Taking Stock

It's been a fun couple of days putting in the story links, setting up and scripting. I'm happy with the progress so far. There are roughly a thousand stories in the index covering three genres and five podcasts. The integration between Blogger and the custom search engine is working well and I'm finding lots of old stories to re-listen to.

I'm switching the focus now to work on quality rather than quantity. I'll be working with the Autocompletions feature of Google's Custom Search Engine to improve the terms you see in the dropdown list when you're typing in a search. You can see a limited demonstration of this now by typing "Pet" into the search box, which should bring up "peter watts" and "peter watts the second coming" as completed search phrases.

I want to extend the data used for autocompletion to include, for every author and every story, the following pattern:

• StoryTitle by Forenames Surname
• Forenames Surname StoryTitle
• Surname Forenames StoryTitle
• Initials Surname StoryTitle
• Surname Initials StoryTitle

This is gilding the lilly somewhat, but it feels nicely complete to autocomplete with all of an author's stories in the index regardless of how you format the author's name.