Well, it seems that Scott's Feedster is no longer alone. Dave Sifry's Technorati is now offering full-text search and he's already integrated it into the Technorati API. Read the full announcement on his blog.
For what it's worth, I use both services. They're great. I'm a paid subscriber of Technorati and I'm going be helping Scott out with a bit of stuff on Feedster sometime soon.
Keep up the great work guys...
Around 3am this morning, I got to wondering what it'd take to write a command-line script that, given a post id number, would cause MT to regenerate it. The reason I need this (at least as a stepping stone) is that in my quest to remove blog pop-ups I neglected to notice that MT doesn't rebuild the entry page upon receiving a TrackBack ping--only when a comment is posted. This was pointed out by several folks in the comments. Someone even pointed to a patch that fixes this.
Instead, I wanted a way to do this without relying on a patch that may or not still work after the next MT upgrade. So I did a bit of poking around and read some of the MT perl module documentation. What I found made me very happy.
With that in mind, I created a few test scripts before settling upon what I wanted. I devised a script called rebuild_recent.pl. Given a number (N) on the command-line, it rebuilds the N most recent entries. Have a look. It's really quite simple. Just drop it in your MT directory and it'll work.
Now I mentioned that this is a stepping stone. Since I recently moved from Berkeley DB to MySQL for the back-end, I'm going to rig up a cron job that scans for recent TrackBack pings and rebuilds affected entries. If I run it every 2-10 minutes, that should be sufficient.
Kudos to Ben and Mena for a great product that's also hacker friendly.
BusinessWeek has published a good overview of the ramifications of the recently announced SAP/MySQL deal and MySQL's recent funding boost from Benchmark Capital. Marten Mickos, the CEO of MySQL AB, is discussed frequently as well.
To date, though, MySQL has been viewed mainly as a cheap database for running Web sites and as relatively unsophisticated compared to the whiz-bang wares of the database Big Three, Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT). Further, MySQL was never seen as an apple-cart tipper on the order of Linux. But Mickos and his minions served notice to the database sector on May 27 when MySQL announced an alliance with German software giant SAP (SAP). Then on June 3, MySQL announced a $19.5 million venture-capital financing round including marquee Silicon Valley VC firm Benchmark Capital.
I especially like this bit:
And the new financing should give MySQL the cash to upgrade its database with new features to take on Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM -- at least in less sophisticated installations. If the story of Linux's rise from humble hobbyist project to powerful corporate system is prologue, then this spring could mark the start of MySQL's inexorable ascent.
Since that's pretty much what I've been telling reporters for months now, I tend to agree.
In this Fortune article, I'm quoted as:
Yahoo's Zawodny makes a different analogy: "MySQL is to Oracle as Linux is to Windows. It will slowly but steadily creep up the food chain, just like Linux has."
So it seems that the message is getting out. Excellent.
Anyway, the BusinessWeek article is a good read if you can get past the sea of flashing ads on the page.
Finally.
After a very messed up sleep schedule (I just at lunch--at midnight), I managed to get into a productive groove. The chapter I've been not working on for the last 3-4 days is finally becoming reality.
It'll be interesting to see if I got to bed tonight or just wait until after the 10am root canal check-up appointment I have.