WordPress and sphinx search
Looking into different options for better searching in wordpress. Currently wordpress uses a simplistic database query search that doesn’t allow much flexibility. This solution doesn’t scale well either. In all the rails projects I’ve been working on, Sphinx search has been pretty solid for finding related documents, and handling all our search functions away from our user facing servers. Indexing and memory usage are extremely efficient keeping our server costs low. This is fantastic.
While RoR is our preferred development framework, every once in awhile, we’ll slap together a wordpress site and I haven’t seen anyone try to implement sphinx as a plugin partially because it requires a bit more tinkering. However, recently I came across the following plugin that seems to provide a wordpress interface to the sphinx service. https://launchpad.net/wp-sphinx-plugin/+download
It looks promising and seems to autoconfigure the indexes for you including title, Posts, Pages and Comments. I didn’t see anything in readme about indexing tags which might be an issue. I’m also going to see if it includes functionality for providing field weights for preventing false positives.
Got my kml file working
Here’s a plot of NY’s counties. 
GIS data and Google Maps
Trying to convert an old .e00 gis file collected from the us census bureau to arcView. Then from ArcView into a shape format that Google maps can plot. There is a ton of discovery involved specifically with the types of map projections the census bureau uses. There might need to be some normalization, but until I plot my data, I won’t know (their data is extremely undocumented). Anywho…. I’ll be updating my progress.
Links:
-Raw Data: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/co2000.html
Update: Gave up on the arcView format because of it’s proprietary nature. Looks like arcview is pretty expensive, so I’m using the ascii formated data set which seems to be a space and line delimited list of coordinates (found here: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/co2000.html). Here’s the general format:
2 -0.737111200944987E+02 0.447554053271605E+02
-0.740250260000000E+02 0.449800360000000E+02
-0.740274011055598E+02 0.449957651692313E+02
-0.740274011055598E+02 0.449957651692313E+02
END
Looks like the first line is the center point of the shape, where each proceeding line until the “END” represents each point in the polygon.