I have big news for Searchpath today. The client-side portion of Searchpath is now officially open source and available on GitHub. While I do think one of the innovations of Searchpath is the JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, it’s really the simplicity of setting up Searchpath that makes it work. A single line of JavaScript adds a search box and indexes your site, and the crawling and storage will of course remain private on my servers.
Now that part of the service is on GitHub, customers who wanted to extend the JavaScript can have a clear path for doing that. Not only is it easier to host the JavaScript yourself, but I’m accepting pull requests to integrate your improvements back into the core product for everyone to use. Special thanks to Brett Terpstra for already submitting some tweaks.
I’m also very excited to announce a simple themes structure for Searchpath. Because in addition to the JavaScript, the second part of customizing Searchpath is the design. While I document CSS class names you can use to override styles, I wanted to make it even easier to design completely new user interfaces and share them with others.
On GitHub you’ll find a “themes” folder. Any sub-folder here will be routinely synced to the main Seachpath server, where you can access it by adding “theme=folder_name” to the JavaScript include URL. To create your own theme, just add a sub-folder with your own custom theme name and submit a pull request. When the theme is added to Searchpath, all your CSS and images will be hosted by my servers. (The first person to use a specific name will effectively become the owner of it, and I’ll only accept pull requests from that person.)
Want to learn more about Searchpath? You can try it out here for free, or sign up for $8/month.
