Version 3.3.0

[Picky]

Hi Pickynauts!

Since the number of mails we get has now spiked to around 5 per day, with 3 or so being the norm, we've decided to revive this mailing list.

A lot has happened in the last few months!

Picky 3.0.0 has arrived: http://florianhanke.com/blog/2011/08/15/picky-30-its-all-ruby-part-1.html, also http://florianhanke.com/blog/2011/08/23/migrating-to-picky-30.html and http://florianhanke.com/blog/2011/08/26/migrating-to-picky-31.html (See the comments for additional remarks and corrections, thanks Simon Krollpfeifer!).

Then we celebrated Picky's first birthday: http://florianhanke.com/blog/2011/08/16/picky-happy-1st-birthday.html. Let's just say that we will never drink Sochu again.

A few inspirational Blogposts:

How to restrict the result set for your users, http://florianhanke.com/blog/2011/08/31/picky-case-study-restricting-results.html.

Showing ads that are location based: http://florianhanke.com/blog/2011/09/01/picky-case-study-location-based-ads.html.

How to use a Drb server instead of Sinatra: http://florianhanke.com/blog/2011/09/01/picky-case-study-not-singing-in-the-rain.html.

How to make Picky more relaxed (and not using a "relaxative"): http://florianhanke.com/blog/2011/09/05/picky-ignoring-unassigned-tokens.html.

Then, Picky discovered Twitter! He's using it mainly to fill your timelines ;) But seriously, for update announcements etc. See here: http://florianhanke.com/blog/2011/10/23/twitter.html

We decided that Picky could just live in a small script (octopuses can squeeze into almost anything. No bones, you see?): http://florianhanke.com/blog/2011/10/26/search-engine-in-a-script.html.

The current version is 3.3.0. The last few updates (also see http://github.com/floere/picky/blob/master/history.textile) include an experimental version of realtime indexes, and many updates to make Picky much, much leaner, meaner, fighting machin-er. Niko Dittmann shared a funky twitter search which uses the new realtime index. Have a look http://twitter.com/#!/ende42/status/130610300167782401.

Where do we go from here?

Other search engines are a bit like a locked down version of rails. A bit on the heavy side, big, and not too flexible. We strife to be on the Sinatra side: Small, flexible, Ruby.

This is still the focus and where we want to go.

However, currently we would like to make everything still more flexible and add/improve the nice tools that surround Picky, like Clam, Suckerfish, and so on.

In the end, it works like this: User Driven Development meets Dictator Driven Development. Just tell us here what you want and we'll say no. Uh, I mean, yes. Maybe. In a good way.

Yes yes, soo much stuff has been going on. What is this "sleep" that you speak of? ;)

Hearty waving of tentacles!

   Picky, @picky_rb, collaborators (and Florian, @hanke)