Enter Regain! It is a personal search engine and you control what gets indexed; documents of various formats and webpages that you can then search just like you would using the more familiar search engines. I have used both the server version and the personal version and must say that I think they are great! No more looking through a long list of documents trying to recall which one(s) has the information I’m looking for. Just fire up regain’s web-interface and punch in my search criteria and Voila! instant access to all the relevant information with links back to the original documents.

I have installed the windows personal version on our PC and pointed it at our document repository which it happily indexed very quickly so now all those documents are even more useful. Regain updates its index regularly so any new content gets added to the index for searching and I can mix in other good resources to be indexed as well. One can build their very own purpose built tightly focussed search engine on your own computer. Nerdy I know but how great is that. I highly recommend it to anyone that has a significant amount of material that it would be useful to search through or if you want to build your own custom, subject specific search engine- all for free no less.

PS: I did try other products as well and will include some links below.

• Zilverline
• Red Piranha
• Search Blox
• Nutch

I have found that though there have been lots of happenings going on I seem to have lost the urge/desire to write about them. Admittedly I am very interested (alright, borderline obsessed) in the workings of our website and in trying to get things set up just the way I envision them. It is unfortunate that a site that only partly works is next to useless and therefore there needs to be a fair amount of development work, especially for a novice like myself that just tries to muddle through by trial and error, before the site can be rolled out. I’m now hoping that all that is left is just some minor tweaking on this site and then I can start doing what it is supposed to be about- the content (hopefully I can stop obsessing about the techie stuff).

I want to start updating some aspects of our site and continue a couple of series that are the most popular on our site:

• K’s toe walking and that series of posts are far and away the most viewed on our site and I will be updating that series shortly.  It has also been the impetus for one of my next projects that I am just trying to get finished up and will be dedicated solely to this subject.  So stay tuned for more information on both the personal and the techie level.
• K’s seizure activity and our continuous efforts to keep them controlled and how we are managing so far. These posts are also quite popular and is also something I want to update for others that may be having the same experience or undertaking the same journey.
• Our work with a local advocacy group has motivated me start another project that will be a community based site with a lot of local information and content as well as a forum for the exchanging of ideas, information, as well as goods and services.  I am close to finishing it and just need to finish up some of the features, load some initial content, and hopefully local families and individuals will find it useful.
• A new series I want to start documenting is K’s journey from pre-school to kindergarten and what we as parents have been doing in the background to make that transition as smooth as possible and to ensure we are getting all K’s supports in place for the big move to the public school system.

So, look for more content and less techie tweaking to come ( I hope- as long as the site keeps working Ok).  Hopefully I can get the writing bug again as there is lots to talk about personally as well as in the Autism community at large. Check back soon for more…

I am also trying to get a couple of other online projects going, all in my fairly non-existent spare time so this blog has been suffering somewhat I’m afraid. Hopefully I can spend some time getting things more up to date now that the bulk of the re-design has happened and I am just doing some “tinkering” in the background.

The old site is still up, but it will be coming down shortly as I have moved all of the content to this site and integrated our old personal website and blog into one location. Hopefully that will make things easier for me to administer and give me more design/technical freedom to achieve my goals for our website.

In short, stay tuned for more information and announcements and, hopefully, the return of more content here as K continues to develop and grow and we are now undertaking the major challenge of deciding on public vs private school for the coming year.

Those factors in conjunction with trying to limit our energy usage made the idea of switching to a hosted service even more appealing. I get to off-load the administration, which admittedly did give me a chance to learn new geeky stuff, and we no longer have to run our file server 24/7. We also get occasional power outages and this means that the blog, our site, and some of our other functions were not always available, now all that has changed.

Though I have just begun to start the transition, I believe I have most of the administrative “stuff” resolved and now I just need to move some of our old posts to the new blog, as well as migrate some of our ASD specific documentation to our new on-line file storage and everything should be much better.

Our new site can be found here with links to the blog and our online docs, which still needs to be populated, but all in all it has been a relatively painless transition. I will likely post more detailed information about the transition, its issues, and my thoughts after it has been up and running for awhile. I’ll likely comment on the online applications we are using from Google and how they compare to what we were using previously.

Update: March 11, 2009

If you are reading this we are now on our new (again) hosting service. I have updated the links on this page to reflect the changes.