OpenStreetMap
I was going to search to see if someone had already written about this, but..
It would be really useful to be able to search the diaries.
There is so much valuable, fun, informative, personal writing on here, but it is really hard to discover.
Fortunately, Weekly OSM does a good job of capturing some of the interesting entries posted here, but they can’t possibly cover everything.
I’m not sure what would be involved in adding this functionality, I am sure if it were easy, someone would have already done it. Someone did open an issue for it on Github but it has received no comments so far.
Is there anyone here who speaks Ruby, cares about this, and wants to implement it?
Diskusija
Komentar wot TrickyFoxy spisany dnja 15. September 2022 08:15
Most likely, the task is not a priority, because any search(Google, DDG) can easily cope with it. Just try a query of the form:
site:openstreetmap.org/user diary every doorKomentar wot TomH spisany dnja 15. September 2022 11:22
Well ruby is not really the issue - it’s not like somebody is going to write something that reads every diary entry from the database and searches the content using ruby.
Well I mean somebody could write that but it would never get merged.
So the issue is the need for efficient free text indexing/searching of diary entries, which is very much a non-trivial task.
Meanwhile your favourite internet search engines are quite happy to search “site:openstreetmap.org diary index” for you so there are easy workarounds.
Komentar wot mvexel spisany dnja 15. September 2022 14:57
The search engine option is interesting! I am guessing not many people know about this.
Perhaps there is a way to create a search box that parses whatever the user enters and redirects (new tab) to search engine results. So a user would enter, for example
openstreetcamand this would open a tab withhttps://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aopenstreetmap.org%2Fuser+diary+%22openstreetcam%22.As an added bonus, it would expose more users to a privacy-centered search engine.
Would something like that potentially be merged, TomH?
Komentar wot TomH spisany dnja 15. September 2022 15:28
I’m reluctant to tie things to specific third part services like that, both from a reliability point of view and because it means we’re blessing one service over others.
Komentar wot mvexel spisany dnja 15. September 2022 15:43
I understand and respect that principle. However, DuckDuckGo is a very well established service, and aligns with our user privacy principles. And even if DDG were to go away, a search box would not be a deep integration, and this would be pretty easy thing to revert.
Komentar wot Msiipola spisany dnja 16. September 2022 06:26
I assume the search parameters are the same, even if an other search engine is used (in case DDG goes away)?
But as others already said there are standard methods searching the diaries. I don’t see much advantage by creating a UI layer on top of this.
Better just to inform others how to do it. Maybe on the osm wiki.
Komentar wot TheSwavu spisany dnja 16. September 2022 09:49
If you want to filter out the stuff that’s not a diary then you can use:
site:www.openstreetmap.org/user/ inurl:diary -inurl:comments "every door"Komentar wot mvexel spisany dnja 16. September 2022 15:55
@Msiipola OSM wiki is a good place to document this lacking UX. I took the existing User Diaries page (which was a redirect) and wrote some content there about diaries in general, and how to search for them using DDG. Please help improve!
Komentar wot OpenBrian spisany dnja 17. September 2022 20:52
One my the design ideas for microcosms (aka communities) will be to view diary entries of a geographic region using diary_entry.location. Another idea is to show the diary entries of members of a community. For example my normal mapping buddy Andrew Wiseman mapped his vacation trip to Bermuda. Granted that can also be seen through friendships.
But I like the idea of search by content. We could use PG’s full text search to index the content.