MarkMail: Search and Analyze Email Traffic

Jason Hunter of MarkLogic has unveiled a new application that allows you to search and analyze email traffic. The service is called MarkMail, and you can check out the Apache instance to see it at work.

The application is written using MochiKit and wrappers for Canvas and such.

Jason gave us detailed information on the goals:

As you’ll see with the chart on the home page, one of our goals with the site has been to focus heavily on analytics. We have lots of graphs and counts, and you’re able to use them to watch Apache’s historical growth and each individual project’s growth. Every query you write gets its own histogram chart.

Another goal has been interactivity. Every search result screen gives you lots of ways to refine your search (by sender, list, attachment type, etc). Plus we did a lot with keyboard shortcuts. You can hit “n” and “p” to move to the next and previous result and “j” and “k” to move up and down the thread view. There’s a lot of little things like this. Plus if your result message includes Office or PDF files they’re in-line interactive too.

http://apache.markmail.org/search/ext:ppt+axis

Another goal has been to focus on community. We could have launched MarkMail with 50,000,000 emails from many sources but I think it’s better to start with focus. In fact, I’ll be at ApacheCon and the Hackathon next week, along with my co-developer Ryan Grimm, looking for people’s suggestions and maybe on the spot adding in a few of them. There’s also potential to explore some fun one-off analytics, too.

As part of the focus on communities, we setup MarkMail so it recognizes that Apache itself consists of many communities. If you go to http://apache.markmail.org you search all Apache emails, but if you go to http://struts.markmail.org then you’re auto-limited to just Struts lists. Same for tomcat, spamassassin, httpd, and so on. You can always limit your search using “list:struts” in your query, but using the domain handles that a bit more elegantly.

Notes on using the site:

• Search using keywords as well as from:, subject:, extension:, and list: constraints
• The GUI doesn’t yet expose it, but you can negate any search item, like -subject:jira.
• You can sort results by date by adding order:date-forward or order:date-backward to your query
• Remember to use “n” and “p” keyboard shortcuts to navigate the search results

Source: Ajaxian

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Google Code Revamps with jQuery

We have revamped Google Code, the site which is the home to developers, and open source hosting. A ton of work went into cleaning up the UI integrating and unifying content, and simplifying.

The site uses jQuery for a lot of its work, and also eats a lot of dogfood. The video below goes through some of the high lights, but DeWitt Clinton said it well:

One of the most exciting things about the redesign is that everything you see here was built using technology and APIs that are available to everyone. The pages we’re serving don’t rely on any secret back-end tricks; the site is built on plain HTML, JavaScript and CSS, each using our public APIs. In fact, all of the techniques used on Google Code can be duplicated on your own site.

For example, the search results pages use a combination of the AJAX Search API and Custom Search Engines. The homepage gadgets use the AJAX Feed API and Google Reader feeds. The videos are powered by the YouTube API, the blogs by the Blogger API, the events powered by the Google Calendar API, the metrics by Google Analytics, the forums by Google Groups, etc., etc..

Stay tuned — over the upcoming weeks we’ll offer detailed articles and tutorials about how we built the various parts of Google Code using open technologies.

This is just the beginning of a slew of updates that we are making to the site. I can’t wait to roll out some of the items that really match our vision of what a developer community can really be!

Source: Ajaxian

Digg here