December 29, 2010 at 20:08Proverbs.ru -
Have a nice day to all habrazhitel!
Merry Christmas New Year is coming. Usually at this time, people begin to strongly believe in miracles, God, the renewal of themselves and their lives. And I thought: why in this case, these people (who in 8 cases out of 10 will spend the January holidays in front of the monitor) did not talk about such a spiritual and intellectual site like Pritchi.ru ?
The author and owner of the site is Andrey Viktorovich Yakushev, he is 42 years old, he lives in Rostov-on-Don. Given the specific focus of Habr, I decided to just interview A.V. as the chief technical specialist in this subject.
I hope it brings you some interesting minutes.
0. Tell us about Andrei Yakushev - who is this person?
It is very difficult to write about yourself, especially when a general question is asked, to which you can answer anything you want. I, like any other person, have many sides, qualities and personalities. But here, I think, it makes sense to say about those of my parties that at least somehow relate to the site of Proverbs.ru.
So, I was born as a programmer in 1988, when I started writing programs - first in BASIC, then in Pascal, then in Assembler. Since about 2002, I have been programming for the web.
In 1992, I could be called a poet. Although the first poems appeared back in 1983, but then they looked like ugly ducklings.
In 1996, I became a journalist, working in the Rostov newspaper Easy Breath.
My birth as a philosopher could be observed in 2000, when I came to grips with the study of the Bible.
Around the same year, I was born as a writer. Then I began to write short stories, mostly pure fiction, less often - based on what I watched. Despite the fact that I started writing short stories a long time ago, my print media were not connected with my previous work. Around the same time (2005 - 2006), collections of parables began to appear, where I am the author and compiler, and the book
“Getting Started on the Internet. Quick Guide ”, written by me personally.
In 2008, I tried to open my own charity fund. Rostov newspapers wrote about these attempts, but, unfortunately, my efforts crashed into the rocks of stereotypes and administrative obstacles. But I still did not leave charity. Since May 2009, the site of Proverbs.ru monthly transfers money to the account of the Children's Homes charity foundation.
In April 2009, I participated as an expert in the television program "Night Channel" on the TV channel "Capital", dedicated to the "books we read."
That's probably all.
1. How did you get the idea to create a parable site? How did it all start?
If you start from afar, then I got carried away with parables a very long time ago, in the year 90: a person whom I can in some sense call my Master often used them to illustrate my own views on life.
When in 2000 I got access to the Internet (from work, there wasn’t much thought about homework then), I came across the “Most Different Parables” newsletter, which was then conducted by a girl named Tanya Krol. I decided to collect these parables. I considered the newsletter a rich source, but I wanted to have these parables at hand and use them in my life. Since I am a programmer, I decided to make an electronic collection of materials from this newsletter. By that time, she had been leaving only a few months, and after sitting for half a week, I drove all the parables that came out in her into a hlp format collection, and then I wrote a letter to Tanya Krol with an offer to advertise my collection in my newsletter: “All issues of the newsletter are in one file” . She agreed. She said: “Wow, how many people said they were ready to help, and when I agreed, they disappeared. And you did it first, and then you said. ”
A few months later, the newsletter stopped coming out. Tanya is gone. I wrote letters to her, but she did not answer. I myself began to receive letters from readers with questions about whether there would be a sequel (I was perceived as a co-author). I said that I do not have access to the newsletter. Then they started asking me to update at least the collection. And I began to look for materials myself and upload new versions of the collection.
For a year I tried to find Tanya, but could not. People wrote letters and asked to continue mailing. Then I wrote to the administrators of Subsribe.ru to send the newsletter to me. They tried to contact Tanya on the details that were indicated in her author's profile, but they also did not succeed. And then they handed me the newsletter. That was in May 2003. Since then, I have been releasing the newsletter.
After some time, I began to receive letters asking them to organize a discussion of parables. But in order to discuss parables, they must be posted on the Internet in the public domain. The mailing list archive was not suitable, because there were more parables during the downtime of the mailing list than its releases. Then I opened the section “Proverbs” on my site avy.ru. For some time, not very long, a community worked on the Rostov.ru portal to discuss parables. But then the portal was reformed, and the discussion was closed there. I made a forum on my site so that you can discuss parables directly on the site.
In 2006, the idea of separating parables from my personal site matured. In December of the same year, the site of Proverbs.ru was opened in the form in which it is now. The site is constantly being upgraded. Since 2007, I have got helpers who process and upload texts to the site.
