I’ve been giving thought to just what should come next for Sphider.
Integrating the Sphider Image Indexing functions with the main Sphider, thus making content and image indexing a single operation is a rather obvious improvement.
The ability to index and search RSS feeds would also be a nice addition. I actually have an alpha of this running on both Linux and Windows machines. Since the spidering operations can be done from a command prompt, a simple cron is keeping the feeds updated on the Linux box. The Windows task scheduler is being a bit more stubborn, mainly because of a pesky PHP error I haven’t solved yet. PHP is fine in a browser, but the command prompt is giving trouble. It works, but I keep getting an error that DEMANDS a response! I’ll figure it out.
Since searching for content is different from searching for images, which in turn is different than searching for RSS feeds, three different sets of search and results pages are needed. To a user, the only obvious difference is the search page, as the results portion is integrated. So I am giving thought to a possible “unified” search page with tabs so that the appropriate search form (and corresponding results) can be present to the user. This is not definite yet, just a thought.
These are all ideas for the future. For now, version 1.6 remains the latest. If the need arises, minor release improvements/fixes are not out of the question.
Anything you would like to see in the Spider of the future? Give me your ideas and … well, who knows? It might be a very good, very doable idea!