TechNayak

I recently gave a tutorial on Ruby on Rails at my school. Its pretty comprehensive and most of the material I used for the tutorial is present on my personal Wiki. Please find the tutorial on my wiki here
 http://riteshnayak.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ruby_on_Rails

Also, people who are using rails 2.0, please go the 2.0 section directly. If you start using 1.0 tutorial, you may get lost after a certain time and the results wont show. Check what version of rails you have installed and then use the corresponding section. Best of luck!!

Tags: rubyon rails, ror, rails, itsmeritesh

If you haven’t seen More Y! , then its high time you do. Its a simple search plugin built on top of BOSS platform that optimizes the search experience for widescreen displays. Whats even more cool is the adoption rate. My statistics tell me that there have been a lot of people who use this service and nothing satisfies a technologist more than to see his technology being adopted.

  After a fight with my significant other who is trying really hard to improve relevance on Yahoo search results, I realized that I wasn’t doing justice to search results by ordering top results in top down fashion. I have changed the code to now show results in left-right fashion. Now the most popular results will be available on top of the screen and you don’t have to strain those precious eyeballs of yours to look all the way down to see the results. A simple change but for a goo cause.

 When I get the time, I shall also incorporate search suggestions on your toolbar, but till then make do with this.

Tags: BOSS, yahoo, search, More Y!

Don’t you hate it that your favorite search engine cannot realize that you are using a widescreen or a theatrical display and still shows you ten measly results ? Well, I do and I sat down yesterday to fix it. The result is More Y! - a widescreen optimized search. Wait, before you make any assumptions about it, its not a google killing revolutionary new search algorithm. Its just a differnt way of packaging Yahoo’s search results, thanks to Yahoo! Search BOSS. And, No, its not a Cuil ripoff Cuil is way cuiler. This is just an optimization on the traditional Yahoo search that I liked using.

 If you are using a widescren display or a theatrical display with resolution sizes bigger than 1024 *768 then use More Y! . More Y! displays thirty results in three columns and looks legible on widescreen displays (no guarantees for normal displays though). Whats even more handy is that More Y! can be integrated into your favorite browser (Firefox 2+ or Internet Explorer 7+ ) by following the instruction provided on the More Y! page. Its a cinch.

 Have fun with More Yahoo! and do reply back with comments and feedback.

Tags: boss, search, More Y!, yahoo, itsmeritesh

Reached home early yesterday and read an article about Yahoo BOSS and its open nature. In my effort to kill time, till dinner, I sat and read through the documentation for BOSS and it turns out its the easiest open search ever. I used the Google Coop as my site search but, somehow the techie inside me couldn’t rest at the thought of someone else doing the tech for me. BOSS looked really tempting with its good results and recent indexes; I sat down to build my site search.

BOSS is simple. Really really simple and can do wonders if you are planning to build a search engine with your own flavor. Unlike other searches, BOSS gives you XML/JSON, meaning you can re-order results and present them in any way you like. Add flash, css, javascript, canvas elements whatever to build that unique search experience. After the cuil ripoff Yuil, which got taken down and was relaunched again as 4Hoursearch (why did they call it that ? figure it out Einstein !!), I was sure BOSS would be easy, but didn’t know it would be this easy.

Its only recently that I started learning Python, and I suck at it, so I picked my old favorite PHP as the language of choice ( I suck at PHP too, but suck less compared to Python). Got myself an Application ID to use BOSS. Used PHP SimpleXML parser to get a URL of choice and Voila, I had my results in an array. Wrote some really rudimentary CSS to match the aesthetics of my site and my site search was done .

Check out my Yahoo BOSS powered site search here !!

If it wasn’t for my crappy PHP skill level, Im sure I could have wrapped up the entire thing, right from “Duh, what is BOSS ?” to the implementation, in under an hour. If I do find more time to kill whilst I wait for dinner, I shall experiment with different displays for search results from BOSS. Y! BOSS is truly open and in keeping with the Open Source spirit, I have shared my rudimentary site search code. You wont believe it but the code , with proper convention, HTML and CSS comes up to 65 lines . Isn’t it awesome ??

Get the code for site search here.

Another wonderful manifestation of this concept is that you can now build custom search engines that will search only the sites that you catalog for information you need. Check out Y! BOSS.

Tags: yahoo, BOSS, sitesearch, search

I have like two new interface changes in the recent past. One being the new Facebook interface and more recently (ie today) the del.icio.us page. Both these interfaces have one thing in common, putting the most essential information out where you would need them and more importantly break through the clutter.

 Lets take the example of facebook. The apps killed the facebook profile page. There were days when a single page would take 15 minutes to load thanks to the 50 odd apps that people had added to their profiles. Facebook’s new design rocks coz they have removed the clutter. Facebook’s usp, the newfeed, is what is shown as the profile , which is nice considering you get to see what the person you are seeing is upto recently. The apps have moved to a completely new page which means, no clutter Also the profile information, which people hardly change is gone into another page. Another cool addition I saw is the “What are you doing now ?” is highlighted and big. Given the run twitter is having with its fans, Im sure facebook realizes that micotexting about yourself is the rage right now and integrates that at the head of your homepage. Pretty ingenious if you think about it. Not all redesigns work , for ex , I hated the analytics redesign for the first few days and so was the redesign of wordpress but regular usage and some groking made me very comfortable with the interface. When you are redesigning interfaces especially for sites like flickr, facebook then it becomes essential that you get a value add and Facebook certainly nailed this one.

 Now lets go back to del.icio.us. Firstly the dots are off and you can access it as delicious.com, which saves me the trouble of explaining people the position of the dots in the url. I like the old del.icio.us and its UI. It was very basic, no frill, plain text based UI. The reason was probably the speed which it would work. But one thing that annoyed me was the clutter.The URL, Description, tags, other taggers, edit  and remove links etc were fit into a really small space; the new UI had to break this clutter.  The other problem was the tag cloud on the right. The older version would buch up tags and it would be difficult to spot the tags if you had more than say 200 which is common for most delicious uses. The new UI does a wonderful job of reducing the clutter. All the above mentioned items of the URL are still present in the same space and look darling. The tag cloud has also become more navigable and the social aspect of the site is utilized superbly if you see your networks page.

 I am now looking at some of the properties that I have built that can possibly be redesigned for better usage.

Tags: interfaces, redesign, facebook, delicious