Startups, some promising ideas #1</h1> <article> <h1>Startups, some promising ideas #1</h1> <p>Dario — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:59:01 +0000</p> <p>Startup world is moving very fast this year and there are some really interesting projects. These are two projects that impressed me over the last months:</p> <ul> <li><span class="emph"><a href="http://www.airbnb.com">AirBnB</a></span>: While this is not a new idea, they give to the social aspect of traveling a relevance.<br /> Basically, the website allows you to rent a room/apartment/house and owners to display their properties and offers.<br /> While competitors require a payment to display your apartment/house on their website, AirBnB gives you full presence and get the 3% of your earnings. This is not cheap, but it feels like it is.<br /> The photography idea is really good, better quality for every announce and the integration with Google Maps is great.<br /> The bad things: the layout is young and fun but it doesn't feel like a serious place where I can find an house to travel to. Announces have a very bad title field, (ab)used by many owners and italian translation is currently terrific, with css issues everywhere. But I suppose these are just small problems for someone who is valued 1 billion dollar.</li> <li><span class="emph"><a href="http://www.foodspotting.com">Foodspotting</a></span>: This is one of my favourite, a simple but great idea coded into a beautiful interface with a mix of additional useful features.<br /> With Foodspotting you can add a food you like into their catalogue, share your opinion, find new foods to try on the map and create food guides. The attention now is not on restaurants, the attention is on foods.<br /> While I think it's not so easy as AirBnB to get money from a project like this, this work is great. They're making a catalogue of foods and people on travel can use their smartphone application to search for places to eat.<br /> Useful and simple.</li> </ul> </article> <article> <h1>The power of Google, basic solutions to improve your search</h1> <p>Dario — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 18:35:32 +0000</p> <p><a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a> is really powerful.<br /> Into the last decade it revolutionizes the way you search for informations with a simple text box. It's easy and anyone can use it with successful results.<br /> Finding what you're searching for with Google is certainly easier if you have experience with the search engine, that kind of experience that let you choose the right words to put into the search box. However this is not trivial and sometimes even an old user could find lot of difficulties, particularly when the information is not so spread.</p> <p>With this post I wanna show you how can you improve your Google usage, some small tips to get the information you want with simple statements.</p> <p>First of all, there are some important rules that you need to know about how Google works:</p> <ul> <li><span class="emph">Search query are not case sensitive</span>: searching for "House" or "house" or "HoUsE" is exactly the same.</li> <li><span class="emph">You can use the wildcard '*'</span>: it substitutes a single word in a search phrase.</li> <li><span class="emph">Google usually ignores stop-words</span>: words like 'the,' 'a,' and 'for' are widely used and Google often ignores them. To force its inclusion you need to append a plus sign before them, without leaving spaces. For example "+the cat" doesn't ignore for sure the word "the". Like plus, there's his opposite, which is minus and you should use it while excluding search terms.</li> <li><span class="emph">Search query is limited to 10 terms</span>: if you put into the search box more than 10 words, Google will ignore the terms after the first ten. There's a small workaround to search for more than ten terms and it consists of substituting some of the common ignored terms, like 'the', 'in', ecc with an asterisk. Google doesn't count the asterisk as a word, so you can search for more terms.</li> <li><span class="emph">Google stems automatically</span>: sometimes Google stems or expand automatically some words when they correspond each other.</li> <li><span class="emph">If you use double quotes nothing will be ignored</span>: using double quotes, for example searching for "the house" forces google to search for all the words included.