IndexTank Holiday Hacks Contest Results

Built in about 3 days. Most of the work was handling the PDF uploads and parsing. It uses the amazing tool transloadit.com for uploading, and resque for managing the parsing of the pdfs. It then posts each page to indextank as a document so it can be full text searched.

Indextank was insanely easy to use. I'd never used the service before this, but I'll be using it in many apps of my apps in the future. This is future of cloud services. Removes up front costs for launching some really complex app infrastructures. And then pay hosting over the long term. It's a tradeoff I'll take any day.

The design was hacked together using some shelf PSD assets a designer friend built for me. As you can see, there's not to many components there, but I think it turned out pretty decent.

UI was built using Backbone.js and Coffeescript. Sass/Compass provides the style, and HAML provides the basic structure.

I got just enough done where search worked well, however the app is woofully underfinished. It really needs better "My Shelf" management. I also really want to hook it into the dropbox api so it can automatically index all your PDFs.

Hoping to flesh it out a bit this month, and hopefully should have a proper launch in Feb. Would love any suggestions / feedback on the current version so far (no bug reports, there's too many of them! :)

I wrote a few Python scripts to scrape Proggit every few minutes, looking for new comments. Sending them to IndexTank was simple--just one call. On the Rails app for the searching, same thing--just one call and you can get the results from IndexTank.

I'm going to spend more time on it and make it a bit more usable. HelpShelf's highlighting is cool so I'll do that, and I think auto complete is a no brainer.