We collect a few different ways of searching for things. We have a lot of sites. How would we find needles in this larger haystack?
This page is a How To.
# Search Plugin
Search retrieves page references from information recorded by federated wiki search services.
# The grep plugin
See About Grep Plugin.
Find markdown todos:
ITEM markdown TEXT ^- \[ \]
While we were working on the project of replacing skypack we documented a few different ways of searching, including other examples of the grep plugin.
ITEM code TEXT skypack
# Full text search
Load a roster into our neighborhood and use built-in full-text search. It's not as specific as the grep search, but it has the advantage of looking over the whole neighborhood.
ROSTER wiki.dbbs.co/eric-dobbs
We sometimes also fork a page of search results to keep the collection of things we found, or to convert the results into a project page. See Search for 'glitch.me'.
In a localhost wiki, we have created a script that searches the local filesystem and generates a page full of references to each wiki found. This can be used in combination with full text search.
# Survey and Probe
We have not created our own probes, but have explored some examples that Ward created. We are drawn to this approach of creating new probes as a tool for ongoing discovery or maintenance.
The Institution Survey seems suggestive of the kind of custom probe which might serve unique operational tooling. A convention is established for annotating pages with semi-structured markdown. The probe recognizes the structures and rewards an author for applying the convention by making it easy to update a list of pages that follow the convention.
Find INSTITUTION nodes and relations in Markdown plugins
Create and maintain a site survey by selecting and repeatedly applying a probe.
Survey results from 4/20/2025, 12:07:59 PM.