

IndexTank Holiday Hacks Contest Results - diego
http://blog.indextank.com/211/211/

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railsjedi
My app: <http://helpshelf.com>

Built in about 3 days. Most of the work was handling the PDF uploads and
parsing. It uses the amazing tool transloadit.com for uploading, and resque
for managing the parsing of the pdfs. It then posts each page to indextank as
a document so it can be full text searched.

Indextank was insanely easy to use. I'd never used the service before this,
but I'll be using it in many apps of my apps in the future. This is future of
cloud services. Removes up front costs for launching some really complex app
infrastructures. And then pay hosting over the long term. It's a tradeoff I'll
take any day.

The design was hacked together using some shelf PSD assets a designer friend
built for me. As you can see, there's not to many components there, but I
think it turned out pretty decent.

UI was built using Backbone.js and Coffeescript. Sass/Compass provides the
style, and HAML provides the basic structure.

I got just enough done where search worked well, however the app is woofully
underfinished. It really needs better "My Shelf" management. I also really
want to hook it into the dropbox api so it can automatically index all your
PDFs.

Hoping to flesh it out a bit this month, and hopefully should have a proper
launch in Feb. Would love any suggestions / feedback on the current version so
far (no bug reports, there's too many of them! :)

~~~
santip
The application looks really neat, have you thought about making use of more
of IndexTank's features such as scoring functions, faceting and autocomplete?
See: [http://indextank.com/documentation/ruby-client#relevance-
fun...](http://indextank.com/documentation/ruby-client#relevance-functions),
<http://indextank.com/documentation/ruby-client#faceting> and
<http://indextank.com/documentation/tutorial-autocomplete>

~~~
railsjedi
I'm using faceting pretty heavily. Scoring and autocomplete are awesome
indextank features that I'm going to try to integrate in the very near future.

Thanks!

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mattculbreth
I got second place here for <http://www.proggitftw.com>. What a great contest.

I wrote a few Python scripts to scrape Proggit every few minutes, looking for
new comments. Sending them to IndexTank was simple--just one call. On the
Rails app for the searching, same thing--just one call and you can get the
results from IndexTank.

I'm going to spend more time on it and make it a bit more usable. HelpShelf's
highlighting is cool so I'll do that, and I think auto complete is a no
brainer.

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eidorianu
Congratulations to all participants! I would like to see more apps
implementing diferent ideas around indextank. Next contest? :)

