for i in infinity

JobMigo.com, inspired from the ‘#rtjobs’ movement, is an application created to help people find and sort jobs using twitter. So what does Twitter have to do with finding a job? Twitter has also become a place where users have begun to post listings for job openings. There are many ways in which this is done in the “Twitterverse”. Some users are actually job portals, “tweeting” posts from their website for the benefit of anyone who is receiving the tweets.

One of these tags was especially of interest. #RTJOBS was a tag that was created especially for the ‘re-tweeting’ of posted jobs. This tag essentially solved the third reason for overload by allowing users to stay current by re-tweeting posts that were still relevant, and popular on Twitter. By tracking these posts we are also assuming that the community has some kind of valuable information to add relating to importance or relevance of the post simply by the action of tweeting that post.

There are plenty of search tools available to search for job related keywords in tweets. JobMigo doesn’t try to index all job related information on web, instead it tries to figure out which job posts are genuine and of real interest to people. Users can see which job post (posted url) was ‘the most discussed’ or ’shared’ among twitter users within a given time frame. Additionally, JobMigo enables users to search by date, locations and job types. It has some pretty smart logic to bookmark the final urls discussed in tweets along with a tagging of places (state, country) and job types.

JobMigo is an example for application of the text filtering and information processing tool, which is being developed right now. I’ll post more about the tool and its evolution soon.

Url: http://jobmigo.com
Follow Jobmigo on twitter: http://twitter.com/jobmigo

Team behind JobMigo.com: Anup Narkhede, Ebru Kivanc and Ranmini Perera.

Checking for non-existing images and replacing them by placeholders is simple when the images are handled on server (db/filestore). However, for externally linked images, we can do something like this using JQuery:

This script will replace the broken image urls with ‘/images/noimage.jpg’.

I ran into a requirement to create thumbs of all images in my content folder. This shell script can be used to create thumbs of all images or for mass conversion of file formats. The script scans for images with the specified format in all subdirectories and puts the processed file in same path.

The constants can be modified to define the source directory, resolution, source and target filetypes. You need to have ImageMagick installed and configured to get this script working.

The script will create thumbs for each image file in same directory with ‘.thumb’ before the extension.
For ex: my_cool_pic.jpg will have a thumbnail named as my_cool_pic.thumb.png.

Here are the steps to set up a Google CSE for your rails application. In order to use the xml api, first of all you need to have a business account. You can get the xml query format url or more precisely the cx parameter (unique ID of the CSE) from the control panel.

Setup:

Identify your resource to be searched with the help of url patterns. For ex, if the application is RESTful, it is easy to index something like http://someshop.com/products. Configure your CSE for the above url pattern so that http://someshop.com/products/1, http://someshop.com/products/2.. etc get indexed by the search engine.

Code:

The GoogleSearch class sends a GET request to fetch the results xml, which is parsed using the Hpricot parser.

Output:

Now you could get the urls of search results as an array. Likewise, you can fetch other parameters from resultant xml by referring the this doc..

Recently I worked on a Mass Mailing system for a Rails application using ar_mailer. This tutorial is just an effort to consolidate tips needed to get the mailing system ready and save time on some commonly known problems.
I wanted to implement this for a newsletter application, where a mail needs to be sent to hundreds of recipients for delivery. One of the good choice is to store these mails in a database queue and allow a background process ‘ar_sendmail’ to deliver them one by one.

1. Install ARMailer

Follow this tutorial : http://blog.segment7.net/articles/2006/08/15/ar_mailer.

One of the commonly faced error:

Solution:
Verify that Email model, migration and emails table are created and configured properly.

2. Configuration

Add following lines in environment.rb file

3. Create Mailers

I wanted to have two type of Mailers, one for immediate delivery (alert messages, signup notifications etc) and other for batch delivery (newsletters for mass mailing, which are scheduled to deliver on a particular time). QuickMailer class is an Actionmailer for instant delivery using smtp, and BatchMailer uses ar_mailer to queue the mails in database for delivery using ar_sendmail process.

Note the statement ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp at the top, which forces UserMailer to send mail using smtp directly instead of calling ARMailer’s perform_delivery_activerecord(mail).

4. Using Gmail SMTP server

I have used local smtp server to send mails, to avoid authentication for each call and save time. However here are the steps to configure Gmail smtp server.
http://ruby.dzone.com/news/rails-gmail-simple-email-deliv

Install plugin action_mailer_tls from https://openrain.com/opensource/public/rails/plugins/action_mailer_tls

Configure your environment.rb

5. Test