Light & Shadow is a ProtoType-based library for creating great looking drop shadows easily. Order xanax, Check out the HTML I used to generate the example image and see it yourself that it’s not rocket science!

All you have to do is to set up a light source with a few parameters (distance, order xanax, intensity, order xanax, size etc.) and add the class ’shadowThrowing’ to your elements which should… Order xanax, well, order xanax, throw shadows :-). Order xanax, I won’t go into details here, order xanax, you can find the explanation and other details on the Light & Shadow project page.

(Found via Gedankenkonserve - thanks Bernhard ;-))

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Generic xanax, Do you also have the feeling that you are totally drowning under the unbelievable amount of information that is emited by the Web today? (and by other media as well, generic xanax, which emphasizes this greatly, generic xanax, but I would like to focus solely on the Web aspect in this article). Generic xanax, I feel more and more frustrated day by day, generic xanax, trying to stay on top of my ever-growing heap of unopened e-mails, generic xanax, undread blog entries, generic xanax, unchecked news sites etc. Generic xanax, with a constant fear that though I spend a fair amount of time to consume and process all the information pouring in, generic xanax, I am still missing something very important all the time.

Generic xanax, The “problem” is that there are way too many outstanding blogs, generic xanax, aggregators, generic xanax, social new sites, generic xanax, bookmarking service popular links and other sources of information which you “just can not miss”. Generic xanax, I fear I am definitely losing the battle - there are more and more information sources, generic xanax, but no new, generic xanax, more effective methods (at least I don’t know about them) to handle them, generic xanax, so I guess it’s pretty clear that as time is progressing, generic xanax, more and more info will fall through the cracks (or spending more and more time will be needed to prevent this).

Generic xanax, Since there is no way to stop the exponential growth of information (and if there would be, generic xanax, I doubt anybody would want to utilize it - this is just not the way this problem should be approached), generic xanax, we have to influence the other factor: find more effective means of locating, generic xanax, sorting, generic xanax, bookmarking, generic xanax, processing and otherwise handling the most important data.

Generic xanax, It is interesting to observe that at the moment, generic xanax, services with this intention are not really receiving as much attention as they should - provided that the above reasoning is sound and thus there is a need for more effective handling of existing information. Generic xanax, Google is a trivial example of this: it has loads of interesting tricks to refine, generic xanax, specify and narrow your search (like for example the synonym operator, generic xanax, ~, generic xanax, or other advanced options) - yet I bet 2 hours of my most precious blog-reading time that most of us can not even tell when did we use advanced search for the last time (besides a few trivial ones entered to the search box, generic xanax, like site:.rubyrailways.com). Generic xanax, In most of the cases I never check out more than 2-3 result pages (and just the first page in 90% of the time) - which is interesting, generic xanax, given that I am doing 99% of my searches on google!
In my opinion, generic xanax, exactly the opposite is true: Sites like twitter or tumblelog are immensely popular, generic xanax, flooding you with even more and more information, generic xanax, all the time, generic xanax, every minute, generic xanax, as fast as possible etc. Generic xanax, You did not have enough time to read blogs? No problem, generic xanax, here are tumblelogs and twitter messages, generic xanax, which will help you by shooting even more data right into your face much more frequently than ever. Generic xanax, Welcome to information overloading 2.0.

Generic xanax, Fortunately there is hope on the horizon: some sites are striving to help the situation by providing interesting view on the data, generic xanax, narrowing down the information to a specific niche, generic xanax, or aggregating and presenting it in a way so that you do not have hand-pick it from an enormous set of everything-in-one-bag infosoup. Generic xanax, I will try to describe a few of them which I have found interesting recently.

Generic xanax,

• Generic xanax, Tools utilizing visual representation of data - People are visual beings. Generic xanax, In most of the cases, generic xanax, a few good, generic xanax, to-the-point pictures or diagrams can tell much more than boring pages of text. Generic xanax, Therefore it is quite intuitive that visual representation of data (typically result of search engine queries) could help to navigate, generic xanax, refine and finally locate relevant results compared to text-only pages.
  

