For a few projects at work, I’ve been using Sphinx as a separate full-text engine. The configuration to get going is about as easy as I could ask for, and indexing is lightning-fast:
collected 28851 docs, 6.1 MB
sorted 6.0 Mhits, 100.0% done
total 28851 docs, 6134126 bytestotal 7.432 sec, 825404.12 bytes/sec, 3882.17 docs/sec
rotating indices: succesfully sent SIGHUP to searchd (pid=27222).
For an example of usage, check out a project I made for aggregating news from a few select sources based on keyword sets: http://feedwords.net/
I realize the similarity to Google’s blog notification system, but this was built to index with less noise.
Amazon has announced a new version (1.4) of ElasticFox, it’s EC2 management console for FireFox 2, and a version for 3 on the way.
Included in this version is support for the (awesome) elastic IP functionality, a few security updates, and user-selectable kernals. The project has also been open-sourced and moved to Source Forge so anyone with a few minutes and an idea can hack out whatever improvements they have in mind.
Amazon is on a roll!
Reddit recently introduced a cool new feature that allows people to create their own sub-reddits. Unfortunately, they’ve opted to employ a drop-down widget for sub-reddit selection.
How about an auto-completer, Reddit? Or, how about keeping the drop-down for the site’s most common sections and having an auto-completer widget for finding the sub-reddit best fit to the content.
As of this around 9:30 PM CST, here are the stats from Google Analytics:
-
3,550+ uniques
- 18,000+ pageviews
- Less than 40% bounce rate (should go down once more interactive features are added, I’d imagine)
- 30 usable contributions to the site thus far
- ~1% interaction rate. Virginia is for lovers, and the web is for voyuers.
- Major referers are:
- Fark (landed on the front page!)
- Stumbleupon
- Reddit
- Flyertalk
I was expecting the opposite. While I’m glad to see that a majority of people stuck around to check out the site, I plan on developing a few more features to attract return visitors. See below for that. But first:
A BIG “Thank You” to everyone that has emailed me suggestions, comments, bug reports (incorrect linking in the RSS feeds based on an older version of the site, and a problem with San Antonio), and words of encouragement!
And, of course, a REALLY BIG “Thank You” to everyone that has submitted (usable) content so far
Heres the rundown of what I’ll be adding soon to make this site even more interactive and up-front with the information:
- Keyword extraction courtesy of the Yahoo! Keyword Extraction API as a form of automatic tagging
- Potentially user tagging
- Voting on quality of articles
Contrary to what I thought out loud about earlier, I don’t think complaint comments will be happening. Yet.
If you’d like to cover TSA Complaints, I’d be much appreciative. I’m planning on sending out a small batch of press releases to more than a few sensible outlets, but this site needs your contributions and complaints to be at all useful in terms of its greater goal: statistical mining to find what’s going wrong.
Feel free to email me at: tsa -dot- complaints -at- gmail -dot- com
Again, thanks to everyone making this possible. I can’t wait to see where the site goes from here.
I’ve had a ton of page views to TSA Complaints in its first few hours, hit the front page of Fark, gotten some interesting feedback from a TSA agent, and am excited to see content materialize.
Im working on dropping in django-threadedcomments and testing it locally to launch tomorrow or later tonite, so that people can comment on individual complaints. The trick to this, though, is the complaint pages are static media generated by StaticGenerator, so that policy may be reversed. We’ll see.
Im just about ready to launch my first big web project in a while: TSA Complaints.
TSA Complaints a forum for travellers suffering from TSA-burn. Use it to describe your incidents with the TSA, and find which airports are the worst at what times.
Im really excited for the statistics that will be rolling in from the site, and can’t wait to see how the whole thing goes. This project has been equal parts reaction to the TSA blog and excitement over aggregating some data directly from the source (you!) and analyzing it.
Obligatory name droppings: This project was done with Django, and makes use of StaticGenerator, Mootools (including Aeron Glemann’s Calendar and a modified version of Harald Kirschner’s Autocompleter), memcached, nginx and Apache, and MySQL. It’s hosted on a Slicehost slice.
Big thanks to Andy, Paul and Travis at work for feedback, and Jason for both feedback and untangling some (painfully obvious) brain-teasers.
