Bira / the-all-seeing-eye

The All-Seeing Eye
by Ubiratan P. Alberton (u.alberton@gmail.com)

Introduction

A little while ago, Steve Jackson Games took down their online Pyramid Magazine,
replacing it with monthly PDF releases. However, they did leave the whole set of
HTML archives in place for a while, so that subscribers could download them.

So here I was, in possession of 8+ years of HTML articles. And I thought,
wouldn't it be cool if I could search through them to find the cool stuff I
wanted? Thus came the idea for The All-Seeing Eye.

Lots of people keep saying you should build your own blog engine if you want to
be a good programmer, but blogs are so common these days. Plus, I didn't want to
pay hosting fees once I was done with the Eye. So it became a desktop search
app.

Inside The Eye: The General plan.

The Eye is all about indexing a library of HTML files. Though I have the Pyramid
Archives in mind, those files could be anything, really.

There used to be an ambitious description here about it supporting
multiple frontends and backends, but in the interest of getting this
thing done, I'm starting again from scratch and keeping as simple as I
can. So for now it's going to be a Sinatra app using a Ferret index,
and it will serve static HTML pages from under a /public directory,
each one corresponding to a document in the Ferret index.

There will be a command-line program to crawl the /public directory
and fill the index up. The Ferret documents will have their HTML
stripped by Nokogiri. And that will be it for a start. Any other fancy
thing I can think of can wait.