Adding elastic site search

One of the services Elastic provides is a site search service. They claim this adds site search to your site in just 5 minutes, which is not exactly true, but is not too far off the truth either. I managed to get a working site search with a nice-ishly styled search box in 30 minutes, 15 minutes of which were waiting for the confirmation email to arrive and the elastic crawler to do her job.

I decided to give it a try for this website. The steps are easy enough:

Sign up here and wait for confirmation email (2 minutes)
Click link in email, and enter the url of your site. Now wait for Elastic's crawling to finish (15 minutes)
Add some javascript and a search form to your site, as supplied by Elastic (2 minutes)
Use my not-so-leet css skills to make the form look okayish in a regular browser as well as in the mobile version (10 minutes)

And that's it, site search indeed works pretty smoothly out-of-the-box. Without adding any additional javascript or html, the search works and looks like this:
site search results

The only bad news is that it's not for free, actually the pricing starts at $79 a month. So unfortunately I will remove the search again after the 14 day trial period. Still a nice product and an easy way to add search to your site without any coding on your side.

blogging search

Fighting html form bots
A tale of fighting spam bots abusing my contact form. A series of experiments led to a simple solution to stop the bots.
Sending mail from a contact form
How I set up my contact form to send emails in a way that does not reveal my email address to the world.