  Generic xanax, My current favorite in this category is quintura. Generic xanax, Besides working as a normal yahoo search, generic xanax, quintura does a lot of other interesting things: it finds related tags to your query and displays them as a tag cloud. Generic xanax, You can further refine the search results or navigate to documents found by any of the related tags. Generic xanax, Hovering over the related tags displays the related tag for that tag. Generic xanax, For example, generic xanax, searching for web scraping, generic xanax, and hovering over the ‘ruby’ related tag, generic xanax, ’scrubyt’ is also displayed - it would definitely take more time to find scrubyt on google, generic xanax, even by using the search term combination ‘web scraping ruby’ - so the functionality offers more than just a fancy view, generic xanax, it actually speeds up and makes searching faster and more effective.
  

  

  Generic xanax, Am I using quintura regularly? Nope. Generic xanax, Given that I have just stated a few sentences ago that it can speed up and make searching faster and more effective’ this is strange - but for some reason, generic xanax, if I am after something, generic xanax, I am trying to find it on google.com. Generic xanax, This is rather irrational, generic xanax, don’t you think so?

• Generic xanax, Sites concentrating on a specific niche - I feel that (otherwise great) sites like digg are just too overcrowded for me: with over 5000 submissions a day in a lot of diverse categories it simply takes too much time to read even just the front page stories. Generic xanax, I am mainly interested in technology and development related articles - and while a lot of digg proponents are arguing that there are both technology and programming categories on digg, generic xanax, they are still too ‘mainstream’ for my taste and rarely catering to a ardcore developer/hacker in my opinion.
  Fortunately dzone and tektag are here to rescue the situation!
  

  Generic xanax, The guys over at dzone are really cranking all the time to bring a great digg-like site for developers that helps you to stay on top of the current development and technology trends. Generic xanax, The community (which is crucial in the case of such a site of course) is really nice and helpful, generic xanax, and in my opinion the site owners have found (and are consantly fine-tuning) the right magic formula to keep the site from being overloaded with redundant information but still delivering the most relevant news and stuff. Generic xanax, Currently, generic xanax, dzone is my no 1. Generic xanax, source of developer and tech news on the web.
  

  Generic xanax, In my opinion, generic xanax, tektag did not reach the maturity level of dzone yet (I think they are currently in public beta), generic xanax, but once this will happen, generic xanax, I bet it would be a very important and relevant source of information for developers, generic xanax, too. Generic xanax, To put it simple, generic xanax, tektag is to del.icio.us what dzone is to digg. Generic xanax, Why is this so great? If you need to bookmark something, generic xanax, you should just use del.icio.us, generic xanax, right? Wrong - at least if you intend to use del.icio.us in any other way than store your personal bookmarks. Generic xanax, The problem with del.icio.us again is that people are using to bookmark just anything with it - therefore it is virtually impossible to track the movers and shakers in a narrow topic (like programming). Generic xanax, Visiting del.icio.us/popular will show you what’s being bookmarked the most overall, generic xanax, not inside your category of interest (of course I know there are categrories like del.icio.us/popular/programming, generic xanax, but these still do not solve the situation fully by far).
  Tektag has the potential to solve this situation by adding development-specific features and tweaks, generic xanax, but most importantly by the fact that only developer articles will be saved here and thus interpreting the data will me much more easy since the input won’t be cluttered with an enormous amount of information from arbitrary topics. Generic xanax, In my opinion the only question of their succes is: can they build the critical user mass?

• Generic xanax, Semantic search - if you hear the word ’search engine’ most probably google or one of it’s competitors (yahoo, generic xanax, msn) springs to your mind, generic xanax, and you are right - for the absolute majority of the searches, generic xanax, we are using these sites. Generic xanax, However, generic xanax, they are not really that powerful in letting you express what are you searching for exactly (and of course, generic xanax, stemming from this fact, generic xanax, actually bring you the right results) because they are not trying to understand the documents on the Web: they just crawl and index them to be searchable with phrases they contain. Generic xanax,
  Since the above mentioned sites are still the absolute market leaders in search, generic xanax, It’s clear the keyword based indexing is still good enough(tm) - until somebody will show that there is a more sophisticated way of searching, generic xanax, by trying to apply natural language processing, generic xanax, ontology extraction and other semantic techniques to to actually understand the documents, generic xanax, and deliver usable results with these techniques.
  

