Introducing Quick search

I added a quick search box on the top and browse pages. It's not that new feature anymore, since I added it there three weeks ago already. I felt that it was self evident enough and didn't feel like posting about it on blog at that time. Now that I've received some feedback on it, it's due time that I did that. Or rather, nobody's said a thing about the quick search but about some other changes I did at the time, instead.

I felt that the alphabetic navigation links on the browse page became superfluous with the quick search. Just type a letter and the first result offered would be the same that the old alphabetic link would give. But I didn't remove the alphabetic links outright, but left them as an option if anyone happened to use noscript and only removed them from the view in the javascript code. That confused some people. It was a (dubious) design choice, not a bug, not even if you used Mac, as one user surmised. I changed it so that the alphabetic navigation links stay in view.

An implementation detail about the quick search box, if you're feeling adventurous: It uses regexps. You can do things like [bc].*ing$ to search for all comics that have "b" or "c" in their name and end with "ing". I'm not going to give you a regexp tutorial but it should be pretty versatile. Also, I added the option to not limit the search results to ten comics. It'll tax your computer a bit but it's there if you want it.

Quick search isn't the search function that I've mentioned earlier. It would be something that'd allow stacking and combining search terms, but it's still in the works. This quick search was something I made, well, quickly, and I'm pretty annoyed at myself for not doing it earlier. It really wasn't that big an effort and it's so useful that even I use it.

Another change I did was to remove the subscribed/unsubscribed filters from the browse page. Some people have missed the subscribed filter, but note that the same results are available on your profile page. I even added sort options to that page. That was a bit unnecessary duplication of functionality there and I made the code a bit more straightforward while I was working on it. There's no way to get a list of unsubscribed comics is currently but hopefully that won't be as missed feature.

Now that I'm writing: there was a couple of hours of unplanned downtime yesterday. Hetzner had some power supply issues at the server center where Piperka's server is located.