Well, I really have tried to RTFM by browsing the
Thunderstone pages and searching for info. I'm still
not sure I understand what I need to do to customize
my search page.
First, before I start propagating links to our Webinator
search form, I'm wondering if we can buffer ourselves against
future local changes by defining a virtual host address
that would map right to the search form. We are running
Apache on our server and we do this frequently for our
users who want to have a customized address, defining or mapping
in Apache where it points in the information tree on the server.
But we've always done that with ordinary HTML files, not
with a cgi file. So, if we defined the virtual host to be
http://www.webinator.unh.edu/
are you aware of any reasons why we could not (or should
not) map that to our current Webinator URL of
http://www.unh.edu/cgi-bin/texis/webinator/search
Even if I've misstated some step here, I hope you can
see what I'm intending to do.
Second, to see if I understand the "mechanics".
We have an uncustomized installation with licensed Webinator,
but not a license for Texis. When I use the URL
http://www.unh.edu/cgi-bin/texis/webinator/search
is that displaying the basic search form by running
the "search" cgi-script which knows to look in my
webinator home directory and run the standard file
"search.vtx"?
I see that I have, from the basic installation, both
search (ascii) and search.vtx (compiled, evidently).
If I want to customize my search page, is it the
search file that I edit? If I do that, what causes
it to be recompiled? Am I required to have my search
script named "search"? If I wanted it to be "foobar",
how would I then get it to run? Would I do that by
linking to it from within _any_ HTML file on my server
where Webinator is installed and Webinator/Vortex
would be smart enough to compile and run the script?
I feel tantalizingly close to understanding this, but
confused.
A different question.
Now that I've walked my server and can do retrievals,
I'm not sure how many total pages are in the database.
Is there an SQL command I can issue of the form
gw -s "put-SQL-statement-here"
And finally.
Most commercial search engines display the count of
the total number of matches before they start listing
the first 10 or whatever matches. Is there a demo
that shows the commands that would be needed to
customize the search script to do that? I assume
that once I understand the "mechanics" asked about in
my questions above, that this would be straight-forward
to do. Similarly in a Q/A on 1998-01-28, someone asked
about query logging and the answer showed a sample
<sql> statement to use and where to place it -- again
presumably a simple customization once the mechanics
are understood?
Jim Cerny, Computing & Information Services, Univ.NH