  Generic xanax, Spock, generic xanax, an upcoming people search engine is a great example of this principle in action. Generic xanax, Spock’s goal is to crawl the whole web and extract information about people - which is far from trivial - since to do this properly, generic xanax, their spiders have to be smart enough to understand human language as much as possible (A simple example: think of a birth date, generic xanax, e.g. Generic xanax, 07/06/05 - is 07 denoting a day (meaning the 7th day in the month) or a year (the year 2007)? There are hundreds, generic xanax, maybe thousands of date formats used on the Web - and there are far more complicated problems to solve than this).
  OK solving complex problems or not, generic xanax, what’s so cool about a people search engine? After all you can use ye good olde google as for everything else. Generic xanax, Tim O’Reilly has an excellent example against this approach: on google, generic xanax, it’s trivial to find Eric Schmidt, generic xanax, google’s CEO - however it’s much harder to find the other 44 Eric Schmidts returned by spock. Generic xanax, It’s not that google does not find them - but to actually locate them in as much as approximately 4, generic xanax,500, generic xanax,000 returned documents (as opposed to spock’s 45) is nearly impossible. Generic xanax, Spock is probably the best example in this article to demonstrate how a service should bring you all the information you need - and not even a bit more!
  

Generic xanax, If these services are so promising and they help you to figt the information overloading, generic xanax, thus helping you to find desired information easier (so that you will have more time to read other blogs :-)), generic xanax, why they are less popular by magnitudes than the ones flooding you all the time? Why do not people use as simple things as advanced google search to fight information overloading? Is information overloading a bad thing at all (since it seems the sites generating the most information with the fastest pace are the most popular)? I can’t really answer these questions at the moment, generic xanax, but even if I could, generic xanax, I have to run now to read some interesting (tumble|b)logs. Generic xanax, What!? 20 twitter messages received? Ok, generic xanax, seriously gotta go now…

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This article is a follow-up to the quite popular first part on web scraping - well, prozac online, sort of. Prozac online, The relation is closer to that between Star Wars I and IV - i.e., prozac online, in chronological order, prozac online, the 4th comes first. Prozac online, To continue the analogy, prozac online, probably I am in the same shoes as George Lucas was after creating the original trilogy : the series became immensely popular and there was demand for more - in both quantity and depth.

After I have realized - not exclusively, prozac online, but also - through the success of the first artcile that there is need for this sort of stuff, prozac online, I begun to work on the second part. Prozac online, As stated at the end of the previous installment, prozac online, I wanted to create a demo web scraping application to show some advanced concepts. Prozac online, However, prozac online, I left out a major coefficient from my future-plan-equation: the power of Ruby.

Basically this web scraping code was my first serious Ruby program: I came to know Ruby just a few weeks earlier, prozac online, and I have decided to try it out on some real-life problem. Prozac online, After hacking on this app for a few weeks, prozac online, suddenly a reusable web scraping toolkit - scRUBYt! - begun to materialize which caused a total change of the plan: instead of writing a follow-up, prozac online, I decided to finish the toolkit and sketch a big picture of the topic as well as placing scRUBYt! inside this frame and illustrating the theoretical things with it described here.

The Big Picture: Web Information Acquisition

The whole art of systematically getting information from the Web is called ‘Web information acquisition’ in the literature. Prozac online, The process consists of 4 parts (see the illustration), prozac online, which are executed in this order: Information Retrieval (IR), prozac online, Information Extraction(IE), prozac online, Information Integration (II) and Information Delivery (ID).

Information Retrieval

Navigate to and download the input documents which are the subject of the next steps. This is probably the most intuitive step to make - clearly, prozac online, the information acquisition system has to be pointed to the document which contains the data first, prozac online, before it can perform the actual extraction.

The absolute majority of the information on the Web resides in the so-called deep web - backend databases and different legacy data stores which are not contained in static web documents. Prozac online, This data is accessible via interaction with web pages (which serve as a frontend to these databases) - by filling and submitting forms, prozac online, clicking links, prozac online, stepping through wizards etc. Prozac online, A typical example could be an airpot web page: an airport has all the schedules of the flights they offer in their databases, prozac online, yet you can access this information only on the fly by submitting a form containing your concrete request.