</li> </ul> <p>To get started with this rules, here are some query examples:</p> <div class="codeblack"><code>the blue house</code></div> <p>searches for "blue house"</p> <div class="codeblack"><code>+the blue house</code></div> <p>searches for "the blue house"</p> <div class="codeblack"><code>the blue house is -not so good</code></div> <p>searches for "blue house is so good" (remember that "the" is often excluded)</p> <div class="codeblack"><code>the * house is good</code></div> <p>searches for "any_word house is good". "any_word" means only one word, no more.</p> <p>These are just some simple examples, but we can do a lot more with Google.<br /> Google provides boolean operators, commonly known as AND, NOT, OR. Examples are in this case better than large explanations:</p> <div class="codeblack"><code>cake AND biscuits</code></div> <p>searches for pages with the word "cake" and the word "biscuits"<br /> The particularity about the AND operator concern the implicity. On Google every query is just a collection of words with the AND operator between them, it doesn't have to be exposed.</p> <div class="codeblack"><code>cake NOT biscuits</code></div> <p>searches for "cake" excluding the results that contains "biscuits"<br /> This is the same of</p> <div class="codeblack"><code>cake -biscuits</code></div> <p>where the minus works exactly like the NOT operator.</p> <div class="codeblack"><code>cake OR biscuits</code></div> <p>instructs Google to search for the word "cake" or the word "buscuits", but not both into the same document.</p> <p>This is pretty simple, now let's face a more complicated example with operators.</p> <div class="codeblack"><code>intext:cake | biscuits intext:nutella | jam</code></div> <p>Google doesn't read this query with algebra rules. This can make the query less readable for a human, but all you need to know is that Google reads it from the left to right.<br /> So the previous query looks for cake or biscuits into the text of the document, and then filter the results looking for nutella or jam.<br /> To make the query readable, it's possibile to use parenthesis:</p> <div class="codeblack"><code>intext:(cake | biscuits) intext:(nutella | jam)</code></div> <p>Another interesting usage I appreciate about Google operators consists of the following example:</p> <div class="codeblack"><code>"# This is the main Apache server configuration file." -"ServerRoot "/etc/apache2""</code></div> <p>This query searches for the Apache configuration file, excluding the ones who has ServerRoot directive set to /etc/apache2, which is the default configuration.</p> <p>Ok, this is enough for now. I'll discuss advanced operators into the next post and security implications into the following.<br /> Have fun.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Drupal 7 Alpha 1 released</h1> <p>Dario — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 02:22:19 +0000</p> <p>Drupal 7 Alpha 1 is now available.</p> <p>I'm working about security to test as much as I can Drupal before the final release. I'm doing something like a penetration testing but it's just an hobby for me, so no professional intentions here!<br /> However I started today and I have already found a small security hole.<br /> It's very very low priority and absolutely not critical, it's more like a bug looking at the location I found it, but it's there and we need to patch it.</p> <p>Progress about this security mission on this blog soon.<br /> Stay tuned.</p> </article> <article> <h1>DrupalCamp at Crema, Italy</h1> <p>Dario — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:55:52 +0000</p> <p>On December 11 2009 I'll wait for you at the first italian DrupalCamp in Crema, Italy. This is the best place to find developers and Drupal addicteds, speak with them and understand how Drupal is awesome.</p> <p>On <a href="http://www.drupalcamp.it">DrupalCamp.it</a> you can find any detail about the event.</p> <p>Register as soon as possible, there're already so many registered people!<br /> DrupalCamp is completely free.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Drupacon Paris, I'm coming</h1> <p>Dario — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:38:21 +0000</p> <p>On tuesday I will move to Paris for Drupalcon. This could be the last Drupalcon before the release of Drupal 7 and I can't wait to listen to Dries new keynote.Looking at this year's sessions list I'm pretty sure I will follow:- State of Drupal - Dries Buytaert- Drupal 7 Status Update and Next Steps - Angela Byron- How to easily set up an intiutive WYSIWYG editor that supports inline image placement using CCK image fields - Jen Lampton- Views 2 for developers - Crell- Geo tools for Drupal - Allie Micka- Rules: How to leverage rule-based automation on your sites! - fagoThis is just the first day of sessions, and I will miss about 15/16 other talks I would like to see.</p> </article> </main></body></html>