If I understand that correctly, in spite of not having had my coffee yet, this nifty PHP script parses an arbitrary page for hyperlinks and extracts Google queries from those? Consequently, you could link there from your own page, pass it an apropriate URL from your page, along with a stylesheet that makes it look like it belongs to your own page, thus somewhat extending the functionality of your page.

Very good, however, totally different from the functionality that other PHP script provides, and also different from my thoughts on combining an implementation of this functionality with a tidy-fication of the backlinks.

antville is built by people who do things, not people who talk about things.

hns, you mean if I have a feature request now but don't have any time to spend on implementation until later I should just shut up instead of discussing it with others and see if there even is anyone who also wants it? I'd like to decide if I'll hack together a little snippet of script for my personal use only, because it won't ever be added to Antville anyway, or if I'll try to write some production quality code. Talking about the code is most certainly useful and it would be sad if Antville was built by people who never exchange thoughts about their work. And I also wouldn't be mad about someone who wants a feature but can't code himself.

Anyway, the new HOWTO you did write is most helpful and I do intend to try that out ASAP :-)

You can talk about features all you want, just don't expect the rest of us to get excited (or even interested) unless you get your hands dirty with actual work.

let me put that into nicer words: every idea concerning antville is highly welcome, but there are differences in how to present such an idea: you can do that like "antville has to have that", you can do it like "i have an idea, it could be done like <pseudo-code follows>" or "i implemented it in my personal antville installation like this <code follows>, and it works fine, wouldn't that be a nice feature?". now, the idea behind a feature stays the same, but the way of presenting that idea is completely different. and the more hints you give us, the more we get the feeling that you thought about how a feature could be implemented and why you think this is important the more responses you will get.

and now back on topic: i'm -1 because 1) it's a google-only solution (unless you come up with a flexible solution for one could extend this to other search engines), 2) it conflicts with antvilles text-caching mechanism (to boost performance), and 3) it appears to me that this is a feature one can easily hack into a single site system, but - remember - we're hosting far more sites here, and every feature that costs performance must be really worthy.

and its completly useless, since the highlited words have no special meanin to the text and may lead to text formatting issues and affects performance.

it's all about excitement. I get excited when Robert commits a monster patch or when Kris does something a "normal user" wouldn't consider doing.

Now that was a good answer (for a change). You told us how useful you think it would be, where to look for potential problems and what would have to be improved to make it interesting.

"i implemented it in my personal antville installation like this [code follows], and it works fine, wouldn't that be a nice feature?" I already did that and I'd like to do it that way again, but I can't if the keepers of the CVS don't do their part of the job: I provided a first version of a working implementation of a seriously useful feature that I have in my personal 'ville for ages already and that I'd like to have in the next version of my Antville.org blog. hns said he'd adopt it, but no one else looked at it, I got no feedback, it's still not working after three months. If you could please sort this out, and maybe reply to that, ("We'll never add that feature because no one needs it, you blubbering idiot" would be a perfectly valid answer, by the way), I'd happily send in my next contribution; mkay?

"antville has to have that" I didn't say so. If you took the phrase "Antville needs this" literally, you obviously didn't notice the sardonic title and the general flippant tone of my story. My mistake, I'll cut that out in the future.

i implemented this too (cvs-diff). thanks for the reminder (i totally forgot that), and thanks for the contribution. please mind that it won't work here on antville.org 'til the next update, which should happen within the next week.