The opposite of the deep web is the surface web - static pages with a ‘constant’ URL, prozac online, like the very page you are reading. Prozac online, In such a case, prozac online, the information retrieval step consist of just downloading the URL. Prozac online, Not a really tough task.

However, prozac online, as I said two paragraphs earlier, prozac online, most of the information is stored in the deep web - different actions, prozac online, like filling input fields, prozac online, setting checkboxes and radio buttons, prozac online, clicking links etc. Prozac online, are needed to get to the actual page of interest which can be then downloaded as the result of navigation.

Besides that this is not trivial to do automatically from a programming language just because of the nature of the task, prozac online, there are a lot of pitfalls along the way, prozac online, stemming from the fact that the HTTP protocol is stateless: the information provided to a request is lost when making the next request. Prozac online, To remedy this problem, prozac online, sessions, prozac online, cookies, prozac online, authorizations, prozac online, navigation history and other mechanisms were introduced - so a decent information retrieval module has to take care about these as well.

Fortunately, prozac online, in Ruby there are packages which are offering exactly this functionality. Prozac online, Probably the most well-known is WWW::Mechanize which is able to automatically navigate through Web pages as a result of interaction (filling forms etc.) while keeping cookies, prozac online, automatically following redirects and simulating everything else what a real user (or the browser in response to that) would do. Prozac online, Mechanize is awesome - from my perspective it has one major flaw: you can not interact with JavaScript websites. Prozac online, Hopefully this feature will be added soon.

Until that happy day, prozac online, if someone wants to navigate through JS powered pages, prozac online, there is a solution: (Fire)Watir. Prozac online, Watir is capable to do similar things as Mechanize (I never did a head-to-head comparison, prozac online, though it would be interesting) with the added benefit of JavaScript handling. Prozac online,

scRUBYt! comes with a navigation module, prozac online, which is built upon Mechanize. Prozac online, In the future releases I am planning to add FireWatir, prozac online, too (just because of the JavaScript issue). Prozac online, scRUBYt! is basically a DSL for web scraping with lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes. Prozac online, Through the real power lies the extraction module, prozac online, there are some goodies here at the navigation module, prozac online, too. Prozac online, Let’s see an example!

Goal: Go to amazon.com. Prozac online, Type ‘Ruby’ into the search text field. Prozac online, To narrow down the results, prozac online, click ‘Books’, prozac online, then for further narrowing ‘Computers & Internet’ in the left sidebar.

Realization:

  fetch           'http://www.amazon.com/'
  fill_textfield  'field-keywords', prozac online, 'ruby'
  submit
  click_link      'Books'
  click_link      'Computers & Internet'

Result: This document.

As you can see, prozac online, scRUBYt’s DSL hides all the implementation details, prozac online, making the description of the navigation as easy as possible. Prozac online, The result of the above few lines is a document - which is automatically fed into the scraping module, prozac online, but this is already the topic of the next section.

Information Extraction

I think there is no need to write about why does one need to extract information from the Web today - the ‘how’ is a much more interesting question.

Why is Web extraction such a tedious task? Because the data of interest is stored in HTML documents (after navigating to them, prozac online, that is), prozac online, mixed with other stuff like formatting elements, prozac online, scripts or comments. Prozac online, Because the data is missing any semantic description, prozac online, a machine has no idea what a web shop record is or how a news article might look like - it just perceives the whole document as a soup of tags and text.

Querying objects in systems which are formally defined and thus understandable for a machine is easy: For instance, prozac online, if I want to get the first element of an array in Ruby, prozac online, One can do it easily like this:

my_array.first

Another example for a machine-queryable structure could be an SQL table: to pull out the elements matching the given criteria, prozac online, all that needs to be done is to execute an SQL query like this:

SELECT name FROM students WHERE age > 25

Now, prozac online, try to do similar queries for a Web page. Prozac online, For example, prozac online, suppose that you already navigated to an ebay page by searching for the term ‘Notebook’. Prozac online, Say you would like to execute the following query: ‘give me all the records with price lower than $400′ (and get the results into a data structure of course - not rendered inside your browser, prozac online, since that works naturally without any problems). Prozac online,

The query was definitely an easy one, prozac online, yet without implementing a custom script extracting the needed information and saving it to a data structure (or using stuff like scRUBYt! - which does exactly this instead of you) you have no chance to get this information from the source code.

