I’m using Simple Jekyll Search to do searching (came from Ably originally).

Basic Description

I struggled to follow the explanations in the Simple Jekyll Search wiki until I dug into it a bit. Here’s how it works:

• Search.json defines what’s returned in the search results.
• You can pass in config options by sticking some javascript in your html. At the time of writing (commit 048c7b6 in clare-wiki-ably), this is living in _layouts/default.html. It lives inside a script tag and looks like this: window.simpleJekyllSearch = new SimpleJekyllSearch.
• This config can then refer to further scripts, for instance at time of writing it refers to another script - showSearchResults - defined in the same file.
• The searchResultTemplate value defined in the config (see above) defines how each search result will look, and can refer back to the stuff defined in search.json.
• You can configure a full text search - see instructions here.

An example of tweaking it

To configure it to do cool stuff with categories and tags, you can add a category element into the json that defines the search results, and then refer to it in default.html or wherever you’re displaying your search results.

See commit 048c7b6 in clare-wiki-ably for an example of where I started playing with this (then I abandoned it because I didn’t have the time to make it work properly).

Troubleshooting

Sometimes if you’re not finding search results, if yuou empty cache and hard reload that’ll fix it (F12 for Chrome dev tools, then right-click in the refresh icon to the left of the url).