Upgrading my site search

I finally got around to indexing my own site with Algolia and building a little React app to handle requests.

It was the typical dev plan - I got 90% of the way there in the first two hours, and the next 5% took um... longer. And I've still got 5% left. In hindsight, deciding to build an app that would do the sodo-search style popover and deciding not to shove it in an iframe was a recipe for aggravation, as was loading the default Algolia styles. I somehow forgot that my heavily modified Ruby theme does the 1rem = 10px, so all the sizes were wrong, in interesting and weird ways, after being perfect in my test setup (a static HTML page). And then there was fighting Algolia vs Ruby vs the search app styles. Before I share it with anyone else, I'm going to shove it in an iframe, which I should have done in the first place. Ugh. Live and learn, I guess?

I also spent way too much time on the close button in the top right corner, which was initially weirdly misplaced on my iPhone (despite looking fine in dev tools testing). And now that I'm publishing this, I'm sure someone will come along and tell me it's broken for Android in some way, because of course, it probably is. Cross-platform compatibility is not for wimps, man.

I'm still fussing around a bit with rankings, typo tolerance, etc. But feel free to take it for a spin and let me know what you think! (Hit the search icon on the top of the page.)

My eventual thought is that I'll open source it, to make it easier for sites that want Algolia searching without a bunch of custom work, but I've got to squash some more bugs first. And maybe remove a few Ghosts who snuck into this demo...