WolframAlpha Needs Work

There's been a lot of hype around WolframAlpha so I thought I'd test it out today.

Here's what I think so far:

1. Simple facts might be hard to get
2. The name is a mouthful
3. The brand is inconsistent
4. I'm curious about the revenue

Simple facts might be hard to get

I was away from a computer when I first thought to test it, but I had my iPhone on me, so I quickly went to the new site and tapped "number of chromisomes in a chimp" and hit "Go". Oh well, I thought. I mis-spelled chromosomes (easy to do in a web form on the iPhone), but it should give me a proper spelling to click.

Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Hmm, ok. I tried the proper spelling and full name of the animal: "number of chromosomes in a chimpanzee".

Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Perhaps I'm using it wrong. Google got me the answer pretty quickly even though the answer didn't come from Google (but another site on the internet.) So I tried out what was supposed to be a Google-killer: Cuil (improper spelling to be fair).

No results were found for: number of chromisomes in a chimp

Proper spelling? That got me to a place to look.

According to Wolfram: "We are not a search engine. No searching is involved here". That's fine but a search engine got me my answer. It's 48 by the way.

Forbes magazine had this to say:

...Wolfram Alpha's biggest strength may also be its biggest weakness: The datasets behind its calculations are curated by hand—hundreds of them—and somebody plugged them into the system.

Uhh... really!? I guess that's a necessity for a useful and friendly tool but I was still shocked when I read that. Here's my contribution then:

Dear WolframAlpha,

A chimpanzee has 48 chromosomes.

Sincerely,

Jim

WolframAlpha is a mouthful

It doesn't roll off the tongue as much as it gets stuck coming out. That could be a really good thing if the product is really good. A name that's difficult to pronounce may increase the amount that people tend to discuss it... that gets the name around.

Aside from my search, it produces some great things which could be expected from the makers of Mathmatica. But I fear the advent of startup companies with names like DolphinFrankenfurter. Alright, that doesn't have the difficult "lfr" in the name, but it'll do for a me-too company name.

The WolframAlpha name should be more consistent

The logo seems to say WolframAlpha, but everywhere else that it is written in reads Wolfram|Alpha... What's with the pipe and it's inconsistent usage? Is it WolframAlpha, Wolfram Alpha or Wolfram|Alpha?

I'm curious about the WolframAlpha source of revenue?

Forbes magazine also points out that:

It would be more than foolish to assume Wolfram Research can monetize Wolfram Alpha in the way Google has monetized its search engine through its lucrative paid search business...

It would, wouldn't it. Because that's not the same target market. And making money on ads might mean you need to ensure that a lot more information was readily availabile. Such as the number of chromosomes in a chimp.

Wolfram Research has not said how it intends to monetize its new search engine, but a preview of it offered to Forbes hints at one approach: There's a "Featured Sponsor(s)" module hidden in the code, commented out by the developers. The copy used is dummy text, but suggests that one revenue stream for Wolfram Alpha will be from display ads.

Hmm. I already see ads appearing for featured sponsors, so perhaps that's the route they've chosen. But perhaps a better path would be to charge for it. If it's a great service that is worth money then people will likely pay to use it. It works for Lexis Nexis.

How to write a RadiantCMS extension

If you're looking for the short description that boils down the answer: start. Just start writing an extension and you'll know more after that than you do now.

Radiant is a great system for setting up a website. Many developers who contribute to the core or contribute extensions to the community might forget that there may be plenty of users of Radiant who want to do many things with it, but they just don't know how.

That is part of the reason I wrote the Help Extension. Sure, regular users need help understanding how the system works , but people who provide Radiant to their clients could make the entire community better if they could just get past the point where they begin to understand. "Help" is an apt name for the extension, but there may be a downside in that many Radiant developers may not realize that there's plenty of info in there about how to interact with Radiant through an extension.

I do my best to help new developers. I once was a new developer. Scratch that; I still am a new developer.

Start small

Many of our extensions are small in scope. That's a great way to learn and a great way to pave the path to write something more substantial. You can ask for Radiant help on the email lists. Sometimes the community may come to your aid or sometimes the help doesn't come. That may be because of timing (and everyone is busy with other things when you ask for help) or because no one else particularly cares about what you want to do.

Well how do I get help if nobody cares!? Easy. Ask a technical question. But in order to do that, you need to start.

Start building your extension and when you get an error or arrive at an impasse in your code, you'll have plenty of info to either solve the problem yourself or get help from someone else. If nobody cares about your desire to list widgets on your site, someone may be interested in solving a technical problem with you. Developers are like that.

