OpenSource Connections
Category: Uncategorized
In our daily adventures on our computers and the Internet, we often find/create notes or documents that we would like to keep for later, that we attempt to organize. We put them in our email, in Google Docs, in Dropbox, in Gist, and countless other places. Then when we want to find them later, it’s often a hassle to look everywhere.
What if you had a fast, smart search that would look through all these places at once? What if you could also search for files shared by others in your company, and selectively share your own documents without reorganizing them into yet another service?
Let me introduce “OSCAR”, the OpenSource Connection Automated Robot. Keep your docs wherever you want; Oscar will find them and index them. Oscar is being developed as an (initially) internal tool which functions basically as a virtual assistant that helps you manage your personal digital content and easily retrieve them later. Eventually of course, it will cater to your every whim and need. If you’re lucky.
The past week I developed the very first version of Oscar with a functioning Solr backend and simple online frontend. Right now the function is pretty basic – you send an email to Oscar’s Gmail address and he puts your email into a Solr server. If you include any links, Oscar crawls the pages a little and remembers some keywords so you can easily find the content later. Finally, you can go to Oscar’s site and make queries for these emails.
See it here. (Warning: Under active development. May explode upon contact.)
The app itself is hosted on Google App Engine (Python), which was something new I learned to use in the past week in addition to Solr. GAE is pretty awesome – in my opinion much easier to setup and deploy to than Heroku or AWS… though thats a post for another time. It’s especially fun to work with if you have a cool IDE like PyCharm. GAEs webapp2 library and templating system is like a lighter, smaller version of Django, and Django itself is supported. Another reason why GAE is awesome.
Over the next week, we will begin fully integrating the app with Django and moving the backend to ElasticSearch. In addition, we will begin adding new features to OSCAR as we begin the trek of bringing it into its vision. I’m excited!
We’d love to hear about your experiences with organizing your notes and documents. How do you find stuff across multiple locations and services? Do you have a preferred service that you try to pack everything into, or do you have another way of saving and finding things? Let us know by commenting below!