Lijeesh Blog

Today I added WPTouch plugin on my Blog, a popular iPhone theme for wordpress. It was just 2 minutes of job to make my site in this amazing theme. Following are some screen captures of my blog in iPhone now.

Sphinx is one of the high performance, free open-source full-text search engine with rich feature list. Recently I was experimenting, on this tool for developing a search platform, for big and complex databases. It is very interesting, and easy to setup a developing environment in Mac OS. Sometimes the compiling using the method specified in the documents of sphinx will not work that easily. I found it is super easy, installation using mac ports. Here is how I done it.

Installing Sphinx using Mac Ports

1. If you don’t have mac-ports installed, Install mac-ports downloading from their site.
2. If you not installed X code tools from Mac OS X, DVD install it – need this for compiling sources in a UNIX development way.
3. Now install sphinx using following command.

sudo port install sphinx

This will compile and install everything required for making the sphinx work.

Now sphinx is installed and we have ‘indexer’, ’search’ utilities and a ’searchd’ daemon.

Basic way to use Sphinx

Sphinx comes with a sample sql file to setup a sql-query based search (Simplest configuration). This SQL and a sample Sphinx sample configuration is located at

/opt/local/etc/sphinx

. Try following steps to make it running with your configuration
1. Create a directory some where in your system. In my case I created at desktop named ’sphinx’.

 cd ~/Desktop/sphinx 

2. Create ‘test’ database in your mysql server and import the Sample SQL.
2. copy sphinx.conf from sample /opt/local/etc/sphinx to this folder.

cp /opt/local/etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf.dist sphinx.conf

3. Now edit sphinx.conf and change the database Params and paths. In my case it looks like following. Edit the queries related to your custom databases to make it yours.

source src1
{
	type					= mysql

	sql_host				= localhost
	sql_user				= test
	sql_pass				=
	sql_db					= test
	sql_port				= 3306	# optional, default is 3306

	sql_query				= \
		SELECT id, group_id, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(date_added) AS date_added, title, content \
		FROM documents

	sql_attr_uint			= group_id
	sql_attr_timestamp		= date_added

	sql_query_info			= SELECT * FROM documents WHERE id=$id
}

index test1
{
	source					= src1
	path					= /Users/lijeeshms/Desktop/sphinx/data/test1
	docinfo					= extern
	charset_type			= sbcs
}

indexer
{
	mem_limit				= 32M
}

searchd
{
	port					= 3312
	log						= /Users/lijeeshms/Desktop/sphinx/log/searchd.log
	query_log				= /Users/lijeeshms/Desktop/sphinx/log/query.log
	read_timeout			= 5
	max_children			= 30
	pid_file				= /Users/lijeeshms/Desktop/sphinx/log/searchd.pid
	max_matches				= 1000
	seamless_rotate			= 1
	preopen_indexes			= 0
	unlink_old				= 1
}

4. Create 2 folders, ‘data’ and ‘log’ inside the ’sphinx’ directory.

mkdir data log

5. Now run the indexer with the configuration we created from the test directory.

indexer --config /<path-to>/sphinx.conf --all

This will create the indexes based the confutation.
6. Now run the Sphinx search daemon using the same command.

searchd --config /<path-to>/sphinx.conf 

If everything is fine, sphinx search engine will start with the above index configurations. If any error happens you need to check the configuration for any errors.
7. You can now test a search with ’search’ command from terminal.

search <query> 

The results will be shown.

Once all the above is working, it will be easy to use any of the client libraries for PHP (or PECL), Python, Ruby or Java to search from a web or desktop based environments. Sphinx provides options to run multiple indexes and search on selected indexes, thus allowing one daemon to use with multiple type of searches.
Sphinx can index data from an XMLPipe, this is best for creating configurable search indexes from very dynamic datasources like a CMS or CRM.

After a lot of hardwork Flip Media Launched its first iphone application.

Mumbaikar iPhone application by Flip Media

Wow…We did it. After months of hard work, our first iPhone application, Mumbaikar, is now available at the Apple app store. The application is an interactive map with everything and anything you need to know about Mumbai, from geotagged restaurant, blogs and store listings to events and neighborhood crime alerts

on Blog Post at Flip Website .

You can install the application from this link

Recently I got questions from my friends and some readers on How to create Image galleries in Wordpress like in My blog.

Here is the simple steps on how to do it.
1. Install ‘Picasa Image Express for Wordpress’ plug-in – download from plugin site. Only limitation of this plugin is, it cannot show the unlisted albums from picassa.

2. Install ‘Light box Plus’ plug-in from http://www.23systems.net/plugins/lightbox-plus/. You can do more interesting stuff with this.

Some of my configuration you can see from following screens

Flip Media just announced the launch of an Unofficial Dubai metro website.

Unofficial Dubai Metro website

Check the press release from Flip

Dubai–With residents eagerly awaiting the launch of the Dubai Metro, Dubai’s biggest infrastructure project, Flip Media today unveiled Mydubaimetro.com, a non profit portal designed and developed to provide residents of Dubai with a practical and usable guide to all things related to the Metro.

The one stop shop website offers key information and helpful tools such as a journey planner and fare calculator, information about each station stop as well as downloadable pocket maps.

“We saw a gap in the market where people, including ourselves, were curious and hungry for more information about the Metro,” said Yousef Tuqan Tuqan, CEO, Flip Media.

Dinesh Lalvani, Managing Partner of Flip added, “We’re bringing the best of web and technology to help people discover not only the basic information about the services available, but also help connect with fellow commuters. The idea is to make the metro not just about the destination but also about the journey and experience.”

The community portal gives users to post comments, blog and share photos and useful tips about the metro.  The website is scalable, allowing for the addition of new technology and tools.

I am very proud of this, as one of developers of this website and the Technology behind it, The Navisite CMS .