The server load got crazy there for a while, and we had to reboot it more than once. Here’s an open thread while I feed the hamsters.

And while I’m at it, here’s a sneak preview of the new MySQL-based LGF search tool. (Link now removed because it’s currently under construction.) The last few weeks’ worth of posts and comments have not been entered into the database yet, so this is not quite an up-to-date search. But it’s enough to let you see how it works. (And to let me do a public beta test. Be aware there are probably still bugs lurking in the code.)

The new search tool is greatly improved; the old one could only search for an exact word or phrase, while the new one is keyword-based, like Google or Yahoo. There are more details and some examples of how to use these features on this page of the MySQL manual: Boolean Full-Text Searches.

And by the way, the new search tool is orders of magnitude faster.

One important detail to know is that there’s a limit on the length of words that can be searched, to prevent huge sets of results; words with less than 4 characters will not yield any results. It’s designed to prevent words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ from skewing the results. (You can get around this limitation by surrounding the word in double quotes, which performs an exact match of a word or phrase.)