In Thy Hands, Lord
Posted on the 13th of August 2008 at 19:51 by Bodil
After weeks and weeks of struggle, I now stand before you a woman reborn in the glory of Singularity. Yea, for I have shed the final shackle, and have ported my blog to Google App Engine. My entire net presence now lies within the sweet embrace of the Googleplex.
Welcome to a leaner, faster, more reliable Bodil.TV. When I started the port, I had to basically turn off everything, and in working myself back towards a complete feature set, as well as needing to abide by Google’s stringent resource limits, I’ve been able to clean out a surprising amount of cruft and unused code, as well as being forced to optimise my more grotesque excesses, and the result is a codebase I’m starting to feel proud of. Everything is so much neater and cleaner now.
The one thing I’m not very happy with is the feature that’s been a showstopper for a great many hoping to adopt the Google platform, and it’s a surprising one, given that this is Google, dammit: App Engine is awful at full-text search. This issue held me back for a long time, but I finally came up with a workaround I can live with, if not entirely comfortably: the Yahoo BOSS API. So search on Bodil.TV is now delivered by Yahoo!, which doesn’t do half as good a job of it as my old Xapian based indexer. I’m hoping it’s going to improve over time, as their crawler gets used to my site, but it’s a stopgap measure at best. I can only hope Google will come around and implement something better inside their platform.
All hail the Googleplex!
Now please be patient with me as I resolve my DNS issues… You’ll likely be seeing redirects to bodiltv.appspot.com for a while.
