Table of Contents generated with DocToc

• Intro
  • Clone repositories
  • Install dependencies
• Setup
  • IFTTT IF-recipes
  • Spreadsheet column headers
    • Gmail
    • Twitter tweets
    • Flickr uploads
  • Switch frontend
• Index content
• Run
• Example
• Credits

Intro

Life-Index is a personal search engine based on Norch and Search-index, making my digital life searchable. Proof of concept.

Life-Index is a forked version of Norch-bootstrap. It uses iftt-norch-tools for document processing and Life-Indexer for indexing.

The data comes from several IFTTT IF-recipes, storing it in several Google Drive Spreadsheets. Life-Indexer pulls this information from Google Drive and index it.

Clone repositories

$ cd node_modules
$ git clone git@github.com:eklem/life-index.git
$ git clone git@github.com:eklem/life-indexer.git
$ git clone git@github.com:eklem/iftt-norch-tools.git

Install dependencies

... todo

Setup

IFTTT IF-recipes

Activate the recipes you want to make searchable

• Starred email in Gmail
• Your Twitter tweets
• Flickr uploads
• GitHub issues

Spreadsheet column headers

The IFTTT IF recipes stores content in spreadshees on Google Drive. Each recipe gets it's own spreadsheet, and you need to manually add a row with column headers. These will be the key in our key/value pair when we use the Life-indexer to pull JSON from those spreadsheets.

Gmail

date	email	title	text	file	fileurlprivate	fileurlpublic
[date]	[email address]	[email title]	[body text]	[Filename on first attachment]	[URL to private file]	[URL to public file]

Twitter tweets

date	user	text	link
[date]	[username]	[tweet text]	[link to tweet]

Flickr uploads

date	dateuploaded	title	text	url	image	urlimage	tags
[date]	[date uploaded]	[photo title]	[photo text]	[URL to photo page]	[resizeable image URL]	[full size image URL]	[tags list, comma separated]

GitHub issues

date	repository	title	text	issue-type	url	user	user-img
[date]	[repository name]	[issue title]	[issue text]	[issue type]	[url to issue page]	[username]	[user photo]

Switch frontend

Life-index is based on Norch. Norch has a generic frontend called Norch-bootstrap. You'll have to switch the frontend from Norch-bootstrap to Life-index. It's done by changing one line of code in node_modules/norch/lib/norch.js from:

  this.app.use(this.express.static(this.path.join(__dirname,
                                   '../node_modules/norch-bootstrap')));

to:

  this.app.use(this.express.static(this.path.join(__dirname,
                                   '../../life-index')));

Index content

... todo

Run

$ node node_modules/.bin/norch

Example

A quick screenshot on how the search will look:

Credits

• fergiemcdowall for support and help on norchand search-index
• mewwts for helping me on NodeJS issues
• erikperez for creating an indexer for the online version of Outlook: life-indexer-outlook