Firefox Extension Published

Cool! Firefox Extension Approved

I just got this email:

Trexy TrailBar 1.1 - Approval Granted
Your item, Trexy TrailBar 1.1, has been reviewed by a Mozilla Update editor who took the following action:
Approval Granted

Please Note: It may take up to 30 minutes for your extension to be available for download.

Your item was tested by Mike Kroger using FF 1.5 on Win XP.
Editor's Comments:
Cool!
----
Mozilla Update: https://addons.mozilla.org/

Cool indeed! :-)

More The Merrier

We are having the Trexy Christmas party today.

We are going to nearby Greenwich to do a little sightseeing followed by Christmas lunch at Bar du Musee.

This is the first time Nige and I have had a work Christmas party with more than two people.

Photos to come soon...

Shockfire Support

One our new users, Shockfire Matt, has been a supporter of ours for a while now.

He helped us on Turbo10. He can even remember back to the days when Turbo10.com had the dark purple homepage.

We really appreciate his support. You can read some of his recent feedback in the forum.

"Hit" Me with a Clearer Result Display

A number of people have suggested making the results clearer. Our graphic designer, Marty, came to the rescue and sent us some excellent mock ups of how an improved results display could look.

So Meg and I went into pair programming mode and we made the changes in an afternoon. It's important for the result "hit" to not look like a normal search result. After all, Trexy is not showing traditional search results. A Trexy hit is a record of a real person traversing the web looking for what they want. That's why their country flag is displayed prominently in the top of the hit - a computer didn't make this trail - a real person did!

Here's an example of our new presentation:


But this isn't the end of the story, we will constantly tweak and change the interface so it "just works" and tunes in to your requirements. Any feedback you may have is much appreciated? The best place to give us feedback is in the forum.

Trexy Forum Up and Running

Sven has done a great job of setting up a forum for Trexy.

This is a place where users give us feedback and see what others are saying about Trexy.

You can post as a Guest or login. We've already had our first forum sign-up. It is of course one of our star supporters - Shockfire Matt.

Visit the forum at - http://forum.trexy.com

On The Feedback Trail

On Friday, Nige and I sent out some emails to friends and family asking for initial feedback.

It's great that people have taken a look and made helpful suggestions. As a result, Nige and I are implementing changes.

Some of the initial feedback includes:

• Too many distracting links on the homepage. One user found the 1 Goat, 2 People links at the base of the homepage quite intriguing but the not most useful for the first time visitor.

Nige and I have decided to reduce the number of links and no longer hyperlink 1 GOAT, 2 PEOPLE, 3,292 ENGINES, 216,014 TRAILBLAZERS, and 752,418 TRAILS.

• Description of Trexy needs to be more apparent.

We've decided to edit the text on the About page and the Tours to help make the description more apparent.

• Once you start blazing trails how can you switch engines?

The TrailBar works with hundreds of engines so you are not limited to just one engine. You can select which is your preferred engine to search with, but this doesn't prevent you from blazing trails on other engines. We'll add this to our FAQ to help make this clearer.

• When I visit Trexy, I get a popup asking me to save a file.

This is a nasty bug that happens occasionally. We are aware of it and have added it to the bug list.

The bug is caused because we are sending the document in GZIP >format. Normally it works fine, however sometimes the error happens when the user is behind a proxy and the HTTP headers are converted and the page is not automatically decompressed. This causes the "Save As" dialog box to appear.

Some suggestions for improved features include:

• Allow results to be grouped by rank, search engine used, country of origin.
• Allow trails to be edited or tidied up.

The feedback trail is on-going and we hope to mould Trexy in response to our users' comments to deliver the best search product we can.

Treking to the Roger Needham Lecture @ The Royal Society

Sven and I went along to a lecture on the "Semantic Web" at the Royal Society last night.

The Roger Needham Lecture given by Professor Ian Horrocks, clearly explained the ideas behind the "Semantic Web". It was an interesting tour around the "Semantic Web" which is just starting to show practical promise. But as Ian said to me afterwards, it is currently limited to discrete domains. It remains to be seen if all these domains will one day merge to form a Meta-Semantic Web?

The main problem is defining "semantics", or in other words, determining "meaning". "Meaning" is decided by human beings, not machines, and although "inference engines" can infer meaning they are only as good as their underlying facts - and here lies the problem. This kind of system only works well if we all think like Mr Spock: logical and ruthlessly honest.

Remember META tags in web pages? They worked well until everybody started to tag their pages inappropriately with terms that didn't really apply. And then things got really silly - we saw META tag trade mark infringement and bulk keyword stuffing - as a result, search engines now routinely ignore META tags.

