Ciarán Lee

RateMyArea.com
• Local-Social-Search
• Starting off in Dublin
• Launched 7 November
• Rails app

Interesting things we have done
• Search
• Caching
• iPhone web app

Search

Search = sphinx
• moving from ultrasphinx to thinking_sphinx
• more actively developed
• nice syntax
• we are overhauling search

geo-search
• sphinx does this very well
• insists on radians
• ultrasphinx provides a nice interface
# CREATE AN INDEX
define_index do
indexes :name
has \"RADIANS(latitude)\", :as => :latitude, :type => :float
has \"RADIANS(longitude)\", :as => :longitude, :type => :float
end
# RUN A SEARCH for popular bars nearby
@bars = Listing.search(\"bar\",
:per_page => 10,
:page => 1,
:geo => [deg2rad(@where.latitude), deg2rad(@where.longitude)],
:order => average_rating DESC,
:with => {\"@geodist\" => 0.0..2000})

caching - in order of preference
1. Page caching
2. Action caching
3. Fragment caching

Caching
Page caching not possible if
content changes for ANY
user *
Action caching can be used
conditionally - for logged out
users
caches_action :show ,
:if => Proc.new { |controller| controller.send(:logged_out?) }
* unless server side includes (SSI) are used

20,000 action cached places
But... the footer is dynamic
How to keep the action cache but
change the footer?

Server Side Includes
Wikipedia:
“As its name implies, its primary use is including the
contents of one file into another one dynamically when
the latter is served by a web server.”
<!--# include virtual=\"/ssi/footer\" -->
The webserver inserts the contents of the include
before sending the response to the client
http://blog.kovyrin.net/2007/08/05/using-nginx-ssi-and-memcache-to-make-your-web-applications-faster/
http://www.jkraemer.net/tags/nginx

also...
• Object caching can be handy for expensive queries
• these objects can be fetched out of request/
response cycle (we use workling for this)
• don’t keep page cache in RAILS_ROOT/public -
this will preserve it through redeploys
http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/2008/1/30/segregated-page-cache-storage

RateMyArea on your mobile
(if you have an iPhone)
• We like MobileSafari!
• iUi used for the interface
• development has stalled
• good starting point...
• Flickr agree with copied us :)
http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/10/27/lessons-learned-while-building-an-iphone-site/

RateMyArea on your mobile
(if you have an iPhone)
• No access to CoreLocation through the browser :(
• phonegap can fix this
• native iPhone app
• wraps a web-app
• really is a site specific browser
• http://github.com/sintaxi/phonegap/tree/master

Maps on the iPhone
• Native app is really nice
• can render kml
• different firmware versions have different
capabilities :(

Thank You
keepusbusy@ratemyarea.com