Your Name: Erin

Today’s Date: 2007/01/30

Day(s) worked or described: W Th last week

Total hours for week: 5

The School: Till

Kind of Work: Project Prep, Tech General

Main Report or Narrative: Wednesday was spent mostly prepping the new book club blog for student use this week, and adding new reviews to the Book Previews site. 

On Thursday I had the immense satisfaction of solving a fairly simple problem that I've been tackling on and off since this time last year-- how to make the search function of the <a href="http://blog.cuip.net/BookPreviews">Book Previews</a> site really useful. Mrs. Jacobson and I really wanted students to be able to type an interest (say, sports) into the search box and find some reviews of books related to sports. The search function is only designed to find matches in titles and the main text of posts, however, and because of the format of the student's reviews, a post about a book of potential interest to a search wasn't likely to contain general terms like this. Short of adding in information of my own at the end of every post (taking away from the sense of student creation that we wanted to maintain) I couldn't figure out a way to get a more functional search. During spring quarter I started experimenting with the "custom fields" sections of the WP post creator, but search wasn't customized to index that data. The "Jerome's Search" plugin did provide that particular functionality, but including the custom fields metadata in each individual live post just looked confusing and would have frustrated a user. 
I stewed over this over the summer and last quarter, and then Thursday afternoon I came across the obvious answer-- include the metadata in the template for the individual post (the code for this is <i>?php the_meta(); ?</i> in brackets) but <i>comment it out</i> (i.e., - -&gt; at the end of the relevant portion and  &lt;!- - at the beginning). This puts the information in a place where the amplified search can find it without confusing the user or cluttering the page. Ugh. 
So half an hour later, I'd added enough keywords to each of the 30-odd posts (things like genre, series, subjects, and gender of target audience [ideological protestations aside]) to make the search function somewhat tenable. Go ahead, search for basketball. Or nonfiction. Or friendship!