The Semantic Web, and the recent trend of "tagging" will suffer from human nature just like META tags did. If these systems are to survive they need to take account of human nature at the outset.

I don't know about you, but I prefer to think like Captain Kirk than Mr Spock. Planet "Semantic Web"? Even Spock might say "does not compute." Quick Scottie ... Beam Me Up!

Trexy Tech Central

Sven has done a great job of setting up a forum for Trexy. Now we need to link to it on the Trexy website.

I think we need to create a tech area called "Trexy Tech Central" to contain the general Trexy Tour, FAQ and the Forum.

Nigel and Ted's Excellent Adventure

Following Nigel's presentation on Saturday, here's a posting to the London Perl Mongers' mailing list:

Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:44:22 +0000 (GMT) From: Rev Simon Rumble <simon@rumble.net> Reply-To: "London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers" <london.pm@london.pm.org> To: london.pm@london.pm.org
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] [LPW] thanks and slides

Big thanks to the speakers, even the hat-of-shamers. I really enjoyed it, learnt a number of useful things and have been re-inspired to do more Perl.

My impression is that Nigel Hamilton is Ted Nelson's love child.

Then There Were Five.

I'm glad that Jennifer Mitchell has joined our team today.

Having interviewed 10 applicants on Thursday, Jennifer shone out from the group to become our new marketing assistant.

Now that makes five of us!

Decoupling Turbo10 + Trexy

Meg and I made an important decision a couple of months ago to separate the Turbo10 and Trexy cluster. We wanted Trexy to have the best chance of growing without conflicting with the high growth on the Turbo10 cluster. It's hard enough managing the load pattern of just one search engine. Two separate clusters means we can tune each cluster to best serve its search engine. We are now receiving over 26 million hits per day on the Turbo10 network!

It was a tough decision to make at the time. But the last week has shown it was the right one. The variation in load on Turbo10 has not affected Trexy at all.

On Friday the legal arrangements will also come into effect. It's really exciting!

CV Mania

Last Thursday I posted an advertisement for another Marketing Assistant. So far we have received 43 applications. I have shortlisted nine for interviews tomorrow.

Rena and I will be conducting the initial interviews with a follow-up meeting on Friday morning so Nigel and Sven and can give the green light.

Hopefully we'll have a new person beginning by next week.

Tandem Trails

Sven seems to find things quicker than me and I end up saying, "where did you find that?"

To which he says, "follow my trail."

Instead of doing the hard work of wading through web pages I get presented with a trail that's right on target! ;-)

Goo Trails

I've used many of the ideas behind Trexy to help with my own programming productivity.

I wrote a system called "The Goo" that helps me stick "Things" together behind the scenes. The Goo leaves a "Trail" behind in your working environment. I've decided to open source the software behind The Goo as a thank you to all the other open source software developers who have helped me.

You can find it here: http://thegoo.org.

More Bugs ...

Meg and Rena have done a great job in finding more bugs in the Beta version. Sven and I are going to have a concentrated bug killing session tomorrow.

A new robot is also going to start running: Darius the Dead Link Manager. Darius will be responsible for removing dead steps in trails (i.e., 404 URLs). We were considering preserving trail links and enabling users to access missing pages via the the Way Back When Machine at archive.org but it seems too slow. Our tests show a 10+ second response time.

We may return to this system later if speed improves or we find a better archived page provider.

More Robots ...

Behind the scenes we have a small army of 'robots' helping us. This week three new robots came into being:

• Tara, 'The Task Master' - She looks after managing tasks.
• Burt, 'The Bug Buster' - Burt lets us know when reported bugs have been fixed.
• Data, 'The Director Dude' - This is Sven's first robot. Data is responsible for making sure the load balancer (i.e., director) is perfoming well.

Pumping Up The Power

Things were getting a little slow with our Internet connection over here at Ivory Wharf, so we've just upgraded.

Gone are the days of a meagre 2MB connection - bring on the power with 8 MB.

Bugs Go Virtual

Gone are the days of printing off a technical request form, filling it out and handing it to Nige.

As of today, there is a new tech regime here at Trexy. All bugs and technical requests will be logged electronically.

Crime Came Our Way Today

It all happened in a flash. The front gate of the office swung open and we realised someone had just taken the bike. We got up from our desks, rushed out the door and saw a hooded figure ride around the corner. Sven took off in hot pursuit of the thief but couldn't catch him.

In the panic, the door swung shut behind us and locked us all out.

Rena was left standing outside with no shoes and I was searching my pockets for my keys with no luck.

What a dramatic way to start the day. Bike stolen, locked out with no keys and no mobile phone.
Fortunately the Theatre Company across the road, The London Bubble, were able to help. I called Martin and within 10 minutes he arrived with another set of keys.

Phew.