Trying Out Pagefind in Micro.blog

Trying out Pagefind that was just released for Micro.blog. I find myself using the search on this blog surprisingly often, and while the search plugin has served me well, I’m always up for trying something new.

It took me a bit of time to work out how to get the actual search page. What I did was uninstall the search plugin, create a new “Search” page, and copied-pasted the sample UI on Pagefind’s docs. That worked without a hitch. I explored changing some of the display options, such as raising the number of results and the size of the snippets. Interestingly, a smaller number of results actually feels nicer. I started with 25 but seeing all those results felt overwhelming (who knew there was so much nonsense written here). I think I’ll give 10 a go.

If I can provide some feedback to Manton, it would be to choose which pages to index. I did a search for “Devlog” and found that the stats page, category list page, and various pages of the blog list were showing up in the results. It would be nice to configure the index to just the blog posts, maybe also the custom pages, and leave the entry lists out. I am curious to explore the capabilities of Pagefind some more, particularly around faceted search. One thing I’ve been thinking of for a while is the ability to use # to filter based on cataegories, such as #photos birds to return only the results with the “Photos” category. I did consider hacking this into the search plugin, but maybe I won’t have to.

All in all, I think I like it. I like how fast the results come through, and although I do prefer the UI of the search plugin, I think that’s solvable by tuning this one to my desires (or, just more likely, I’ll simply get use to it). I think this is a great addition to Micro.blog.