For those running Octopress and wanting to set up a full-text search of their site, something a little nicer than the stock Google Simple Search, Tapir is a valid option. It’s a third party website that indexes your RSS feed and provides search tools against that data-set.

Note: You can find the relevant files on GitHub here: octopress-tapir

Tapir search for your Octopress blog!

Tapir works by indexing your RSS feed. Only what is included within this file will be indexed. For RSS purposes you most likely only want the last 20 or so articles but for search, you want all of them included. To handle this, we simply create a second xml file to use for search.

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atom.xml

• the original file
• limited to 20 most recent posts
• we use this for RSS

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atom_search.xml

• the new file
• a modified version of atom.xml
• includes all posts
• added summary field

Install

1. Visit Tapirgo.com and enter the url to your atom_search.xml like: http://yoursite.com/atom_search.xml After you enter your email and click the big GO button, you’ll be given both a public and a private token.
2. Open your _config.yml and include the public token: tapir_token: your_id_here
3. Copy loading.gif to your source/images/ folder.
4. Copy jquery-tapir.js to your source/javascripts/ folder.
5. Copy search.html to your source/ folder.
6. Open source/_includes/navigation.html and add:

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{% if site.tapir_token %}

  <form method="get" action="/search.html">
    <fieldset role="search">
      <input class="search" name="query" type="text" placeholder="Search..." x-webkit-speech />
    </fieldset>
  </form>

{% endif %}

That’s all there is to it. You should now be able to search your content using the wonderful Tapir service. :)