Chile Forum

Yes I came to the forum through Google....before moving here I was looking for general info and the forum popped up in my search.
I like the simplicity of the forum, but definitely in favour of a more robust search for the posts.

el puelche wrote:I would like to see some sort of all chile forum app that would produce an empanada (de horno) out of my printer....I think we could move up to a paila marina, chori pan and maybe a tub of manjar. I would suggest that you stay away from a pisco sour or chicha app because eukypat would never leave his computer.

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Can't they do that in Tron 2.0? They digitized an orange in the first one, so they should be able to digitize an empanada by now.

Catt wrote:but definitely in favour of a more robust search for the posts.

Yes, half the time it says "try again later".

O.k. think I got a tentative plan for doing this after testing a bunch of things, and doing some dry runs to see where the problems might be.

Last time I did a big upgrade, I had the opportunity to be able to give everyone a test version to play with for a few days before going live. I am not going to be able to do that this time because I have some fairly invasive and extensive modifications to the database tables, the forum cache, the dns system, and so on.

So, I will need to take the forum off line completely to do the upgrades. Trying to do upgrades to a database that is actively being used, while mucking around with the domain name system is kind of like working on a car engine as you are driving down the highway in a rain storm. Yea, it can be done, but it is not advisable. Bad things more than likly would happen.

If everything goes well it should likly be only down for an hour or two. I am going to schedule 6 hours to be on the safe side, as I like to run lots of snapshot backups as I proceed and so they can take some time. Backup, backup, backup.

If things go really badly, well we will just be back to the forum as it is now when it is all over and I will have to give it all a rethink.

The more difficult issue is the timing. I will likly have to do it on fairly short notice, when I see I am going to have a clear uninterrupted 6 hours as the process should not be stopped in the middle (or I prefer to just get it over with), followed by a day where I know I am going to be at the computer all day to trouble shoot any growing pains as it goes back online. That means this time of the year, that I might not know until the last moment that I have that time on hand. So, likly I will give an hour or two notice that it is going to happen, and I most likly will do it late at night if I can.

Currently not going to happen this weekend, as I have a bunch of things going on. I also would prefer to see how the protest problems down south play out, as the forum is being used as a vital source of information right now for many people that are not getting info anywhere else.

Perhaps next week I might have a chance if the stars align correctly.

well, I have been giving some particular attention to the problem of searching the forum (I do have a solution for that by the way), but it has got me thinking more and more about not just searching the forum but the entire site and our other sites. Which has led me to thinking about the problem of searching about Chilean topics in general, which I have spent a lot of time over the years thinking about.

Google is great and all, but it is not designed for Chile and the specifics of Chile. So, I started thinking about how to design a search engine for Chile, and I pose this question to the forum, what would an ideal Chile search engine do? That is, what information would it index about Chile, and (perhaps more important) not index (e.g. "chile peppers")?

For example, google.com gives completely different result sets than google.cl based on such things as .cl domains, spanish vs. english, where the site is hosted and so on. Very difficult to search, even within Google's own results sometimes for relevant information. Just think about a local word such as "plata" or "money" in Chilean Spanish or other local words and how Google would handle that.

That is apart from the really really poor quality web sites in Chile that depend on flash, fail to add title tags, descriptions, poorly configured servers, and so on. Often the primary things that Google depends on to index the rest of the web, are missing in Chilean sites (e.g. at least one link from some other site on the Internet).

There is also a mountain of information about living in Chile or Chile related information that is deep inside blogs, facebook, twitter and so on. Essentially Google has bigger fish to fry than Chile in sorting those sites.

So, for the people that have Googled around all things Chile for some time, what would you include in a search engine. The how would be nice too if you have any ideas.

I believe it is possible technically within in my capability and resources to build a search index of Chile topics on the Internet that includes if not all, most things related to Chile. It is a small country with a fairly finite amount of (relevant) information on the Internet. There is only for example about 300,000 registered .cl domains, and I bet less than 100,000 have any sort of web site on them. Less than 50,000 have any real content (being generous here). Less than 10,000 of them have say more than 100 pages of content. Public blogs, forums, and so on likely make up the majority of publication about Chile.

My inclination is to start with the problem of searching our own forum first.

Move to integrating the rest of the site and perhaps our other sites.

From there move out to indexing English language expat websites, forums, articles, and blogs about Chile.

From there I might take a crack at indexing Spanish language sites, starting with say Chilean government sites and so on.

From there I might start moving out to deal with other languages such as German or whatever language sites about Chile.

i always use "santiago chile", if you use just chile you end up with chile peppers, so you need to add a city to get closer, once again if the website is not specific to the city, then you never see the site because chile peppers always ranks higher than chile the country!

Unless you have spanish words to add then there is more chance of getting a chilean website :/

i think perhaps if you just crawled the .cl domains from aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.cl to zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.cl then indexed just those based on their keywords, you would have good search engine.....

if they use a .com too bad!, perhps you could use some keyboards like +56 but then again websites here dont list are codes let alone country codes!

good luck!

yea, we also have the Google problem that everyone gets different search results from different parts of the World, different cities even.

Sorry about that outage folks.

Did I mention we are overdue for an upgrade really soon?

Think I will buy a case of red bull and try to force an upgrade in to my schedule some night this week.

I think the stars seem to be aligned today for me to go for it.

I have some prep work to do, but if that goes well sometime today I will be taking the forum off line to do the upgrade for a few hours.

If all goes well, we should be on the new system in a couple hours after I shut it down.

If something goes wrong, well we will be back on the current one in a few hours.

Chances are, other than the down time, no one should really notice much of difference immediately. I plan to do the core upgrades, and then add a lot of the new features after (well, some of them anyway).

I will issue some early warning that it is going to happen before taking the system down, just it will be sometime this morning or early afternoon.

Is the RSS feed working? I tried adding gymrss.php?news&digest to NetNewsWire but is says Can’t subscribe to feed because: could not find a feed".

Any ideas?

It seems to be working. It might be a format issue that netnewswire is not liking.