Tutorial Seek Development Blog

Tutorial Seek will be the world’s first Tutorial Indexing Search Engine. With an automated submission process, it brings a website always pouring out with fresh learning documents and content that is guiding the members of today’s community to the ones of tomorrow. The concept of having a webmaster only submit a website to the database will relieve a lot of stress on those who want to get visitors to read more of their articles. By providing content for the people of interest, they will need people to read them in order to keep a solid desire to want to learn more and to be the writers of the newest tutorials to the community they are supporting.

This project has improved my skills as a developer and will hopefully continue to raise the bar on my future releases and projects. Coming up with ideas that aren’t taking by the ever changing world wide web is sometimes hard, but taking suggestions and dreams that people have, and twisting them to create a solution for everyone, including yourself is rewarding in the long run.

From the feedback given by the community that has had a little taste of that the Seek Bot will offer webmasters and myself alike, they are curious to how it will work, and yet excited to try it out and see what it is like for themselves. It is expected to be a huge success and will continue to grow to be a very recognized website. Of course marketing the website for it to be known throughout many other sites relating to tutorials will be another project of interest, it will be considered to drive the website to the best that it can be.

Looking back on the first day that I actually started to work on the project, organizing ideas and concepts that kept flowing through my mind and writing them down on the process journal, to the expected launch date and management of the upcoming site, I have to say that I am very satisfied with the finished product. It is well original, simple and clean and to be very pleasing to the new generation of tutorials and tutorial indexing, that is – Tutorial Seek.

Through Approaches to Learning, new ideas and thoughts have been able to filter through my project.  I have had to come up with new themes and concepts to resolve a problem and create a new interface for which my applications were to be incorporated.  An algorithm was necessary for Seek Bot to work, a bunch of math functions and simple problem solving to determine and weigh tutorials based on how much views they are given by the tutorial index itself, and even how high they rank compared to the rest of the website.  Even though I have mastered the languages necessary to process the project, there were times where I needed to do some Research and Development of my own in which to test things that I have not learned, coming up with new logic and putting it together until it worked and to understand how that works and to comprehend why it does not work.  To use libraries and extensions for my server environments, in which made distant dreams closer to the home plate of reality.

Creating any learning resource and an extensive tutorial library for readers gives a complete and fulfilling sense of Community and Service.  It may not be to the local community and neighborhood in your city, but it is the online community accessible to anyone in the world at any time they please.  A tutorial index is primarily a website that creates a library of tutorials on other websites, so that a reader, who is looking for a specific topic, can query the database of many tutorials instead of looking on many other sites for that one tutorial.  It makes it easier as a central learning environment, like your own public library.

Creating your own website already falls in the category of Homo Faber.  Tutorial Seek was developed and coded from simple files on the every day server, to a complete user application interface.  Managing the project on my own was something as tedious as a one man team building a space rocket.  Now that an every day computer user can setup their own web page on Google, only the best of the best can really produce a website in which people will look at in aw, and wonder how it works.  Tutorial Seek is an example of one of those websites, one that will stand out from the normal pile, not only was it coded by one person, but it was coded with the intention of every line that powers each web page to be unique from any other website on the net.

Being a professional web developer for the past 2 years has thought me many things such as patience, and the common logic that is used in developing even the most complex applications.  It has grown into a passion now, something that I love to do and enjoy.  Having this natural inspiration for this field, it was easy to get into the groove and mood necessary to build and complete the massive website.  A simple saying “Code is Poetry” can be used to describe the concept of programming.  It goes over many revisions, certain parts which needs more emphasizing than others, double checked over and over for grammatical errors and irrational key points which aren’t necessary and only cause complications.  That is what a true programmer is all about.

Every project will encounter problems that need to be resolved in order to proceed.  At one point or another, there are things that need to be coded, but there is no way that you know how to put this into pure logic.  You can think it out on paper and in your head, but you cannot put parts of it together.  Things like these are eventually accomplished by taking the problem from a different angle and starting over from a safe point.

Many decisions were necessary in order to complete Tutorial Seek.  I had to outsource designers and artists that could deliver a product in a very professional manner that is visually pleasing to most crowds and catchy to keep the users from revisiting the page.  Not only did they have to have skills and talent, but their price had to be reasonable so that I would get the most for my money.

Obtaining the domain name for Tutorial Seek (www.tutorialseek.com) was generally a good start for me. It was given to me as a compensation gift from one of my clients – Dan Richard (www.danrichard.com) for developing his website the summer of 2006. Pixel2Life (www.pixel2life.com), the website that I worked on, is currently the largest Tutorial Index on the internet boasting over 20,000 tutorials from almost 5,000 different websites. The owner had a sister site of Pixel2Life which was supposed to be a “light” version for users who had a slow internet connection but it was discontinued shortly after for certain reasons. The domain was then later put on sale for almost $2,000 but was never sold, so I thought that the name Tutorial Seek would be a good catchy title for any website, and when the idea of a Tutorial Indexing Crawler came into play, it made the dream come even more of a reality.

Setting up a blog on the website itself to temporally get a general reading crowd as well to use as my process journal was an idea that I thought would be very new and unique. Now only does it display a high level of technological advancement to broaden the standard spectrum of any normal personal project, but it also would make sense if my entire project was staged on the web.

