Mark Boulton

15 Responses to “Live search ‘public beta’”

1. 
   John Oxton said on: May 27th, 2005 at 4:04 pm

   I have live search on my site now as well and it’s pretty sexy. One of the things I don’t agree with is: “Use a live search type func­tion­al­ity to dis­play res­ults without going to a res­ult page” 

   The Tex­t­pat­tern plug-in at least takes you to a search page if you hit return and I kind of like that. 

   Nicely inco­por­ated in to your design though, it looks lurrvely! :)

2. 
   Mark Boulton said on: May 27th, 2005 at 4:23 pm

   Actu­ally John, I hadn’t noticed the search page func­tion­al­ity on the tex­t­pat­tern plug-in. I kind of like that too, although it’s not too obvi­ous that if you press return you go to a search page.

   The prob­lem is the EE plug-in is still a beta. I’d actu­ally like to limit the res­ults to say 10 and then have a link to more res­ults which would go to a full search page. 

   Any PHP or EE wiz­ards like to help me out?

3. 
   Berg said on: May 27th, 2005 at 5:07 pm

   Your new live search looks great.  Nice way of incor­por­at­ing it into your site.  Some things I noticed. 

   In Opera 8 the search box is not flush with the top green line.

   Also in Opera 8, when you use the arrow keys to scroll down the search items it actu­ally scrolls the page too.  Weird.  Not sure if that can be helped. 

   In IE6, when I search for some­thing like “tests” it dis­plays the res­ults fine, but if I back­space to “test”, noth­ing shows up. 

   And, just my opin­ion, it would be nice to have some sort of anim­ated gif to let you know that the search is work­ing, sim­ilar to when you are load­ing a page from Firefox.

4. 
   Urban Faubion said on: May 27th, 2005 at 5:43 pm

   Great work.
   
   Suc­cess on Fire­fox 1.0.4 on OS X 10.3.8 

   I noticed the res­ults on :hover doesn’t receive the same CSS treat­ment as using the arrow keys does. One solu­tion is to giv­ing it mul­tiple classes. Some­thing like:
   

   //Key down
   
   highlight.className += ‘ highlight’;

   //Key up
   
   highlight.className = highlight.className.replace(new Reg­Exp(” highlight\\b”), ‘’);

   When search­ing, in addi­tion to your text under the input field, it would be nice to have some indic­a­tion text like “load­ing” adja­cent to “top res­ults:” as it’s query­ing your DB.  I also think it would be nice if it func­tioned sim­ilar to a select.  When the area loses :focus, it hides the res­ults, that can be expan­ded again, same func­tion­al­ity as click­ing search again. I think your might need to change your “close(esc)” label to “clear” or “new search” because it doesn’t hide the search­box­wrap­per div but instead, hides sear­chresult div.  Hope that helps.

5. 
   Sam said on: May 27th, 2005 at 11:59 pm

   Looks great and works fine in Safari 2.0. After using a lot of other ‘Live Searches’ I actu­ally typed in a word and expec­ted the res­ults to show straight away. Only after wait­ing a few moments (as per your mes­sage) I thought I’d hit enter. 

   More of a per­sonal issue more than any­thing I’d say, like Jon men­tioned, the return tak­ing you to a full blown search page is what I think people may be after.. unless they get the res­ult they are look­ing for in the dropdown. 

   Well integ­rated into your site how­ever.. good work.

6. 
   Lode said on: May 28th, 2005 at 1:16 pm

   * Works fine in Fire­fox 1.0.4 on Mac/Lin/Win
   
   * Nicely integ­rated in your design
   
   * It feels a bit slow, com­pared to the live searches of Bin­ary Bon­sai (which gives you res­ults as you are typ­ing) and 1976design (which maybe isn’t any faster than yours, but does provide a visual clue that it is search­ing something).

7. 
   Mark Boulton said on: May 28th, 2005 at 5:42 pm

   Urban — Thanks for the feed­back and really good com­ment about the (esc) bit, that was just default in the plug-in and it has never sat well with me usab­il­ity wise.

