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Behind The Firm List Blog
Major & Minor Upgrades
The "upgrade" of the search on The Firm List took longer and was more involved than I had expected. The new version of the search engine had a lot of new features (including the ability to display excerpts from pages showing where the search term appeared) but it also included an entirely re-organized administration system.
While sometimes improvements are beneficial, often they can be a pain in the butt, as they require learning how to do something you knew how to do in a different way.
The first pain, which is always a time-consuming drain, is to hack into the scripts and templates to make the script create pages that match your own design. This can often be as easy as changing include files, but sometimes tiny bits of important code are still buried within long strings of code. And it takes a lot of trial and error, placing comment tags and seeing where they are spit out in the page, to get it all working correctly.
And then you discover that even the basic site indexing system has changed, such that what was already a time-consuming process of spidering a really large site becomes an even longer process and one that is, due to changes in how the script is laid out, harder to do, as you can block directories/files in the same way.
So even though it's late on a friday, and there's other things to be done, you find yourself diving headlong into transforming the structure of your site in order to accomodate this new search engine reality. It's a step you intended to make anyways (breaking all states/countries into their own directories) but it was a large undertaking in itself, let alone after a day of hacking cgi scripts.
With the help of BBEdit and Search & Replace, the new directory structure happens in a fairly painless manor. A weird twist of luck opened the door to a trick of coding I hadn't seen before which makes the process happen even quicker, and which will also lead me to going back and applying this change to the rest of the site, in time. It's amazing what the difference between "include virtual" and "include file" means to a large site's architecture.
And then, once everything has been re-organized, there's still the task of doing the initial set-up of the search so that it can search all those new directories. I tell myself it's going to make updating the index files much quicker and easier, but at first, it takes so long.
As I make any major (or sometime minor) change on this site, It inevitably leads to a handful of revelations on things I did wrong or which I could do better, and so it leads me down a path of making those changes across the site. This only steals time away from keeping up with firm submissions as well as adding NEW features to the site.
