After some backflips and one system level workaround, my local sitesearch is now in place. It uses the Jay Allen developed mt-search, one of the first add ons developed for MT, well before version 2 and MySQL support were added.

Because of this, although mt-search is highly configurable, it’s very idiosyncratic, compared to add-ons created after Ben and Mena released their plug-in spec; additionally, Jay made some fundamental assumptions about how Movable Type’s CGI directories and access would be configured in relation to the local path to the actual directories one serves the blog per se from.

Finally, Jay has been attempting to move on from the product, and thus as MT continues to grow, one hopes that the Trotts see fit to rework search such that it’s as easy to set up as the rest of their material.

Becasue it’s pretty poky, I’ve left Google up as a search option for those of you, like me, that grit their teeth when a ‘puter takes more than 2.3 seconds to complete a task. You may not get entries from this month; but you could use the browser’s page search feature too, ya know.