michel aaij wrote:
Dear colleagues,
I hope someone can help me out with a query; I hope this is the right place to ask. A preliminary note: I'm computer literate but by no means an expert on anything besides Minesweeper.
I have been working on a bibliography of the good St. Boniface and am using a program called ProCite. If it ever gets done it will be fully annotated, but for now I wish to make my data accessible via the web. Initially I thought that ProCite could do this for me, but it turns out that it can only generate output as HTML, not make it searchable via the internet. Can any of you tell me how I can do this? Better yet, can an amateur like me do this? The database is fairly large--I believe I have some 750 titles in it right now.
Well, there are a variety of options. For example:
1)Depending on where and how your website is hosted, you could set up a database (e.g. mysql) and then some scripts of some sort (say PHP) to allow users to query the database.
2)You could plop it in an XML database (e.g. eXist) and design a basic XQuery to allow users to do a free-text search. (Or something more complicated). If you use this solution then exporting not as HTML, but as CSV or something and then converting that to more intricate XML would be a better way.
3)By far the easiest is to make your HTML attractive to a third-party search engine, and allow google to search and index it. Then, you can embed a search box which searches just your site by including something like:
<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search"> <div style="border:1px solid black;padding:4px;width:20em;"> <input type="text" name="q" size="25" maxlength="255" value="" /> <input type="submit" value="Google Search" /></td></tr> <input type="checkbox" name="sitesearch" value="DOMAIN-NAME-HERE" checked /> only search DOMAIN-NAME-HERE<br /> </div> </form>
Obviously changing the two 'DOMAIN-NAME-HERE' to be your site for your site. For example changing 'DOMAIN-NAME-HERE' to 'sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php' would make the box search only the Digital Medievalist wiki.
Of course this isn't flawless. Google follows particular rules when indexing pages.
Unless you are looking to put in a fair bit of time and effort, I would suggest the third option.
-JAmes