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Highlights Staying competitive is the name of the newspaper game The third-largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., McClatchy Company owns 30 daily newspapers in 29 markets across the country. This includes the Sacramento Bee, its first paper and one of the oldest in the West, the Miami Herald, The News and Observer, and others. The unforgiving economic climate has hit the industry hard, accompanied as it is with fundamental shifts in reader and advertiser behaviors. As a market leader, McClatchy is vitally focused on their online business model. McClatchy Interactive has more experience than most they launched one of the first electronic news sites on the Web, The Nando Times, in the Spring of 1994. Today, McClatchy’s mission is to establish its local papers as the leading source of online news within their respective markets, with compelling local information online, along with comprehensive news, advertising, e-commerce and other services. Helping online readers find the relevant information they want is a cornerstone of their online initiative. Open source technologies contribute directly to McClatchy’s business model by minimizing the both capital and operational costs without compromise in customer experience. McClatchy Interactive chose the leading open source search solution, Solr, to search classified ads across all online properties. Solr has already helped McClatchy Interactive properties reduce costs dramatically, while improving on the same high quality of service to its online readers. “Solr has done wonders for us. It is easy to understand and deploy, and reduced our costs drastically,” according to Doug Steigerwald, software developer at McClatchy Interactive.

Making the leap from proprietary system to open source search The company’s legacy search system was built on a proprietary, pre-packaged =”_blank”> enterprise search software solution that was increasingly expensive to maintain and modify while addressing new business requirements. In 2007, the company decided to bring in-house its Web site search functionality, and build a search service that could handle classified ads across all McClatchy properties. Primary responsibility for development fell to Doug, although he had some part-time assistance from another member of the software development group. There were two requirements. The first was that the new search system had to have the same features and capabilities as the existing search product. Second, the solution had to be seamless, transparent to support personnel and the McClatchy newspapers. “It had to be absolutely no work for anybody other than development,” said Doug. “And it had perform the same or better as what we already had.” Why Solr was chosen Solr is the leading open source search solution, and features high performance and comprehensive capabilities. These include faceting the ability to drill down on characteristics of the desired result. For example, when looking for a used car, a reader may want to limit search results by price range or model type, and then drill down to find only those cars that are nearby. Any search solution would need to enforce McClatchy’s search policy requirements. Stories which can be searchable or non-searchable appear in many places across McClatchy Interactive properties. A searchable story must remain so, even if it appears in a non-searchable section. The converse is also true, controlling which results are excluded from a search. Before a final decision was made, extensive comparisons of Solr and the existing search package were undertaken, in which Solr delivered better, more relevant results. The developers also checked to make sure that Solr’s search processes stored data in the same way as the legacy system, so no problems would arise with other related applications after the new solution was rolled out to production. McClatchy’s Solr implementation was able to replace the legacy software without changing any significant back end functionality. Doug says, “After researching it, we felt Solr could do everything we’d done with our existing proprietary system.” Real, fast results The project began in September 2007 and was in production by April 2008. With experience in open source development, the developers began evaluating and building a search system using Solr.

Basic development, including the training classes for the two developers, was completed in January 2008. Once the pilot implementation was up and running, efforts moved to improving speed and accuracy. Two months of QA ensured everything would work as intended. In order to meet their targets for both performance and relevance, McClatchy engaged Lucid Imagination consulting services to help them get the most out of their implementation as soon as possible. The team put together a presentation about what McClatchy was doing and asked for an expert opinion on how the system could do better in terms of performance. Lucid worked with McClatchy to carry out extensive analysis of logs and production for all sites, to profile the volume, diversity, and frequency of data being indexed. For McClatchy, Lucid’s recommendations focused largely on configuration and schema for example, what field options could be closed or disregarded to increase indexing and query response time. Doug says, “Lucid Consulting was definitely worth it. They helped things move along more quickly by pointing out ways to better tune Solr, based on our usage. We could have spent a couple of weeks benchmarking and refining our implementation, but Lucid Consulting was able to optimize our specific search environment in a day or two.” McClatchy Interactive today The Solr implementation achieved impressive cost savings and performance. Because there are no licensing costs associated with Solr, McClatchy enjoyed significant savings by eliminating the licensing fees associated with the previous packaged software application they had purchased. In addition, one of the most impressive benefits of this Solr implementation was the dramatic reduction in hardware requirements. The old search required 24 production servers, while McClatchy’s Solr search service runs on just three of the existing servers. The remaining 21 servers have been freed up for other uses. “We really reduced the number of servers we needed,” states Doug. “We may add one or two more in the future to handle extra traffic and roll out some new services.” All 30 McClatchy dailies are running on the new system, and the combined number of classified and news searches reach 700,000 per day primarily from classified queries.

