I got new design for my blog finally! My wife has finished her work and presented sketch in her blog today. I’m highly impressed and want to see what do you think guys. Please look it (click on logo) and vote on sidebar or in the bottom of post. Thanks, your opinion is significant for me!

Corresponding post in IRIS Design blog.

Almost all Web-applications needs data search logic and really often this logic should have full-text search capabilities. If you are using MySQL database, you can use its FULLTEXT search, but it’s not efficient when you have a large amout of data. In this case third party search engines used, and one of them (and I think, the most efficient) is Sphinx. In this article I’ll present my port of Sphinx client library for Ruby and show how to use it.

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I’m starting publishing custom WordPress plugins used in this blog, and today it will be “sCategory Permalink”. I like permalink option of WordPress %category% (and using it here), but it has one great limitation – when this option is selected, WordPress uses category with lowest ID for permalink generation! Just imagine following scenario: you have category “Development” (common for all posts related to software building), and several specific categories, for example “PHP”, “AJAX”, “JavaScript”. You have Development category ID greater than any of other categories IDs, therefor specific categories used for URL generation. But one day you decided to start learning Ruby on Rails and post about this in your blog. It’s the problem, because when you will create category “Ruby on Rails”, its ID will be greater then ID of “Development”. Now you have to take decision: to abandon posting in both categories at the same time, or to update “Development” category ID. Lastest can be done in two ways: remove category from WordPress administration area and re-add it (and then you need to go through all of your posts and add needed to this category), or update ID in database (there are several tables related on category ID). But now you can relax! Just download and install plugin!

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Few days ago my best friend Alexey Kovyrin started new site which name is BestTechVideos.com. As he mentioned, this site has been created because there are lots really interesting videos on the Net, but if you’d like to fine some good tech video, it is not so simple to find them because of tons of crappy “funny videos” like “funny cats” and so on.

This site is interesting for me because I really like to see smarty people and listen their thoughts. Project is just started therefor video collection is not so large as I want, but it grows every day. I found interesting screencasts about AJAX, Web 2.0 and others here.

So, If you like to attend technical conferences and watch conference sessions on video, if you like idea of screencasts, etc, then this site is for you! Welcome to Best Tech Videos you’ll be impressed by amount of hi-quality and useful videos on the Net.

There are couple of cheat sheets about Ruby on Rails and related technologies can be found in the web. I decided to collect all of them (almost all) in one post just to keep them in mind. All of them are in full color PDFs or PNGs.

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