The MMD Archives have been updated with several improvements to help
you find articles and follow discussions more easily.

Full-Text Search

A search box now appears at the top of the Archives home page and
on a dedicated search page at https://www.mmdigest.com/archives  
Type any words and the search engine scans subject lines, author
names, and article text across the full archive corpus.

Filters let you narrow results by year or month. A sort option lets
you switch between Best Match (most relevant first) and Newest First.
Changing any filter or sort applies immediately without needing to
click Search again.

Subject-Only Search

A checkbox labeled "Just search subject lines" is available on both
the home page form and the search page. When checked, the search looks
only at subject lines rather than full article text. This is useful
when you want to find discussions about a specific topic without
picking up incidental mentions in the body of unrelated articles.

Related Articles by Subject

When you read an individual archive article, a "Related by Subject"
section now appears below the Key Words list at the bottom of the page.
This shows other articles whose subject lines are similar to the one
you are reading -- a good way to follow a thread of discussion, since
the editor adjusts subject lines to connect related articles.

The article you are currently reading is marked as "(This article)"
in that list so you can see where you are. The related articles are
listed newest first. Clicking any link takes you directly to that
article, which will have its own Related by Subject list.

Subject and Author Indexes

Links to the existing Subject Index (KWIC) and Author Index remain
available on the Archives home page and are unchanged.

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How the MMD Archives Got Their Modern Search -- and
A Tribute to the Code That Lasted 30 Years

The processing machinery behind the Mechanical Music Digest has run on
code written nearly thirty years ago -- and until recently, that code
was Visual Basic Script. It was written and donated to the Digest by
Bob Fitterman in 1997, and it worked so well that it never became an
emergency to replace. Good software design is about the architecture
and the algorithms, not the language. Bob's code proved that.

Neither of us was in a hurry to change something that worked, but
both of us wanted to eventually. I started on these improvements quite
a while ago and kept getting stuck. For about the last year I have been
tinkering with AI-assisted coding, and this batch of improvements was
greatly helped by using GitHub Copilot with the Claude Sonnet 4.6 model,
available as a plug-in to the free Microsoft Visual Studio Code editor.

Throughout all of it, Bob has been generous with encouragement and
moral support. He is glad to see his code finally retired, and I am
grateful to him for his enormous contribution of time in 1997 and his
ongoing support ever since.

Thanks, Bob.

And thanks to you, the reader, for submitting articles and for the
financial support that keeps the lights on.

Jody Kravitz
Publisher, Mechanical Music Digest
Santee, California