Well I've never used Heroku or IndexTank (or Rails for that matter), but I've had a small weekend hack I've been wanting to do for a while now involving a spattering of search. I was going to try out Solr but I think I'll learn Rails instead. I guess their marketing worked on me.

Btw, we need more hacking trophies, something made out of circuit boards, transistors, and wire, something that will put those little league "I played a sport!" trophies to shame. I suppose a Macbook will be an acceptable substitute.

A small note, if you don't want to actually use Rails, you can use any Rack-based Ruby web framework (aka all of them). You may want to also look at http://sinatrarb.com, which is much simpler than Rails.

That said, Rails is really good! Especially Rails 3.

Thanks Steve, that's good info. I've got a pretty good backing on Sinatra from other languages so that will ease the learning curve on Ruby.

No problem. I happen to be hacking on a Sinatra app that runs on heroku right now, so here's a Gist:

https://gist.github.com/744173#file_a%20simple%20sinatra%20a...

Check it. I wrote this mostly from memory and a few quick copy/pastes, I'll update something if I did something dumb. But that should work.

You'll probably want to add their gem to the gemfile for this contest. Stick "gem 'indextank'" in your pipe and smoke it (aka 'bundle install' again).

Wait a minute, can I use heroku/indextank to build a better search for hacker news with this? I like the real time part of what i see Reddit has with indextank. Can we include votes to help sway search results? Or is this a project that HNs won't like me working on? Am very new to this.

How much will it cost for me to run indextank? am thinking of some thing big like one of the examples or all of the eventbrite database.

For the contest you get a $300 Premium plan for free. You can see the pricing table at http://addons.heroku.com/indextank

This is just the thing to inspire me to finally research a decent search implementation for some of my projects. And I'm glad IndexTank has taken the time to write clients for stock Ruby and Python. Make my life easy.

If HN ran on Heroku, it would be trivial to add search to it...

You can do real-time search for anything with a live feed. Maybe not HN, but there are lots of sites that would be happy to see a better search function just to test-drive it.

super cool. curious to see what kinds of apps people will pull off mashing up different api's. music lyrics, cddb, and youtube would be kinda cool...

I'd add grooveshark to that mix

Great idea.

fabulous!

nice