The old format went something like this:

[Date] Title (link to details page for book)

So yesterday’s deal was:

[2009-06-24]: Excel 2007 PivotTables Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (http://rubyurl.com/HtMV)

The new format:

Title, Publish date, Author, (DailyDeal link)

So today’s deal is:

Storage Networks Pub. Jun 2004 by Daniel J. Worden (http://su.pr/2R677z)

Twitter takes care of the date, I add author and publish date so you can decide if it’s worth buying a book from 2004 (sometimes they are, other times not) and I avoid confusion by linking you back to the page that says $10.

Disclaimer: I’m not associated with Apress in any way. I was just annoyed/surprised that they didn’t have an RSS feed or something for a “daily deal”. I wouldn’t remember to come back every day. Yes, Apress has some affiliate type program but you can’t earn anything off the daily deal. I think the only thing this has really done, for me, is cause me to spend more money because I’m actually seeing the deals every day. (Though if they wanted to send me a Kindle DX to read all these books on, I wouldn’t send it back )

• We didn’t provide breakfast or coffee (it’s a free event and we didn’t have sponsors)
• We shortened the sessions to 60 minutes from 75 to get more speakers

Universally, both those changes were not well received. I’m going to go through feedback in general and then talk about what the plans are for the CodeCamp in the fall.

How was the event overall? 7.88/9

• Most of the comments in here were “Great”
• A few complained about the short sessions
• A few more complained about lack of food

How was the range of topics? 7.77/9
This is something I try not to control at all. I give people a general list of ideas but I’m trying to encourage speakers and not constrain them. Given the breadth of available topics in the .NET eco system they’re admittedly going to be all over the place.

• Generally it seemed we managed to have a good balance between vCurrent and vNext tech.
• Scheduling could always be improved (how sessions are arranged in tracks, and how levels are distributed across timeslots)

How was the length of the sessions? 7.31/9
I’m honestly surprised here, I expected to get dinged pretty good on this one. It’s all my decision and I really didn’t want to turn away any speakers, and I didn’t.

• Most, obviously, thought the sessions were fine.
• The louder complainants that it was too short.
• No one thought they were too long.

How was the format of the event? More coding, more powerpoints? 7.8/9
I guess this question wasn’t fair, or clear enough to answer on a simple 1-9 scale with comments. I was more just looking for feedback as I’d like more code-centric events.

How was the food? 7.45/9
It was Memorial Day weekend, we had 230 people registered, 150 show up, and 45 pizzas. Somehow, 45 pizzas disappeared in under 2 minutes. Maybe everyone was getting even for not being given breakfast. Seriously, the gall of these Free Event Organizers! Most people were pleased, except the few that didn’t get any pizza.

It’s really annoying to see people grab 4 or 5 pieces before the rest of the line makes it through. What can we do? Serve pizza instead of expect people to just take some and come back around for more if it’s left?

Is catered breakfast and network access worth a small registration fee? 4.81/9
I’ll take this as no. One of the bigger drawbacks about the space is network access, which the attendees don’t have. The other is just the fact that we’re starting to outgrow it. But having it at Microsoft, for free, keeps us able to do these events often. Other area CodeCamps had to drop down to only 1 event this year because they have to pay to rent space.

How well was the event organized? 8.14/9
Well, we did good here.

How was the length of lunch? 6.95/9
I had a couple comments during the day so I included this question. A CodeCamp or two ago, we had an ask the experts session at lunch, and it went really well. We’ll have to bring that back (or lightening talks). This time we wasted what could have been session time. There was some networking but most of the comments seemed to think it was long.

Would you ever consider speaking during a full session? 5.87/9
Some people just don’t want to speak, I know. I didn’t tell the speakers to skip this question either, so they’re obviously skewing the results.

I would like to see more people speak, more new people, and hopefully this is an indication that we might have some of them ready.

Would you ever consider speaking during a lightning talk (5-10 minutes) 5.82/9
Less people, maybe one less, was actually less inclined to speak during a lightning session than a full session. I don’t get it. I really don’t know what the aversion to lightning talks is in the .NET community.

Any ideas?

How interested are you in attending lightning talks? 6.67/9
Seems like there is at least an audience for this type of thing, assuming we can get some of the ( (5.82/9) * 63 ) respondees to participate.

