Forum: Ruby Ruby-Talk without the cruft

> > It's all about the perception... depends on people mentality. Forum is
> > to help someone. I would agree with Robert, although not with you.
>
> It is about the perception of the group. Not the individual. The more you behave
> the way you do, the more the group will perceive you as a help vampire. Tho,
> after seeing the rest of your responses to this thread, the more you come off
> like a troll. Keep up the good work.

"Cruft is a collective term for the elements of a program, system or
product that are either useless, poorly designed or both....Something
that is "crufty" may be dirty, unpleasant, extra, sloppily implemented,
duplicated elsewhere or simply useless."

From thread: Re: splat operator and Ruby instance variable assignments

18 of the 22 messages listed with this topic have nothing to do with the
original question (even if it *may* have been posed by a member whom
many consider to be a 'help vampire').

You can find help without the cruft by checking out
http://RubyTalkTips.com/tips/ (guaranteed to be vampire and troll free).

Be warned, this is a subjective list (580 tips and growing). If I find a
post or a series of posts to be helpful explaining anything 'ruby', I
try to whittle down the posts to their essentials and post the relevant
information as a 'tip'. All information is stored in a searchable
PostgreSQL database, and can be sorted by subject, author, date, type
and keywords. The ruby-talk mailing list is the primary source of most
all of the information found there.

I don't update this list daily, but I try to wait until a thread has run
its course, and decide if any of the information in the message thread
is worth re-dissemination. I recently added the 'Posted' column to make
it easier to sort by the most recent tips (which is now the default).

We all owe a serious dept of gratitude for the posters here who spend
their time explaining and commenting on the myriad of topics posed here.
It's a long list and if I start naming names, I will surely miss someone
deserving mention. You know who you are, and you have my THANKS!. ;-)  A
simple sort by author on the RubyTalkTips site will clearly show you who
they are by the quantity and the quality of their messages.

I know there must be hundreds of readers, like myself, who read and
benefit from the expertise and great advice that is posted to this list.
This project is just my way of giving back something to the community
that has been so helpful to me and others. I hope you find something
useful there.

Cheers!

-- Steve
aka Capt. Downer
email: captdowner@gmail.com
site: http://rubytalktips.com

Sounds like a fun project :)

I gave it a spin with a search for "split a unicode string" and "extract
unicode characters". To be honest I was not expecting a hit unless you 
had
entered a lot of old messages and of course there were no hits. No 
results
can be a little daunting because it makes you think that you have 
entered
the wrong search terms.

What might be a good idea is to try variations of the failed search.

"split a unicode string" yields nothing but searches for "unicode" (one 
of
your keywords), "unicode string" and "split string" all return results.
Which would make me hopeful that there was an answer to my question in
there. Likewise "extract unicode characters" yields nothing but 
"unicode",
"unicode characters" and "extract characters" all return results.

I am not saying that this will magically find answers that are not there
but they will allow the user to feel that your site has something to 
offer.
Going to the site to find that all your queries return no results will
drive users away and your efforts will be in vain.

Peter Hickman wrote in post #1098083:
> Sounds like a fun project :)
>
> I gave it a spin with a search for "split a unicode string" and "extract
> unicode characters". To be honest I was not expecting a hit unless you
> had entered a lot of old messages and of course there were no hits. No
> results can be a little daunting because it makes you think that you have
> entered the wrong search terms.
>
> What might be a good idea is to try variations of the failed search.
>
> "split a unicode string" yields nothing but searches for "unicode" (one
> of your keywords), "unicode string" and "split string" all return
> results. Which would make me hopeful that there was an answer to my
> question in there. Likewise "extract unicode characters" yields nothing > but
"unicode", "unicode characters" and "extract characters" all return
> results.
>
> I am not saying that this will magically find answers that are not there
> but they will allow the user to feel that your site has something to
> offer.
> Going to the site to find that all your queries return no results will
> drive users away and your efforts will be in vain.

Glad you got to try it out.

RE: search terms

I have tried to implement keywords (not key phrases) so that the search
terms could be short and accurate. While the Postgres search that I've
implemented does search keywords, subjects and text of the tips, you
will find that less is more and rather than entering phrases, just
entering keywords *may* find more useful information.

Source code for my site is open source and is here:
https://github.com/CaptDowner/rubytips.git

Feel free to fork it and add features (like enhanced search). I do this
in my spare time and can't devote as much time as I'd like to further
development.

If nothing else, please add your own "tips" that you think others might
find useful. ;-)

Thanks again for checking it out.

Cheers!,

-- Steve
aka Capt. Downer
email: captdowner@gmail.com