I've Wanted this for Years

I can't tell you how many times the situation as arisen where I have wanted to find a particular old blog entry to refer someone to and struggled to find it. Typically I'd employ one of three methods to find an old post:

• making a rough guess at the date and looking through the subject lines for the months near when I think I might have made the post,
• making a rough guess at the date and looking at the image folders on my server for a picture in the post, then going to the month in the archive and finding the post, or
• grepping my backup (I run a Perl script nightly that downloads my entries) to find the post.

Grepping is quickest but the results can be so ugly that the other two methods are often more effective. So, today I decided to write a search utility that gives nice, clean results. Finding things in my blog is now a snap. And as it gets bigger (there are already almost 3,000 entries) this will get more useful.

There is also another level of utility to it as well. More than just being a useful tool, it was an exercise in using Perl to pull together elements from my Lotus Domino server, a third-party website, and the file system in a nice, seamless way - which is exactly what I am going to need to do for the leverage the work already done with the artofadornment store for selling prints. There is a plan, it all fits together eventually.