Having a high reputation being a very recognized and respected programmer on some online communities would only mean that I was good at what I do - Coding and Web Development. The server environment which would be used is quite popular among most dynamic powered websites, shorted by the acronym: L.A.M.P. Linux, a free open source operating system for modern web hosts to power and provide a foundation for applications to be ran when the demand is necessary. Apache, the most widely available HTTP server on the Internet which is used by web servers to handle requests sent by users. MySQL (pronounced “my ess cue el”), an open source relationship database management system that uses Structured Query Language (SQL) which proves itself to be fast and efficient to handle large amounts of data in a secure and safe manner. PHP, the programming language that allows web developers to create dynamic content that interacts with databases as well as developing web based software applications. The server side essentials in managing and querying information back and forth from database platform to the user’s browser are as vital as the languagse that the browser really reads. Those are the client side languages such as the powerful scripting language for web pages which adds functionality in a smooth and professional manner called Javascript. The web’s standard, HTML (Hyper Text Mark-Up Language) which is the coding syntax used to create the web pages that browsers read and interpret as text and images and so forth. Cascading Style Sheets, commonly known as CSS which a formatting language that tells the browser the format and appearance of the web page, defining colors of font, background and even the size and dimensions of objects placed on the page – the visual and pleasing aspect of viewing websites. All of these resources, which are free to learn about and use made it easier for a fixed budget, since they are all common and widely used everywhere. The entire server and client environment was already mastered and I was well knowledgeable about them all.

The exact process of developing the website cannot be detailed because simply of the fact that the source code and manner in which it was developed is private to the owner itself and its developer, I – Jamie Chung. The basis would definitely be involved for any modern website. The web host, in which was no additional charge since I already owned a small hosting company and outsourcing a designer for a web layout as well as a graphical artist for the logo and the mascot identity of the website. I invested over $300 outsourcing these artists to do this graphical work for me. It was not my specialty to do artwork or web design, but to provide a good functional website; a visual pleasing aspect is needed as well.

As the project came together, it became clear that the concept was simple – accurate and it worked. I spent many hours, even days debugging thousands upon thousands lines of code. Revising the logic hundreds of times, making sure that there were no loop holes or security exploits that were visible for the modern web hacker. That all data and information sent to and from the server, was truly valid and no unwanted input. The spider reached a point where it could be tested, where real sites were added to the spider’s database to index for their tutorials – a success when put to the test. It actually worked. The artificial intelligence of making decisions on what pages are tutorials and which are not, copying images as well as keywords from that page, and even the URL to that specific tutorial for the database itself. Recounting statistics and the number of visits to that site automatically during specific set hours of the days and specific times per week, months or even year so that to avoid the amount of processes running on the server to be high to slow it down. Users could even currently view that the Seek Bot was up to, a log was placed on Tutorial Seek for the viewer’s pleasure.

The website itself has not been launched until an unconfirmed date in the early weeks if not month of the year 2007. The purpose of this is the possibility of beta invitations to certain tutorial webmasters and websites - to give the index a go, optimize the algorithm of the Seek Bot to make it as efficient as possible as well as accurate. Almost 6 months of development and production would finally be put to the test, against the entire world.

Come project due date, Tuesday, December 19, 2006 – I knew that it would be rather weird to be turning in only a Written Presentation. The thought came to my mind to invest a little more and get a poster printed professionally with the identity of the website. That would include the Seek Bot, and the written logo of “Tutorial Seek”. Something physical to show representing my work – that I actually did something. Even to frame and put on a wall for later references. A simple poster was designed and I chose FedEx – Kinko’s as the venue for it to be printed.

Updates and new coming ideas for the project and Tutorial Seek itself would be posted on the web blog which would be found at Tutorial Seek (www.tutorialseek.com). Simply for a closer interaction between myself and the general crowd, the ability to post comments on ideas of interests and concepts that they don’t like or need changed. As well as a form of a journal, it will hold the entries of my process journal, which all of them are the entries on the blog.

It is every webmaster’s dream to get their tutorials known to the world, but it has always been a hassle to submit their tutorials into an index maybe because there is simply not enough time or the large amount of tutorials to submit. That dream has been taken further, introducing automated tutorial submission.

Tutorial Seek is a Tutorial Indexing Search Engine. A website that has an index, or directory of tutorials in which are crawled by a spider named the Seek Bot. Given websites that are submitted by the webmasters of the tutorial community, the Seek Bot will visit those websites, and search them for tutorials in which to add to its own database. The entire process, which is done automatically - is what makes this idea revolutionary. Webmasters now don’t submit tutorials one by one as they release new ones that are written, but their entire site.

All of the popular Tutorial Indexes that are out there on the World Wide Web have all the same basic concept of how they work and deliver content to the public crowd. They have the same environment and the same theme of obtaining content. This way is solely relying on the webmasters to submit their tutorials and articles manually into the tutorial index. Using the idea of a tutorial spider is what makes Tutorial Seek totally different than any other tutorial based website on the web.

Being a web developer for almost 2 years, I have gained a lot of knowledge and insight of the most popular and up-to-date programming languages used for server environments. I know that developing such a site would be a challenge, but I was confident that it was possible, and I was driven to deliver that final product for my own personal project.
During the development phase of this project, and even during the beta testing of the website, I have had to find times in which the project would relate to at least three of the five areas of interaction. The final three that I seem to fit best would have been Approaches to Learning – which includes new concepts, techniques and actions necessary for me to complete the project in a timely manner, Community Service – raising the level of knowledge by providing a free learning service to the web development and graphical arts community and Homo Faber – being the production of the website, from the ground up.