First Post!

Hello world.

I've been meaning to start blogging for some time. My motivations are that articulating what I'm up to will help me to stay focussed better, and I'll be able to let those in the Xapian community who are interested see what I'm currently up to without me having to worry that I'm bombarding the mailing list with too much information.

It will also give me somewhere to put analysis of Xapian-related issues which include graphs, diagrams, and tables, which mailing list email isn't very well suited to.

And that's the motivation for getting around to this right now. GMX are sponsoring me to do some work on reducing database size. They've wanted me to report as the work progressed, and we decided the best approach was for me to post the progress reports to a public blog, so other people can follow the work too.

I will try to make the test scripts available where I easily can, and I'd love to get feedback on how things look with your Xapian databases, particularly if they are large.

I don't currently have a commenting feature on the blog. It would be good to have one, but I'm reluctant to create yet another place to have to regularly cleanse of spam, so until I have time to set up comments with decent spam protection please direct feedback to http://identi.ca/olly or the xapian-devel mailing list.