Until last week, I kind of thought moving to Ruby on Rails was stupid for long time developers in another language (like me) - what was the point of learning a totally new language?

Well until Friday night, when I was reading some article about Rails (I forget what it was), I suddenly got a burst of “lets have a look!”. I typed rubyonrails.com into my browser, and continued to look at the screencasts and the rest of the site/wiki for a while, until deciding I would in fact try it - I had nothing to loose! I downloaded it and got RadRails (an IDE for rails), then started doing the really basic stuff, like creating projects, doing some Hello Worlds’ - all looked great, and the simple MVC file structure was easy to understand after using CakePHP! By this time it was already 4am, and while I was very much excited to carry on, I needed rest.

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I’ve been playing around with Drapper for a while now, and I honestly have to say - its one of the coolest little web apps I’ve seen in a long time in terms of the “Wow I have so many bloody uses for that!!” factor! I have lost track of how many times I have had to preg_match() [arrgghh!] myself towards some nice output from a service which doesn’t have an API (read: Xbox Live Gamercards), and now, this simple service does most of the work for me:

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One thing which I hate is slow sites. If I’m googling for something, and a page I’m trying to load is taking its time, I usually click the next interesting link. So when I had finished nuefoo using a pretty optimized Wordpress system, I was pretty let down with my cheap Dreamhost hosting (to be honest - what did I expect?).

As the months went on, the gap between my first blog post, and a new one was ever growing, mainly because I realised that anything I did post would probably never be seen, as if anything I did post actually got Dugg to the front page (which I would be utterly proud off), or even got linked by somebody, the visitors would either be put off by the slow loading (upwards of 5-10 seconds at times), or the fact that Wordpress would return the database “Wordpress can’t connect to your database” error or even worse, not load at all, leading to “lol digg killed ur server!!!” comments on digg. And remember this was a simple styled Wordpress blog, which I expect is utterly polished and optimized by several people - what would happen if I tried to run a custom app using the CakePHP framework?

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I’ve always wondered what would be the easiest way to have a vast spelling checker for small phases, for use if your site takes a user string, searches the database, but returns no results. At first I thought about algorithms to compare the words to results in the contents of the database, so I did I quick google search, and right there, on the top of google, was my answer!

Googles “Did you mean” feature not only finds the nearest result to what the user typed, but also the most common search phrase if the query was vague - just what you need, eh?

I guessed this has been done before by somebody, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I quickly threw together a PHP script to test it out…

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