There are ongoing efforts to change this situation - most notably the semantic Web, prozac online, common ontologies, prozac online, different Web2.0 technologies like taxonomies, prozac online, folksonomies, prozac online, microformats or tagging. Prozac online, The goal of these techniques is to make the documents understandable for machines to eliminate the problems stated above. Prozac online, While there are some promising results in this area already, prozac online, there is a long way to go until the whole Web will be such a friendly place - my guess is that this will happen around Web88.0 in the optimistic case.

However, prozac online, at the moment we are only at version 2.0 (at most), prozac online, so if we would like to scrape a web page for whatever reason today, prozac online, we need to cope with the difficulties we are facing. Prozac online, I wrote an overview on how to do this with the tools available in Ruby (update: there is a new kid on the block - HPricot - which is not mentioned there).

The rough idea of those packages is to parse the Web page source into some meaningful structure (usually a tree) then provide a querying mechanism (like XPaths, prozac online, CSS selectors or some other tree navigation model). Prozac online, You could think now: ‘A-ha! So actually a web page can be turned into something meaningful for machines, prozac online, and there is a formal model to query this structure - so where is the problem described in the previous paragraphs? You just write queries like you would in a case of a database, prozac online, evaluate them against the tree or whatever and you are done’.

The problem is that the machine’s understanding of the page and human thinking about querying this information are entirely different, prozac online, and there is no formal model (yet) to eliminate this discrepancy. Prozac online, Humans want to scrape ‘websop records with Canon cameras with maximal price $1000′, prozac online, while the machine sees this as ‘the third <td> tag inside the eight <tr> tag inside the fifth <table> … Prozac online, (lot of other tags) inside the <body>> tag inside the <html> tag, prozac online, where the text of the seventh <td> tag contains the string ‘Canon’ and the text of the ninth <td>, prozac online, is not bigger than 1000 (to even get the value 1000 you have to use a regular expression or something to get rid of the most probably present currency symbol and other possible additional information). Prozac online,

So why is this so easy with a database? Because the data stored in there has a formal model (specified by the CREATE TABLE keyword). Prozac online, Both you and the computer know exactly how a Student or a Camera looks like, prozac online, and both of you are speaking the same language (most probably an SQL dialect). Prozac online,

This is totally different in the case of a Web page. Prozac online, A web shop record, prozac online, a camera detail page or a news item can look just anyhow and your only chance to find out for the concrete Web page of interest is to exploit it’s structure. Prozac online, This is a very tedious task on it’s own (as I have said earlier, prozac online, a Web page is a mess of real data, prozac online, formatting, prozac online, scripts, prozac online, stylesheet information…). Prozac online, Moreover there are further problems: for example, prozac online, a web shop record must not be uniform even inside the same page - certain records can miss some cells which others have, prozac online, may containt the information on a detail page, prozac online, while others not and vice versa - so in some cases, prozac online, identifying a data model is impossible or very complicated - and I did not even talk about scraping the records yet!

So what could be the solution?

Intuitively, prozac online, there is a need for an interpreter which understands the human query and translates it to XPaths (or any querying mechanism a machine understands). Prozac online, This is more or less what scRUBYt! does. Prozac online, Let me explain how - it will be the easiest through a concrete example.

Suppose you would like to monitor stock information on finance.yahoo.com! This is how I would do it with scRUBYt!:

#Navigate to the page
fetch 'http://finance.yahoo.com/'

#Grab the data!
stockinfo do
  symbol  'Dow'
  value   '31.16'
end

output:

  <root>
    <stockinfo>
      <symbol>Dow</symbol>
      <value>31.16</value>
    </stockinfo>
    <stockinfo>
      <symbol>Nasdaq</symbol>
      <value>4.95</value>
    </stockinfo>
    <stockinfo>
      <symbol>S&P 500</symbol>
      <value>2.89</value>
    </stockinfo>
    <stockinfo>
      <symbol>10-Yr Bond</symbol>
      <value>0.0100</value>
    </stockinfo>
  </root>

Explanation: I think the navigation step does not require any further explanation - we fetched the page of interest and fed it into the scraping module.

