automagically.co.uk

I've been playing around with various book related sites, gems, plugins etc. in order to get my next web application up and running.

In order to get some seed data for the website (as a test), I also used Hpricot to scrape some sites, I just wanted to nod towards an amazing tool - although I'm also looking into HTTParty in this space.

The gem I settled on to get deep information on books was the Amazon ECS gem by Pluit Solutions (who are also behind BookJetty).

I'm hoping to get the site up and running in (very limited) beta soon, as I had a few days off from work last week and was able to make huge advances on it.

Please stay tuned...

My only issues with my server move and my upgrade to Mephisto 0.8, so far was that my Mint installation had stopped recording stats!

Luckily, a little Google searching and browsing round the Google Group in particular I happened upon this message which related to exactly the issue I had.

A few minutes later, and an Apache conf file update later (with a Passenger bounce) and I am now recording stats again.

I've just updated to mephisto 0.8, so please bear with me if there are any errors...

Since I've installed mephisto I've not had the problems that others have, but this is the first time I've upgraded!

Last weekend, I went to Mashed 08, run by my employer, the BBC

During the first morning, several APIs were released and a competition was started with 24 hours to hack/mash an application together, using one of those APIs.

As a BBC employees, myself and my colleagues decided to create an application related to our roles, which it turned out what a "personal, pocket, travel guide" application, which allowed you to create your personalised travel guide for any given city and choose which points of interest you wanted in your guide (we created PDFs).

The APIs we used to create this were the Lonely Planet Developer Network and the Multimap Open API. These allowed us to gather destination and point of interest information (including geo information) and then plot these on the map (that every good application should contain!)

Overall, the weekend went very well, I personally had great fun developing again, and the two APIs we used were very complete, very easy to use and well documented (for what we needed).

We had many enhancements we could have done to the application, but had to succumb to sleep at some point!

Thanks go to the BBC for running the event, apparently last year was just as much fun, but I missed it.

Taking yesterday's learnings with Ruby and Sinatra, I decided to make my app in less than 24 hours.

Now, the application is a starting point for a large app that I have in mind for authr.co.uk, and it only allows you to search and find articles on Wikipedia (so nothing amazing!)

I'm using Hpricot, the Wikipedia API.and the MediaCloth gem to cobble together something of use to me in a short timeframe.

I'll be improving the application over the next few days hopefully (given time) and adding features along with fixing bugs, but I'm impressed with my ability to stick to a plan (getting the app up) and learning new things fast!

Any feedback, please leave a comment.