Andy Hedges’ Tech Blog

I’m currently spending some of my free time developing patches for Nutch an OSS search engine. Recently a number of these patches were accepted into the main line of development. The patches I submitted do various things from parsing MS Word properties such as title and author to allowing MP3 audio files to be searched. There is still one outstanding patch of mine to be accepted and that is a rewrite of the HTTP fetching routines (the protocol side of the spider/robot).

Nutch is a pretty exciting project in my opinion with big players like Yahoo and Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly books fame) participating. Yahoo have a demo of Nutch on their site.

I have found a much more satisfactory piece of blogging software (thanks to Luke on the nutch developers mailing list) - so hopefully I can now keep a somewhat up to date blog.

I tried blogger and it was the most awful piece of software I have used in a long while; well speaking from a usability point of view anyway. On the first day I had the blog someone managed to post the same comment ten times and the bloody software wouldn’t allow me to delete it. The fact you can’t delete comments or at least mod them down is a real show stopper for me as I like things to be neat and on topic.