Grabbing Hanuman’s Long Tail - Jacob Singh online

I had the privilege of working with Srijan Technologies this spring on Drupal and Agile Development trainings for their team and helping them get Apache Solr kicking for the India Environmental Portal which just launched last week to much fanfare.

The site is based on Drupal 5 and features:

• Over 250,000 consciousness–changing-content-laden nodes
• 7,500+ terms that would give any librarian a serious biblio-complex
• Feeds from hundreds of in-house and our of house publications
• A killer example of Apache Solr being amazing: Apache Solr search for “water”
• And probably a lot more. You should read more about it at Srijan’s site: http://blogs.srijan.in/2008/08/10/a-year-to-live-a-powerful-way-of-living-your-life/ (A full fledged case study is in the offing)

What is an environmental portal?

India Environmental Portal is an initiative of the Center for Society and the Environment, one of India’s oldest and most revered environmental NGOs. Here is an excerpt from their about page:

This is the age of environment. And to make a difference, in our lifestyle, in policy and in practice we need information, which is accessible, well categorized and easy to use. The India Environment Portal is our effort to put together a one-stop shop of all that you want to know about environment and development issues. Its politics is overt: to build open, networked and informed societies, who can use knowledge to make change…..

This is a people’s portal. It will actively collate and exchange data, research and information from people working in the field, in campaigns, in scientific institutions, in research and in industry.

I recommend checking out the about page to find out more about this exciting resource:
http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/content/about-us

Congratulations to Ipsita, Rahul, Syed, Shashank, and all the rest of the excellent team at Srijan!

And a special thanks to drunken monkey and Robert Douglass for their work to integrate Drupal and Apache Solr.

Some press about the launch

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/National-portal-on-environment/347761/

http://in.news.yahoo.com/43/20080811/812/tnl-national-online-portal-on-environmen.html

http://www.thehindu.com/holnus/002200808112067.htm

http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=104697&keybold=climate%20forest%20environment%20warming

http://www.indiaprwire.com/businessnews/20080811/32685.htm

http://alootechie.net/content/indiaenvironmentportalorgin-launched-provide-environmental-information

I’m doing a training for Srijan this week with their developers on good version control and change management practices, and while googling around I ran into this:

http://www.polarion.org/index.php?page=overview&project=subtrain

It is a fantastic set of training materials generously provided under CC 2.5 by Polarion.org.

it features ppts for admins as well as users, evaluation and feedback materials, as well as sets of exercises to simulate normal working environments. I can’t say enough about these materials, they are really top notch.

Major cred goes to the good folks providing them. Please check them out!