Well, I posted about two weeks ago about my present Saturday morning project. It was a good little project, and for the curious, I've updated the static page with a more recent run of my script. My present solution is about O(n^2). There are two major improvements I want to make that should make the script place better, without increasing complexity.
Anyways, the reason that script got put aside is that I have a new project. One that's even more fun if you can believe it. Basically, my friend Dan & I realized two things:
One - We both like a certain web comic
Two – The search engine that web comic possesses sucks in brave new ways
So we decided to make our own search engine for that comic. The problem is, in order to write an effective search engine, we were going to need to obtain tones of data on the individual comics (full text, characters appearing, games referenced, etc.). So I've written a basic spider to retrieve their entire comic library, an ajax based comic browser to view that library on my server (lightning fast), and various scripts to allow the user to enter in this meta data in a timely fashion. Dan & I will both begin using these scripts shortly to enter in the data for every comic they've ever made, then finish up our search engine (I gave him the hard work on 6 table full text and other search types) and present it to the comic creators.
I haven't included a link here, I'm sorry. While their site possessed no robots.txt file to preclude the spidering, the images are still in their copyright, and I have no doubt that presenting their entire library on a site not presenting their ads would attract their ire. Once the search engine is done, I will probably make it include thumbnails of the comic with results, with links going to the original comic (on their site) and share that with the world.
As to 'the good kind of hate' I shared the link to the lightning fast browser with a friend last night:
Amy: You've sucked like over an hour of my time with this damn ****** thing
Amy: I hate you
Amy: I hate you til you die!!
That's the good kind of hate... right?