Every ad category and classification is stored within a Solr index. Solr also hooks into the company’s content management system, which serves all its newspapers, to index other searchable data such as stories, movie show times, and so on. In addition, the entire front page of online properties is powered by Solr, including news search, movie search, and more. Partly because it was so easy to implement, Doug recommends Solr to other developers who are just beginning to explore open source. “Solr is free and has a huge, active user base, which is very helpful,” says Doug. “It was a different experience than the proprietary software we were using. We found it was easier to get support by going open source. The Solr community provides support through the developer e-mail list, where you can find out how others have already solved problems you might have.” McClatchy Interactive is evaluating Solr to take advantage of other capabilities. For example, Doug is evaluating Solr’s More Like This functionality, to help readers find related stories and increase site stickiness. And as Doug points out, there’s no extra charge for this functionality.

OOPs is a programming technique designed to simplify convoluted programming concepts. In fundamental nature, object-oriented programming revolves around the idea of user- and system-defined chunks of data, and controlled means of accessing and modifying those chunks. Object-oriented programming consists of Objects, Methods and Properties. An object is basically a black box which stores some information. Object may have a way for you to read that information and a way for you to write to, or change in sequence. It may also have other less noticeable ways of interacting with the information.

Some of the information in the object may essentially be directly easily reached; other information may necessitate you to use a method to access it – conceivably because the way the information is stored internally is of no use to you, or because only certain things can be written into that information space and the object needs to check that you’re not going outside those limits. The directly reachable bits of information in the object are its properties. The difference between data accessed via properties and data accessed via methods is that with properties, you see accurately what you’re doing to the object; with methods, unless you created the object yourself, you just see the effects of what you’re doing.

Other JavaScripts pages you read will almost certainly pass on frequently to objects, events, methods, and properties. This tutorial will learn by example, without focusing too profoundly on OOP terminology. However, you will need a basic fundamental of these terms to use other JavaScript references. Your web page document is an object. Any web page may involve table, form, button, image, or link on your page is also an object. Each object has confident properties. For example, the background color of your document is written document.bgcolor. You would change the color of your page to red by scripts code writing the line document.bgcolor= red

Most objects have a certain collection of things that they can do. Different objects can do different things, just as a light can turn on and off. A new document is opened with the method document. Open () you can write “Introduction of Java to a document by typing document. Write (“Introduction of Java “). Open () and write () are both methods of the object: document.

If you own a closet filled with clothes, you know what it is like to have a mess that needs to be sorted and cleaned up. Well, your iTunes music collection is no different at all.

Sometimes too many songs that you have are not tagged properly, many of them are missing album names and artist names, some may have wrong track titles and most may not have any album art. If you were to try to clean up your music collection manually, this would take weeks of tedious work, to say the least.

The way to alleviate this situation is to perform a quick and successful and almost hassle-free iTunes cleanup.

Here are some tips to help you achieve this goal:

Do a back-up of your iTunes library
Delete the music that you do not want to keep
Do a manual deletion of all duplicates
Make use of software to remove bulk duplicates, especially if you have a large library
Remove deleted files which remain listed in your library
When your library is free of duplicates and deleted files, you can backup and convert to MP3
Fix meta data or information, erroneous song titles or album info – try fixing one album or folder at a time and saving over your back-up
Rebuild your iTunes library after making sure of your back-up above
Sort out and update your album artwork

You may decide to go the way of subscribing to a software to do this job for you. Enter ‘Tune Up’, your music’s new best friend, as some refer to it. The TuneUp iTunes cleanup product can be subscribed to free of cost, cleaning up to 500 songs. Over and beyond that, you can sign up for a one year unlimited song clean up subscription for $11.95, as well as a life time subscription of $19.95 (limited offer).

The TuneUp iTunes plug-in is by far the easiest way to clean up all the patchy and scattered information in your iTunes. All you have to do is drag and drop songs into TuneUp.

How does the TuneUp iTunes cleanup work? Remembering that every piece of music, no matter from what source, contains a certain audio signature, TuneUp will then compare that signature with the online music database ‘Gracenote’. It will then retrieve all the information and album art about the song and simply put it in iTunes. Voila!

TidySongs is another automatic cleanup tool which will alleviate the painful manual process of going through one song at a time to fix the missing information on your song list. If you choose to go this route, all you have to do is to download the TidySongs application. Because it is an AIR application download, once the download is finished, you will end up with a ZIP file on your desktop. Once unzipped, the application is ready to be launched. Just a note of caution should you choose to take advantage of TidySongs: once you launch the application, make sure your local iTunes application is running and not engaged with other activities, for example, synching to your iPod, iPhone or other music players or downloading of podcasts.