I just finished deploying Links SQL 2.0. The previous engine I used maintained five flat files; Index, Content, Categories, Activity Log and Reverse Lookup. Most links were in the index because they had been spidered but the cream of the crop were also categorized and browsable because they had been put there manually. It would not export to text on demand but it did keep a running, pipe delimited text file of all entries. Removing duplicates was easy.
To import these entries to Links I used MySQL manager import. Although each entry contained 19 fields, the only three fields I imported were Title, URL and Description into the "Links" table. Links assigns default values to any others it needs. After importing you must run nph-index to index your new links and they become fully searchable.
What I discovered is these newly created links reside in the Home directory which is not browsable. To make them browsable all I had to do was create sub-categories below Home. Those are the visible categories. Now that I have manually reloaded my best links into browsable categories, I'm not sure how I would go about moving them back to the Home directory if I ever needed to except to export the links to a text file, purge the database and reload from scratch. There's probably an easier way but I don't know it, nor do I think I would ever want to.
My point is, when I loaded from delimited text, the entire thing is searchable even though not browsable. The only thing my old one did that Links SQL does not is index keywords and some of the page body along with title and description. The jury is still out on which I like better. This produced more search results than Links but also allowed for potential search manipulation by the web site authors. Relevence suffered on some searches but obscure information was easier to find in my old engine.
By design, Links is a directory maintenance package with search capability. My other was a search engine with directory capabilities. It's all in what you need it for. I do wish it had a keyword field in the "Links" table though. I may tinker with that a bit later.
The big problem I am faced with at the moment is how to link entries to categories DURING the import process if given entries have been assigned a category in one of the pipe delimited fields. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Mark Brasche
http://SurfSafely.com/