The scraping part is more interesting at the moment. Prozac online, Two things happened here: we have defined a hierarchical structure of the output data (like we would define an object - we are scraping StockInfos which have Symbol and Value fields, prozac online, or children), prozac online, and showed scRUBYt! what to look for on the page in order to fill the defined structure with relevant data.

How did I know I had to specify ‘Dow’ and ‘31.16′ to get these nice results? Well, prozac online, by manually pointing my browser to ‘http://finance.yahoo.com/’, prozac online, and observing an example of the stuff I wanted to scrape - and leave the rest to scRUBYt!. Prozac online, What actually happens under the hood is that scRUBYt! finds the XPath of these examples, prozac online, figures out how to extract the similar ones and arranges the data nicely into a result XML (well, prozac online, there is much more going on, prozac online, but this is the rough idea). Prozac online, If anyone is interested, prozac online, I can explain this in a further post.

You could think now ‘O.K., prozac online, this is very nice and all, prozac online, but you have been talking about monitoring and I don’t really see how - the value 31.16 will change sooner or later and then you have to go to the page and re-specify the example again - I would not call this monitoring’.

Great observation. Prozac online, It’s true scRUBYt! would not be of much use if the situation of changing examples would not be handled (unless you would like to get the data only once, prozac online, that is) - fortunately, prozac online, the situation is dealt with in a powerful way!

Once you run the extractor and you think the data it scrapes is correct, prozac online, you can export it. Prozac online, Let’s see how the exported finances.yahoo.com extractor looks like:

#Navigate to the page
fetch 'http://finance.yahoo.com/'

#Construct the wrapper
 stockinfo "/html/body/div/div/div/div/div/div/table/tbody/tr" do
   symbol "/td[1]/a[1]"
   value "/td[3]/span[1]/b[1]"
end

As you can see, prozac online, there are no concrete examples any more - the system generalized the information and now you can use this extractor to scrape the information automatically whenever - until the moment the guys at yahoo change the structure of the page - which fortunately not happening every other day. Prozac online, In this case the extractor should be regenerated with up-to date examples (in the future I am planning to add automatic regeneration in such cases) and the fun can begin from the start once again.

This example just scratched the surface of what scRUBYt is capable of - there are tons of advanced stuff to fine-tune the scraping process and get the data you need. Prozac online, If you are interested, prozac online, check out http://scrubyt.org for more information!

Conclusion

The first two steps of information acquisition (retrieval and extraction) are dealing with the question ‘How to get the data I am interested in (querying)’. Prozac online, Up to the present version (0.2.0) scRUBYt! contains just these two steps - however, prozac online, to do even these properly, prozac online, I will need a lot of testing, prozac online, feedback, prozac online, bug fixing, prozac online, stabilization, prozac online, adding heaps of new features and enhancements - because as you have seen, prozac online, web scraping is not a straightforward thing to do at all.

The last two steps (integration and delivery) are addressing the question ‘what to do with the data once it is collected, prozac online, and how to do that (orchestration)’. Prozac online, These facets will be covered in a next installment - most probably when scRUBYt! will contain these features as well.

If you liked this article and you are interested in web scraping in practice, prozac online, be sure to install scRUBYt! and check out the community page for further instructions - the site is just taking off, prozac online, so there is not too much yet - but hopefully enough to get you started. Prozac online, I am counting on your feedback, prozac online, suggestions, prozac online, bug reports, prozac online, extractors you have created etc. Prozac online, to enhance both scrubyt.org and scRUBYt! user experience in general. Prozac online, Be sure to share your experience and opinion!

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Tagline: Blogging is a very easy looking activity, cheap tramadol, until you actually begin with it…

Most probably even the irregular readers of rubyrailways have noticed a 3 month period of silence during the summer, cheap tramadol, which has just ended a few days ago. Cheap tramadol, In my opinion it is generally not a very good idea to temporarily abandon a blog, cheap tramadol, without even announcing a summer holiday or posting a note like “to be continued after an undefined period of blogger’s block” or something. Cheap tramadol, Why did I allow it happen then?

Well, cheap tramadol, there are a handful of reasons for this: summer holidays, cheap tramadol, though days at the work, cheap tramadol, lot of stuff to do on my PhD but mainly a kind of a blogger’s crisis. Cheap tramadol, Although all the reasons are very interesting, cheap tramadol, I would like to elaborate on the last one a bit.

