Ever wanted to search through all your replies? Well, soon you can! A new plug-in is brewing, with support for searching your posts and replies. I'm calling it Search Space.

Let me know if you're interested in beta testing. @JohnPhilpin, maybe? 😉

@sod Mark me as interested!

@sod I’d be curious to how it compares to what I already have for search.

@sod Another cool plug-in? Yay.

@sod Count me in too.

@sod yes please !!

@skoobz how do you do it?

@JohnPhilpin There’s a basic search plug-in available now, but it only does your posts.

@skoobz yup … I use that it’s the replies I’m missing - thankyou

@sod This sounds great!

@sod I would be interested in beta testing too!

On a side note: I include my replies on my blog too, but in its current form it’s not of much use, since there’s nothing that links back to the original conversation. @manton , could this be something that can be improved in the future?

@ArnoldHoogerwerf The more, the merrier! Regarding that side note, you will be able to get to the original conversation from the search result page. 😉

@ArnoldHoogerwerf what happens when you click on the permalink and go through to the actual reply on a page ….

try this and any permalink clicks through to something like this

@JohnPhilpin Hmm. 🤔 Surfing on your site, I noticed replies end abruptly on page 4. I would expect more replies. Lots more. Do you know what's up with that?

@ArnoldHoogerwerf @sod This can vary between themes. I wonder if you've customized the default replies template? My reply pages (recent example here) include a "Replying to" name that is linked to the conversation.

@manton That link will only take you to the conversation for "replies to replies". Replies to posts will take you to the original post on the blog instead. Like this example.

@sod Ah, good point.

@sod now THERE is a very good question.

I have seen that in the past ... but it got fixed and if i had 'search replies' on my site - I could even pull up the dialogue 😅

One possibility is that it is a system problem that needs @manton power?

The other possibility is that I am using Hitchens by @pimoore based on @pat work ... which I don’t believe has 'replies' as a natural page ... which is why the page doesn't look as pretty.

I could change the template to see if that affects the page count ... which would eliminate one of the two possibilities I can think of?

@JohnPhilpin @sod Ah, I haven’t been using replies so I might have forgotten to test or include them with Hitchens (or Tufte for that matter). I’ll put this on my notes of things to look at.

@JohnPhilpin I'm leaning towards @manton's power is needed for this kind of problem.

Skimming the sitemap.xml, I count 4,911 posts and pages but only 16 replies. @pimoore's theme should only affect the presentation of replies. I don't think it's to blame for the missing ones.

You could always try turning it off and on again. 🤭 That is to say, forcing a complete rebuild of the blog. Sometimes, that will chase away weird issues like this.

@manton @sod I have the Arabica theme with no modifications except for some heavy restyling with CSS. I just checked on my test-blog and it seems that the arabica theme indeed doesn't have a "replying to" link? Would be great to have such a link, and preferably to the original post on the blog itself! (But wouldn't mind if it linked to the entry in the m.b. timeline)

@sod well - look at that - I just 'turned it off and turned it on again' - and 'voila' (ish).

I think ... 'ish' because as I type the rebuild is still running - but it seems to already have 90 pages - and counting ....

So hat accordingly hung on to!

@sod wondering what the defualt order is of search results that emerge when you use searchspace?

That's a great question! The short answer is: in order of relevance. For the longer answer…

An algorithm based on BM25 calculates a relevance score for every document (post or reply) that matches your search term or phrase. A higher score means a better match.

A handful of variables are involved in calculating this score; term frequency and document length are two.

So, imagine a blog containing many micro posts about Apple and their devices. But also a couple of short stories where the protagonist at one time consumes an apple.

A visitor searching this blog for apple will see the micro posts mentioning Apple (the company) high in the results. However, the short stories will rank lower because the apple (fruit) is just mentioned once in passing in longer posts.

On the other hand, a short story named Sven's Apple Farm, which is all about my apple-filled adventures, would probably rank pretty high.

Hope this makes sense. 😊 Just like with filters, sorting is definitely a feature I see in a future version of Search Space.

@sod clever and definitely clarifies … even though I have no clue how you do it … Thankyou.