Throw away your code

One of the things I learned in a Drawing class in college was to be willing to throw something away. So many aspiring artists hold on to every piece of work they've done. They might spend hours upon hours on their work and feel like they have reached a pinnacle when the work is done. But they should always be willing to lose the final piece. You should learn something by doing. You should be able to do it again, even if you do it differently the second (or third, or fourth) time around. The same goes for development when you are learning. The benefit of writing code is that you can put it into source control and all those ideas that you first had and threw away, are safe for you to find again.

If you allow yourself to be willing to throw your code away, you'll be helping yourself learn.

Begin again

Solve the same problem twice and you might discover something you hadn't realized the first time around. While this is not an article about the mechanics of writing extensions for Radiant it is about writing extensions and in order to do that, you must first begin.

After all that, this post isn't really about Radiant, it's about not fearing errors, and about not feeling that editing mere code is a daunting task. I want to encourage any would-be developers to be.

Look for saturnflyer in the #radiantcms IRC channel or on the mailing list. Not every experienced developer may help, but most are happy to help. Just come armed with your info: code, error messages, ideas, etc.

View, Edit and Search your RadiantCMS Database

I came across a handy plugin for Rails applications (version 2.2 or higher) that provides a simple way to view, edit and search the database. Read about it at Neeraj Singh's website.

I thought it would be a useful way to view data in radiant, so I quickly hacked together an extension to view the interface of admin_data.

Originally, the plugin was designed to look into your app/models directory and pull all the classes. But because Radiant loads classes from several locations, it was simpler to just alter this code:

model_dir = File.join(RAILS_ROOT,'app','models')
    Dir.chdir(model_dir) { models = Dir["**/*.rb"] }

to look at the database tables and assume you've followed Rails conventions and load class names according to the table names:

models = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.tables.map{|t| t.singularize.to_s }

The upside of doing that is that it will easily integrate into a system like Radiant.

In a quick test, I found that I also needed to provide a way to alter data in the database without calling validations, so I also provided just that: a button to "Save without Validation!"

At the moment, the extension documentation states that our fork is required and that may remain. The benefit of the original design is that admin_data just looks in the file system for the necessary information, and it preserves any non-standard table naming conventions defined in the models. The downside is that Radiant can't use it like that unless there is some configuration for where to load the models.

Both the extension and the plugin need more tests, but it looks to be a simple way to achieve a separate admin view of data without the need to write all the controllers and views.

I've added it to the extension registry so you can just do a script/extension install admin_data but you'll still need to install the plugin.

How to get what you want

An email from the great Campaign Montior landed in my inbox today and contained a link to a helpful article about getting information on why users have unsubscribed from your email campaign.

This is such a simple concept but it seems that so many seem to be unaware of it. I've recommended this same technique to others in regard to just about anything: if you want something, ask for it.

Many not-for-profit organizations understand this, others seem to miss it. Certainly the way that you ask will have an affect on the answers, but not asking is a great way to not get what you want.

• Before you leave an interview ask for the job.
• Ask someone specifically to volunteer for your event.
• Get a great developer on your open-source project by asking.
• Need funding for an expansion to your school/university/community center/whatever? Ask for it.

People respond to questions, and asking them with a certain approach will help you get your answer. Take a listen to some great advice for managers on how to delegate tasks (it involves asking for help).

Asking for what you need directly affects your future. By not asking, it means you're just waiting for your future to happen to you.

Radiant Comments and Spam

I've been working with the Radiant Comments extension trying to pull in the various changes from the community and just planning to clean things up in general.

Rather than dealing with an outside service for spam filtering, I'm working on the idea of a simple question to block spam. The comment form asks a simple question that a spambot might not know. It may require more work, but some users of Radiant may find things difficult enough without needing to go to Akismet or Mollom for spam filtering. Yes, I know that's a simple task, but for some just the idea of yet another thing to do gives them pause.

So with this post, here's my test of the spam_answer_tag. It's easy to use: you simply add

What color is a stop sign? < r:spam_answer_tag answer="red" />

I'll certainly be doing more work on the extension to clean things up, but I felt that it needed at least a simple CAPTCHA type of option built-in without all the downsides of generated imagery CAPTCHA.

Let me know what you think!

UPDATE: after reading Adam's comment about the number of questions I realized that you can easily provide your own list of options with Radius tags that are already a part of Radiant. Just use r:random and r:option.