MT4: I've off-shored my first software project

On Friday, I posted a note to the Sixapart Pronet mailing list to the effect that I need the following functionality in Movable Type's search feature:

I am doing a global tag search on my MT4 blog, and the entries are coming out sorted by blog. Is there a way to get them sorted by entry date alone?

I had put in a lot of work customizing search templates and just wanted a solution that would give me entries sorted by date without reference to blog. The idea is that students will have their own blogs with a central aggregation blog holding a list of their entries and organizing them by tag. Tags are used to organize conversations that students carry on in their posts. Think of it as a sort of mini-Technorati without the SPAM. I call it the Learning Remix project

Well, I had a number of responses. Mark Carey suggested his fast search plug-in for MT4. It appears to work well and solves a number of problems. However, two things caused me to remove it from immediate consideration:

1. I would have had to learn some specifics about how this plug-in worked. They're not too bad and probably worth it if you want the functionality, but I'm really feeling under pressure with some deadlines.
2. I would have had to do some more, albeit perhaps light, template work.

After reviewing this plug-in, I suggested I would be willing to pay for a drop in plug-in that would just sort tagged entries without respect to which blog they were in. In enters Nemui Ailin. Nemui suggested he could develop a quick plug-in, would I be willing to pay $20. We agreed the price with the condition that the plug-in be released under the artistic license that Perl is released under.

I comssioned it for open source because I want others to be able to do the sort of thing I'm doing with Movable Type. I'll be making a page for the plug-in on the learningremix domain shortly. In the mean time, Nemui has made it available for download here.

BTW, Nemui is located in Germany. I paid him via paypal. Welcome to global sourcing on an individual scale. I'm highly satisfied. The whole experience once we got started took well under 24 hours.