.com/p/djangosearch/

    Anyway, the usability of djangosnippets is awful, you can't navigate from recent to less recent items and I always had to type my own URI in order to reach a tag's page because pagination by 20 just sucks... I should have hundreds of bookmarks so it's not useful anymore too.

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  5. Well, I admit that probably the comment with the link to the faq is too much subtle.

    I haven't used djangosearch yet, but my post was about some things that could be implemented in djangosnippets without using a django based search engine, and make it usable.

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  6. Have you tried using Google's awesome-but-relatively-unknown site search? Just add "site:djangosnippets.org" to your google search. For instance, looking for information about decorators:

    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:djangosnippets.org decorator&btnG=Suche&meta=

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  7. Yes, I tried, and I commented it on my last paragraph. Have you tried to read the whole post before commenting...? ;)

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  8. That is the reason I created a custom search for this site.
    See http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/608/ and http://henning.cco-ev.de/django/djangosnippets.html

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