WIP: 1st PRO feature done

The first PRO feature for my Twitter bookmarking SaaS, Markfolder.com, is done!

Markfolder has been a free SaaS, but soon I'll be launching Markfolder PRO. The first PRO feature is Search. Been working on this last few days and I think it's now ready.

In building Search, I looked at various 3rd party options instead of rolling my own, so that I can launch it quicker. Algolia is supported by Laravel (the dev framework I use), and I'm familiar with Algolia. So this looked promising, but, it would have cost a lot of money. Forget it.

So I looked at what MySQL (the database running Markfolder) can do in terms of search. Turns out, quite a bit! MySQL's FULLTEXT search is good enough for this first version and it won't take too much work.

Getting the search keywords formatted correctly took the most time. And MYSQL's default minimum 4 letters for search keywords is a little annoying.

But it's good enough. If this becomes a popular feature and people are paying for it, then I can always upgrade it to a more sophisticated search service (like Algolia).

Next: Create a teaser for free users to entice them to upgrade.