14+ Years of Chatlogs, Now Searchable!
Posted on August 22nd, 2011 by Ian Blackthorne

Look in the meta section on the left and you’ll see a new link: Sim Chatlogs. That page contains a PHP script that automatically indexes the files in the /chatlogs directory and creates the page full of links, so that I don’t have to add them manually every week. It also looks a lot nicer than the old bare directory listing, since it uses the site’s style, and the newest log is now listed on top. Of course, the big deal is that since the logs are now accessible by links from a page, Google’s crawler can find and index them, so we now have the ability to search the chatlogs! The search will improve as the Googlebot continues to index, but it’s far better than what we had – nothing.

I’ve also done a lot of coding improvements on the back end, and the site is now fully validated HTML5 using a single stylesheet instead of split between the first one I wrote and the WordPress theme’s CSS. Not that anyone besides me cares about that part – yay searchable chatlogs! :)