Next Time

• We’ll go back to 75 minute sessions.
• We’ll schedule it around holidays (my bad)
• We’ll do “Ask the Experts” and/or “Lightning Talks”
• We’ll try harder to get coffee in the morning
• We’ll order a bunch more pizza or guilt people into taking 2 slices to start

Open Invitation
If you’re one of the people that think we did a horrible job, or should have provided breakfast, please join the team. Help make it better. Help us find vendors to give us money to buy coffee. Help us find alternative space with net access. Help figure out how to deal with pizza.

Of course we’d love to have you help even if you thought we did a great job.

Either way, get in touch with me.

The first few days I’d add a tag, and at the top of the hour after the fetch had run I’d see new links for that tag, hot and popular. Then all I’d see was hot and popular.

The delicious algorithms for hot and popular are proprietary (read: smoke and mirrors). I thought I was missing something so I added a bunch of changes to pull the tag feed directly. Then I needed to make another call for each link to see how many times it was bookmarked. I had to add a threshold because I was seeing anywhere from single digits to almost 65,000. So I added a threshold (first 50, then 500) and made sure it was used when showing links on the web. Then I had to deal with freshness, I didn’t want to work on updating the 50,000 links I’d pulled down if they were old.

All told I’ve spent a week on that, week and a half or so when you consider the time I was paired as well. Not 60 hours, but time where I’m not doing anything else. Finally, trying to tweak it one more time this morning, because it looked like dupes were coming back, a lot after marking as read, it seemed like “I’m trying to implement my own delicious popular algorithm”.

Ugh. So I started disabling that code and updating specs to go back to where it was before. I could have reverted but in the mean time I added an admin dashboard to help–among other things–debug my filtering.

I’m going to give it a week or so and not touch it. See if things level out, if there really aren’t that many links becoming popular for individual tags.

I have enough to keep me busy. Beta invitations, coupons and making sure express checkout always runs and passes in my cucumber tests (for a different project).

The lesson for me, I hope, is “let the system return to equilibrium before trying to make adjustments”. Only make adjustments based on customer needs, and I’m not always the best customer.

Pushed the new code with logging and popular almost never changed. So I added hot to get a bit more discovery. They’re both proprietary algorithms so there’s no way for me to guess what it takes to make a bookmark popular.

So the latest push of URLAgg now pulls in recent links for your tags. To weed out the noise I’ve arbitrarily set a filter threshold requiring a link to have been bookmarked at least 50 times before being shown on URLAgg. I’m storing the bookmark count, so I can change the filter later if it turns out to be too noisy or too quiet.

There was a bit of time after the transition where all previously seen links didn’t have bookmark counts so we needed to gradually retrofit their counts. But, being a good API user you’re only supposed to call URLINFO no faster than 1 time a second. This means running the updates in batches, sleeping a second between links, and sleeping again (longer) between batch runs. The sleep between batch runs is more for the benefit of URLAgg’s server.

Everything should be updated now, or close. I think the next big thing is going to be marking read by Tag and not by all (though there will probably still be a convenience link that will do it for all of them).

A few things to help make Saturday as enjoyable as possible for everyone involved.

Details:

• Schedule
• Session abstracts
• Location
• Lunch will be provided (Pizza and Drink). Breakfast will not, you’re on your own for carbs and caffeine in the morning.

• Magic Tags: like magic numbers, but for tags, these mean something different to URLAgg than every other tag.
• All tracked tags: your tags, so you can navigate through them even when you don’t have an unread links.
• URLAgger trackings: These are recently links that someone on URLAgg started tracking (it might even be you). Just one more discoverability bit.

State List is an easy example, it was in Rails, got moved out of rails along with Country list, which I also needed for something else. The point is, if you need something in the ruby or rails ecosystem you can probably find it:

• Want to parse JSON (gem search -r json => > 12 gems)
• Want to make a twitter bot (wc -l says gem search -r twitter returned 59 gems)
• Want to parse HTML use hpricot
• Want to parse HTML that’s behind a form, drive the form with mechanize then parse with hpricot
• etc

That works fairly well for code, libraries, gems, etc. Though it’s not as easy to search github for C# or a few other terms because they do a fuzzy search (which probably works better for most things) and I’ve not been able to crack the nut on multi-term search in github:

What happens if you don’t know you need it, or that it even exists, or what to search for?