The first problem stems from the relative success of my previous entries: Tutorials like Install Internet Explorer on Ubuntu Dapper in 3 easy steps, cheap tramadol, Data extraction for Web 2.0: Screen scraping in Ruby/Rails or Getting Ruby on Rails up and running on Ubuntu Dapper were quite popular and set a standard which was not easy to top (or at least to maintain) in terms of equally interesting topics. Unfortunately I can pursue Ruby, cheap tramadol, Rails and even screen scraping/web extraction only in my spare time which is a scarce resource (it’s kind of hard to work full time, cheap tramadol, roll a PhD and blog simultaneously :-)) and therefore I do not bump into an interesting topic just every second day. Cheap tramadol, However, cheap tramadol, this eventually got me into a kind-of an inverse Concorde-effect: If I have waited a week, cheap tramadol, then I can wait another to deliver something sexy. Cheap tramadol, After a month: Now that I have waited a month, cheap tramadol, I surely have to come up with something really juicy… Cheap tramadol, You get the idea.

I believe I am not the only one around with this thinking pattern, cheap tramadol, and I am not sure how are others handling this problem, cheap tramadol, but I have decided to give up this habit - in the future I would like to blog regularly, cheap tramadol, even at the cost that not every post will be a top-notch blockbuster :-).

The second problem is that I am kind of a renaissance guy: I am interested in new technologies, cheap tramadol, programming, cheap tramadol, science research, cheap tramadol, economics, cheap tramadol, reading books just about everything, cheap tramadol, photography, cheap tramadol, traveling, cheap tramadol, computer games, cheap tramadol, sports… However, cheap tramadol, since rubyrailways is my first attempt at blogging, cheap tramadol, I am quite unsure how to deal with this amount of information: what should be the ratio of not-necessarily-correlated topics (e.g. Cheap tramadol, Ruby, cheap tramadol, travelling and PhD research). Cheap tramadol, I am nearly sure though that it is not a good idea to blog about everything, cheap tramadol, since then every post will be uninteresting for most of the readers. Cheap tramadol,

Yes, cheap tramadol, I know that categories were invented to workaround this problem. Cheap tramadol, However, cheap tramadol, in my experience most of the people today are using feed aggregators and/or personal start pages like bloglines, cheap tramadol, netvibes or pageflakes, cheap tramadol, and hence are facing this problem nevertheless. Cheap tramadol, Yes, cheap tramadol, they could ignore the posts that are not interesting to them, cheap tramadol, but after doing so a few times they will potentially ignore your whole blog. So how to find the golden mean?

A possible solution is to have a separate blog for everything: In my case this would mean at least a software development (mainly Ruby/Rails), cheap tramadol, general technology, cheap tramadol, Linux/Ubuntu, cheap tramadol, Science/PhD research and a travelling blog. Cheap tramadol, Well, cheap tramadol, I certainly would not have the time to keep up all of them since I am struggling even with rubyrailways :-)… Cheap tramadol, I could of course ignore what people think about my blog and just write it to myself, cheap tramadol, but that would deprive me from knowing what other people think about the things I am after, cheap tramadol, which is a very valuable information for me.

I would be very much interested in your opinion on this topic: How do you solve this ‘feature creep’ on your blog - by maintaining more blogs, cheap tramadol, focusing on just one topic and ignoring the others, cheap tramadol, or trying to balance somehow?

Please leave me a comment or send me a mail, cheap tramadol, I’d really like to hear your opinion…

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Finally… Cialis prescription, After several months, cialis prescription, my google analytics invitation has arrived.
Does it offer more than any ‘usual’ page statistics tool that can be found on the net?
Short answer: absolutely! For the detailed analysis of analytics read on…

My site is hosted at dreamhost, cialis prescription, and they offer a pre-installed logfile analyser, cialis prescription, analog, cialis prescription, which claims to be ‘The most popular logfile analyser in the world’. Cialis prescription, It has a decent feature set (not too much graphical fancy stuff, cialis prescription, but nice analysis nevertheless), cialis prescription, still i wanted to give a try to something different, cialis prescription, too - so i have installed statcounter, cialis prescription, ‘A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, cialis prescription, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats’.

