I have read a lot about Lucene over the years and finally managed to find an excuse to play with it. I used it to add a general search to ThePlanCollection.com. Here’s a detailed writeup including the code I used to implement search using Lucene on ASP.Net. Enjoy.
Month: March 2008
Microcontent Sells
I spend a lot of time in the Open Content world. COSL is all about opening up content and making it available to the world. Given that fact why would I write about selling content? The Internet is full of great content and if all I need to do is run a quick Google search…
Turn WordPress Into Social Butterfly
I have been pitching this idea of a distributed social network to everyone that can stand to listen to me. I realize that the conversation around WordPress and the future of social networking is heating up, but as it does I think it is important to begin thinking about implementation. It is fun to philosophize,…
iPhone SDK
Apple finally introduced the iPhone SDK today. The capabilities of the phone are amazing and this opens up an even greater world. I am lusting after a terminal on mine so that I can get into my server from anywhere. There are so many things going on right now it is a great time to…
Disposable Communities
I had a great chat with Brian Lamb yesterday. He and his team are working to use WordPress to support learning communities at UBC. In case anyone else is sick of WebCT, Blackboard or the boring Moodle interface this could provide an interesting replacement. Anyway, as we were talking it made me realize that it…
Logan Cycling Psychopaths
# I like to ride, but I won’t be joining these guys. I must be getting old since riding in the middle of the night in the cold doesn’t seem especially appealing. I’ll stick to the trainer in front of the computer.
Niche Communities
Over the past few months I have talked quite a bit with Joel about online communities and about what philosophically makes a community. I think it is a group of individuals who collectively are interesting in something and need tools to facilitate communication and production of some artifact(s). The way the community interacts to make…
Connected Communities
When Digg was new I spent plenty of time following the latest news ‘dugg’ up by the community. Now I rarely go back. Somewhere along the line Digg became an online Frat house and I am no longer interested in the 10 ten latest shocking things or in hearing about Scientology or in seeing pictures…
Note to Facebook, Myspace and Other Social Silos: DIE
I wrote three Facebook apps and I have ideas for several more. The most successful was the House Plans application I did for ThePlanCollection.com, but in the Facebook world you can’t count a couple thousand users as especially successful. When Open Social started up I felt like I needed to go sign up for a…
We’re All Gonna Die
In the cosmic scheme of things life is little more than a blip between birth and death. Luckily for us as a species the blips are coming online faster than they are fading out. However, it is terrifying when the universe conspires to silence all the blips at once. The death is aimed at us.