Harpoon Search Alpha is live...
Hey guys
I have pushed a basic version of Harpoon Search to heroku so that others can have a little play.
https://stark-reef-26879.herokuapp.com/
It's pretty basic at the moment and there are a few (a lot of) caveats.
- Max results returned is 50
- Error messages aren't returned correctly to the UI
- Hard to tell when the database is being querie - no real loading screen.
- A few fields are currently disabled and the search fields look pretty crap
- Search fields have no validation on them but it should be pretty obvious what goes in them. If you put the wrong stuff in, you'll get a crappy error.
- It's using steemsql in the background, and this runs ever so slightly behind the blockchain so you might see a slight delay in posts arriving there - at the moment it seems quite far behind so id recomment viewing posts in the last 60 minutes at the moment.
- Clicking the item header takes you to steemit.
- Some image thumbnails won't load in the results but i'm working on a better image parsing system.
- I've also seen cases with the deployed version where no results are being returned - just reload the screen and it seems to sort itself out.
One idea I have had is to integrate this search into SteemBoard when I pick that back up again shortly (https://steemit.com/steem/@markangeltrueman/a-quick-view-of-the-steemboard-user-toolbar) . Having an automatically refreshing feed of the blockchain based on the search parameters you enter here would be excellent I belive.
Enjoy harpooning some posts. I should get a lot of these issues fixed in the next few days.
Cheers
Mark
Nice! This could really come in handy. Steemit's own search is just too basic.
And yes, parsing images of Steem posts is quite an adventure :) Did you look at the Condenser (Steemit.com's) code to see how it's "officially" done? I looked there to compare the image parsing code to mine because I felt my solution was a bit hacky, but no, Steemit's is a giant beast, I instantly felt a lot better about my own code :D
What helped me is to just every time I see a broken thumbnail, add the link to my unit tests and then fix the issue. Now I think I've taken care of 99.99% of images, been a long time since I saw any broken thumbnails (that weren't also broken on Steemit.com, because sometimes it's just a user error).
Hey Mark! I've been playing with Harpoon Search and it has been REALLY helpful with my curation! Thanks for sharing this with us! I'm encouraging my followers to come and check it out! Hopefully they will stop in and pay you a visit!
Thanks!!
Thanks. I’ve got some more really useful features coming this weekend hopefully.