BeeSeek Blog

BeeSeek pastebin is the new service is being offered to the community of the free, open source search engine. The advantages are mainly targeted at those who need to discuss the code, allowing them to copy the strings involved and create a page on our website that we can easily share through a simple link of this kind:
http://paste.beeseek.org/#identifier

Good news for the BeeSeek community!

We have transferred, in the quest for greater integration between our services, all our sites on a single platform: drupal. It is a CMS that, thanks to its modularity and extreme versatility, made us able to create a portal, wich consists of blog, forum, home and planet, totally integrated with each other.

BeeSeek leaves once and for all Italian as project language and is going to switch completely into English. The most perceptible changes will be:

After a long wait, BeeSeek finally manage to get back the official channel #BeeSeek on FreeNode. This permitted to replace our former main channel #beeseek.org with the current one, but the recognition, from the IRC network focused on Open Source projects led up to two other benefits:

• Ownership of all channels which contain "beeseek" in the noun
• Ability to give hostname cloaks

But..what is its an IRC Cloaks?

The developers' team leader, Andrea Corbellini, just wrote a wiki's page and officially opened the new BeeSeek Noticeboard.

The noticeboard is intended as a place where to leave short notices to inform the community about members' work and as an easy and fast way to follow important update.

Of course only users that are registered on Launchpad and belong to a BeeSeek team are allowed to write in it. This represents the first implementation of the idea to use Launchpad's teams' membership to easily manage users privileges also on the other BeeSeek services.

To know more about how to use the noticeboard, read the wiki's page or come ask us questions on IRC ;)

As you could notice, the last post on the BeeSeek's blog was written really a long time ago.

In this period we have been working mainly underground: a new blog and other new services, developed with the Drupal platform, are coming and there was a big work with the code, so the blog remained a bit out of the priorities.

But now we are ready to come back writing and our purpose is to post at least a small report every one/two days.
Soon we're also going to write more specified posts about the main changes we had in this time.

That's all for now ;)

In a few hours from the event, I'd like to tell everyone that we'll be at the first international COMMUNIA workshop, The European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain. Coordinated by NEXA, Center for Internet and Society, COMMUNIA is a project backed by europea community in the wider project eContentplus.This lab is dubbed "Technology an the Public Domain" and wants to create a discussion on the relationship between digital technology and the fast-growing internet users.

The first of a long serie?

BeeSeek has been proposed by Philippe Aigrain, Simone Brunozzi will be the english speaker on P2P search and BeeSeek. This is an important acknowledgement for us. For those not able to attend, here the official slides:

BS-presentation-pdf
BS-presentation-odp

This documentation about BeeSeek is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC at-nc-sa) license.

I'll be at the event, and I'll videorecord and/or take pictures, to show you at least some visual reportage.

Good luck Simone!

The BeeSeek Planet finally have a new theme and is ready to start a stable work. Thanks to DnaX again, was possible this complete restyling and you can see the results in the following screenshot:

Nice, isn't it?

But that isn't all yet: even if our choice for the platform was one of the most popular and famous from the open source world, planetplanet, this didn't allow the automatic feeds update. Andrea-bs solved the problem cleverly (as usual! ) with a simple bash script that controls the rss every 10 minutes.

Thereby we can give our welcome to the BeeSeek Planet in our network. So don't wait, go and write on your blog about the bees' search engine or get involved and help us, and soon you'll receive the request to put your feeds in it too! ;)

The alpha 2 version of Hive has been released and the main changes is the adoption of a modular structure. That means faster and easier development without adapting the main code every time, but it makes also upgrades and code reading easier and improves the stability. This also gives the possibility to personalize easily your own server writing your modules.

~ HoneyBee ~

Currently the only module developed already is HoneyBee, that is in alpha 1 version. This module collects all the statistics needed for the future page ranking.
But let's see how it saves the data in /hive/var/stats.log:

Extract sample from stas.log


Time: 1200939792
ID: 1196464515-54220160-65216570
MovTime: 4
StatTime: 18
Scrolls: 0
Url: http://127.0.0.1:50007/blog.beeseek.org/
Referer: http://localhost:50007/?query=beeseek%20blog


1. Time: records date and time of the search.
2. ID: identify the user who perform the search. The ID remains in the browser's cookies for 1 hour after the last use.
3. MovTime: records the time that the mouse moves.
4. StatTime: records the time that the mouse remains static.
5. Scrolls: records how many times the page was scrolled.
6. Url: records the address the stats are for.
7. Referer: records the address you came from.

~ Installation ~

To get the latest release you can use this page, where are available .deb packages and tarballs.

For Ubuntu users are also available our
repository:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/beeseek-core-devs/ubuntu/ hardy main devel
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/beeseek-core-devs/ubuntu/ hardy main devel

Even if the packages are for Hardy, they are perfectly compatible with all the previous Ubuntu releases since Edgy. Anyway specific packages for Edgy, Feisty and Gutsy are going to be added too.

~ The future ~

The plans for the future are:
Hive: solve two blueprints (ipv6 e apport).
HoneyBee: set up the p2p network wich BeeSeek is going to be based on.