   Sam & Lode — Thanks for your com­ments guys, it looks more and more like I’m going to have to hack the crap out of this plug-in to increase the speed but to also add the extra func­tion­al­ity like lim­it­ing the res­ults and press­ing return to go to a res­ults page. 

   As Tex­t­pat­tern and Word­Press both have plug-ins avail­able which do this, and aas their both php, I won­der how much work would be involved in try­ing to them in an EE envir­on­ment to query and EE database… 

   Damn, I had a feel­ing this was going to be a little more involved!

8. 
   Tom said on: May 28th, 2005 at 10:00 pm

   Without read­ing the other com­ments here are some thoughts. 

   Try not to make the search box expand past the bot­tom of the page, do a search for “c”, and youll get the idea. Per­haps a link, or but­ton that lead to more res­ults could help overspill. 

   Press­ing “enter” should take you to the first result. 

   Add a spinny thing, ala Dun­stan

   When hov­er­ing the a res­ult, make the whole row space click­able, use the same effect you have for the arrow keys perhaps? 

   Hit­ting close list and then repeat­ing a search kinda make the search not work at all. 

   Search for “wrap”, the res­ults dont quite fully mask the first colum and might be con­fus­ing with the inform­a­tion under­neath, per­haps you could either make this column white when you search, or reduce the opacity. 

   Perahps you can cache the res­ults so if I repeat one, the res­ults are dis­played instantly. 

   Using Fire­fox Win­dows 2000

9. 
   Julian said on: May 28th, 2005 at 10:45 pm

   It’s very nicely done, but it feels a little bit too slow. I think a “search­ing” graphic would be nice.

10. 
    Thomas B. Aschim said on: May 28th, 2005 at 10:57 pm

    That’s just lovely!

11. 
    Alex said on: May 29th, 2005 at 1:12 am

    Great search box … one little com­plaint.  I think another user men­tioned this as well, but there _needs_ to be a way to show the user whether it is still search­ing, or noth­ing has shown up.  Cur­rently it just shows no res­ults until the res­ults come, but since there’s a lag, it’s dif­fi­cult to know whether it’s still search­ing or just found nothing.

    Also, unre­lated, a few notes the comment-form here (which I must say is very pretty), since I’ve never com­men­ted here before (although I’ve been read­ing for a while):
    
    * The label for the text “Live Pre­view” points to the URL input area instead of the live pre­view check­box
    
    * The area that shows up when the email address input is act­ive links to Gravatar, but when I tried to click on the link (Fx 1.0.4) that un-selected the input and thus the text van­ished with the link I was try­ing to click on.  Not sure how to rem­edy that, though.  Could be Fx prob­lem?
    

    * Be con­sist­ent with your form labels.  Neither “Remem­ber my per­sonal inform­a­tion” nor “Notify me of follow-up com­ments?” are labels.  Big­ger areas to click are bet­ter, and those little teeny boxes are a pain on today’s high-res monitors. 

    But really, great site.  I really enjoyed your series on typo­graphy. Thanks.

12. 
    Alex said on: May 29th, 2005 at 1:14 am

    Fol­lowup:
    
    Why, in the javas­criptlive pre­view, am I get­ting tex­tile com­mands con­ver­ted prop­erly, like _italics_ and
    
    * lists 

    but in the post, that doesn’t happen?

13. 
    Mark Boulton said on: May 30th, 2005 at 10:03 am

    Thanks for the com­ments every­one — keep them coming. 

    So, just to summarise:

    1. Make sure there’s some­thing to indic­ate a search is tak­ing place. 

    2. Improve the speed. 

    3. Press­ing enter should take you some­where — a more com­plete search res­ults page? 

    Did I miss anything?

14. 
    Lewis said on: May 30th, 2005 at 8:24 pm

    It would be nice if what was input­ted was remembered so that a user does not have to re-type the search terms after each time they click to invest­ig­ate an article. 

    You could use PHP to GET the search terms and place them as a value attrib­ute in the input element.

15. 
    XeroCool said on: May 31st, 2005 at 8:28 pm

    Sexy. I have one on my site. Pretty cool.