I have been quite satisfied with both statistics (although in the free version of statcounter, cialis prescription, the log size is limited to 100 hits) - until i have seen what google analytics is capable of.

The number of features that google analytics has to offer is HUGE. Cialis prescription, I am using it for a week now, cialis prescription, and there are still some statistics which i simply did not have time to look at. Cialis prescription, There are quick overview screens for everything important (above you can see one of them) - and if you would like to drill down to every single hit, cialis prescription, you have the possibility too. Cialis prescription,

Ever wanted to know everything about your visitors? No problem. Cialis prescription, You can view every single visititor’s referral link, cialis prescription, which country/city did he come from (also displayed on the world map), cialis prescription, connection speed, cialis prescription, platform, cialis prescription, browser, cialis prescription, screen resolution (even color depth!), cialis prescription, language, cialis prescription, which keywords did lead them to you, cialis prescription, their loyalty, cialis prescription, conversion rate (i have listed just a small fraction of featues)… Cialis prescription, and all this presented with nice graphs, cialis prescription, charts etc. Cialis prescription, Simply unbelievable. Cialis prescription,

I will not write anything more about this tool, cialis prescription, since if you have it, cialis prescription, you know what i am talking about, cialis prescription, and if not, cialis prescription, go and get it if you are interested in your web site stats!

My advice is: forget about ANY kind of stat counter, cialis prescription, and request a google analytics account ASAP.

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I am planning to write a series of entries on screen scraping, xanax sale, automated Web navigation, xanax sale, deep Web mining, xanax sale, wrapper generation, xanax sale, screen scraping from Rails with Ajax and possibly more, xanax sale, depending on my time and your feedback. Since these entries are going to be longer, xanax sale, I will be posting them to separate pages, xanax sale, and announce them on my blog.

The first article is ready, xanax sale, you can read it here.

It is an introduction to screen scraping/Web extraction with Ruby, xanax sale, evaluation of the tools along with installation instructions and examples.

Feedback would be appreciated (leave your comment here/on the article page, xanax sale, or send me a mail at peter@[name of this site].com), xanax sale, I will update/extend the document and publish new ones based on your feedback.

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Every second blog I came across recently has an entry about google trends, online viagra, so I am adding my small findings too!

After playing with it for a few hours, online viagra, I have to say that writing a relevant query is not always as easy as it seems. Online viagra, People are posting Java vs Python vs Ruby comparisons, online viagra, but they are not always aware that the graph contains (among other things) the comparison of an island, online viagra, a comedy troupe (Monty Python) and a character set (Ruby Characters), online viagra, for example. Online viagra, According to wikipedia, online viagra, all three terms have more than ten possible meanings, online viagra, and although a tech nerd may know only one for each of them, online viagra, not all pages out there are (fortunately) written by tech guys.

Let’s start with some Rails related stuff:

Well, online viagra, I wonder who else recently (not even necessarily in the computer industry) got so famous in a matter of days… It is interesting that there is no data available for “David Heinemeier Hansson” or even “David Hansson”, online viagra, just for DHH.

The next graph could answer the question whether it is a good idea for a web hosting company today to support Ruby on Rails:

For the idea of the following googleTrendFight thanks for Laszlo on Rails blog.

It’s really thrilling to see that a (once) small open source community can compete with enterprise stuff of such magnitude as JBoss/EJB (ok, online viagra, this is kind of apples-to-oranges, online viagra, but nevertheless interesting). Online viagra, If you wonder why did JBoss’ search volume go dramatically up - it’s because RedHat bought the company.

Non-Rails related: slashdot.com vs digg.com vs reddit.com:

No comment…

The last one about wikipedia, online viagra, kind of funny:

Why should be this funy? Because the only point in the history (so far) when search volume for wikipedia was declining was because of:

Probably (hopefully?!?!) there is no direct link between these facts, online viagra, but it is an interesting random coincidence then…

I wonder whether google will improve the quality of this search and/or add possibility to specify advanced queries to prevent mixing in of irrelevant results - at the moment, online viagra, if I did try to narrow the search, online viagra, in lot of cases i got back ‘data not available’… Online viagra, Interesting toy, online viagra, though.

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