I am pleased to announce the Inform Extensions Search site, the product of this past Saturday’s procrastinatory toils. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a simple search engine for Inform 7 language extensions.
I created this tool because I miss not having something like the CPAN Search for Inform extensions, even though “only” 230-ish such extensions currently exist in public. In fact, you can see them all (or all the ones released under a Creative Commons license, at least) on a single page at inform7.com.
Up until now, the best way I knew to look for extensions involved visiting that page and using your browser’s Find command. You can also browse by category, but even then you’re limited to extensions’ titles and summaries, and I found myself wanting to search at a deeper level without manually clicking though everything.
My tool offers a solution via searching extensions’ documentation, as well as their more obvious metadata. In this way, for example, a search for guns brings up David Ratliff’s extension to handle weapons and fighting, and searching for water produces several extensions that variously produce and handle liquids, though none have the word “water” in their descriptions.
So that’s that. I hope that someone finds it useful, and welcome feedback and suggestions.
This is great, and definitely a boon to I7 users--thank you!
I've made a yubnub command interface to the search, for anyone who uses yubnub shortcuts. The syntax is simple, just i7x followed by whatever you would type into the search box:
i7x conversation
i7x author:short
Very nice!
Is it technically possible and part of what you would be interested in doing to also search through extensions not hosted at the Inform 7 site? (As far as I know, my ATTACK extension is the only Inform 7 extension not hosted there, because of licensing reasons; but still.)
Funny you should ask; when I was initially testing this I had ATTACK in mind, and was confused why I couldn't find it under keywords like "combat" -- until I remembered that you'd chosen to not group it with the CC-licensed extensions at inform7.com!
It's naturally possible to extend the indexer to visit other sites; as you might have guessed, all it does right now is politely spider the inform7.com extensions pages one per day.
As a short-term hack, I could just have it manually add ATTACK plus the text of its PDF manual. Doesn't really scale (and it won't automatically update when you release new versions), but it'll get it in there at least.
Are there any other public extensions not listed in inform7.com that I should know about...?
Awesome; I'm sure this will be of great use.