I’m hoping “source tags” will help with that. Source tags are the folksonomy applied to a given link from the community of users that bookmarked the link. Simply their other tags applied to that link.
So a link to Balsamiq Mockups might show up in URLAgg because I’m tracking usability but it was also tagged by people who bookmarked the link in: development, gui, prototype, ui, design, webdesign.

This lets me click through to the URLAgg tracker for any of those tags and start tracking them if I wanted. This is useful if you’re trying to cover an area, say User Experience. You might be tracking UX and usability and then discover for some interesting links (to you) other people are also tagging it accessibility, userinterface and webdesign. Now you can start tracking those tags, if you want.

I get emails from cron letting me know how things went, and started noticing a few had bombed out with an error message like this:

rake aborted!
Mysql::Error: Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT)
and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '=':
SELECT * FROM `source_tags` WHERE (`source_tags`.`name` = 'フリーソフト') LIMIT 1

See full trace by running task with --trace)
(in /var/www/apps/urlagg/releases/20090510100125)

I had UTF8 specified as my encoding in database.yml and thought that would have been good enough. Obviously it wasn’t.

You see, MySQL can have different charsets for the database, tables and even columns within the tables as well as the connection.

To find out what charsets you have defined you can do this:

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘character_set%’;
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘collation%’;

Mine was a mix of latin and utf8. I wanted UTF8 across the board so I wrote up a ruby shell script to take care of the problem for me:

I’m still looking for a way to set my charset to UTF8 in one of my config files (/etc/my.cnf or something) so that it’s defaulted everywhere to UTF8. If you’re aware of how to do that let me know. In the mean time, hopefully this saves you some headaches.

[edit] Formatting of the

 and gist code blocks aren't very nice. I'd love to be able to edit formatted code snippets through Blogo and not mess with this, but atm I can't. Hopefully soon.

  

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		Wed, 13 May 2009 01:26:38 +0000
		jeff
				
		
		
		

		http://blog.thequeue.net/urlagg-hot-and-popular/
		
			If you’re using URLAgg you might have noticed something new pop up today, a tag called hot. Hot is the second, and most recent, of two automatically tracked tag that all users get. The first is popular. These have two different, and unique, meanings within URLAgg:

hot are the links that show up on the front page of delicious.com. They are displayed based on some propriertary algorithm. I had a couple buddies that went through “nuke school” in the Navy and they would call it PFM – Pure F#%ing Magic. Works for me, some how they’re “hot” and fresh and popular, all wrapped in to one.
popular links are also determined by a PFM algorithm. It has something to do with bookmarked links within a timeframe. So delicious.com/popular/ruby won’t necessarily show the most popular links overall as seen in delicious.com/tag/ruby. 
Like I said, PFM. I wanted to see both and figured everyone else would too. All new accounts will automatically be following popular and hot. Anyone, including legacy accounts, can just go to the tag page for hot or popular and stop following it, if you like.
The last couple days it looked like only popular links were getting updated (those from the tag “popular” and no others). Seems I had a collation/charset problem in mysql. I have that fixed and I’ll write that up tomorrow. In the mean time I’m going to go down the rabbit hole and see if I can get Blogo to dump syntax highlighted comments into my posts.




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		Sat, 02 May 2009 19:56:23 +0000
		jeff
				
		
		
		
		
		

		http://blog.thequeue.net/urlagg-updates/
		
			I just finished pushing out another release of URLAgg. Here’s a quick summary of what’s new.

Tracked Tags:
Your main tracked tags page looks more like the summary feed for all your tags. It’s been moved to a single column display to more appropriately use the space on the screen (instead of having empty tags next to a tag like “popular” with loads of links and seeing lots of white space in two columns). Tags are also sorted alphabetically and tags without any new links are hidden.
Top Tags:
I’ve added Top Tags as a way for users that haven’t seen the site to get an idea of what I’m talking about. I show the top 9 tracked tags (3×3 grid) and the most recent 10 links for each tag.
Mark as read:
You’ll notice on your tracked tags page there’s a new link under the add tag box to “Mark all read”. Instead of marking them all automatically read based on the last time you viewed your tracked tags we let you decide when they’re read. We’ve limited the number of new links in this display as well, but you can always click through to the tag itself to see all links.
Writing this I realize I need to update some content on the site itself to talk about the new items, but that’s for later. For now, the tests are green, the site is deployed and I’m going to spend some time with the fam.


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