In the summer of 2009, an application was filed for the registration of the Pritchi.ru trademark;
in November 2010, a positive decision was received. Now, Proverbs.ru is a registered trademark.
By the way, the original collection still exists, grows and replenishes. Only he has undergone a change: from the hlp format, he turned into chm. This was due to the fact that the latter is supported by a large number of platforms, in particular (which is valuable) mobile devices. So those people who want to constantly have at hand all the parables located on the site can purchase this collection and, figuratively speaking, always carry it in your pocket.
2. If you enter the word “parables” into the search engine, almost 5 million links are displayed, but yours is the first. How are Proverbs.ru different from other parable sites?
The peculiarity of the site, unlike many other collections of parables on the Internet, is that parables on the site are not laid out by visitors, but by a team of administrators. We and only we are responsible for the quality of the material located on the site. First of all, it should be just parables. Although the definition of a parable is quite broad, a certain tendency is emerging now and, I think, the word “parable” takes on more clear boundaries. In addition, the text is being processed, which includes determining the section for its storage, correction (correcting spelling and punctuation), determining the meaning of the parable and selecting for it the keywords that make up the index on the site. If you look more generally, we can add that we are perhaps the only site that has representative offices on Twitter, LiveJournal, and various social networks. This is no longer just a place
3. How was the site created in a technical sense? What difficulties did you encounter, were there any non-standard moves?
One of the main reasons for creating the site was the need to discuss parables directly next to the parable itself (on my website parables were in one section, and they were discussed on the forum). Therefore, initially I had a choice: either adapt the forum engine and lay out parables in the form of forum topics, or do it yourself, and write some kind of discussion mechanism and everything else related to it. I chose the second, because, in addition to the discussion, other ideas began to appear that were still easier to implement myself, initially exactly as you imagine it.
I have long dreamed of creating a forum in a hierarchical form (I somehow saw one in the Orthodox Talk - I liked it). In such a forum, you can do without quoting, because it’s immediately clear what message is being answered, and quotes do not allow a coherent reading of the discussion. I understand that these are controversial statements, nevertheless there are not so many hierarchical forums, but this was a personal wish, and in a sense it paid off.
The next idea, which I really wanted to implement, and which was supposed to be the “highlight” of the site, is to analyze the preferences of visitors based on parable ratings and make individual forecasts: the site offers visitors parables that they have not read (not rated), choosing exactly those which are more likely to appeal to each individual visitor. The idea is not mine, it is again peeped. There was once a site iqrate.com, which arranged the same with films: it was necessary to evaluate several films that you watched; and based on these estimates, a forecast was created. The ratings of other visitors were checked, matches for the estimated positions were searched, and the unvalued positions with the maximum rating were selected. So it is with us.
Now the site of Proverbs.ru makes not only online “predictions”, but also offline: tens of thousands of newsletter subscribers receive a new parable 3 times a week and evaluate it. As it turned out, many of them do not have Internet access. Those. email for them is the only window on the world wide web. And I gave them the opportunity not only to vote via e-mail, but also to
order a parable supposedly interesting to this reader for my reader. Now the site makes approximately 1.3 million sentences (each reader is offered the 30 most interesting parables; therefore, the site makes an offer of approximately 45.5 thousand people). About every 30 minutes, a program is launched on the website that looks to see who needs to update the offer (or
the person has already appreciated something from the proposed one, or appreciated something else, and the list available for him needs to be adjusted).
The main difficulty with the site was that the site is now located on a shared hosting. And when the load began to increase, I had to think about how to resolve issues with the hosting support service, which made claims about exceeding the load limits on the CPU and database server. One step was an upgrade of the tariff plan, the transition to more expensive conditions, where these restrictions are not
hard. But that did not save. The fact is that many just wanted to download the whole site, this, of course, created a very big load. I had to roll up my sleeves again and start programming. I wrote a script that does not allow this. If the user accesses the site too often, he will be warned with a request “do not rush to press F5”. If this warning does not lead to the desired result, then the user's IP address is blocked by htaccess for 2 months ( link to the script for the curious).
But the problem was not completely resolved. Search engines also did not doze off. And they did not want to ban them at all. Then I decided to write another utility - caching sql queries. This thing is not unique, many engines use it. I decided to do this in my own way, as I myself imagine it and the way I need it in my work ( link ).
4. What is the audience of the site? What does Pritch.ru have to do with his reader? Apparently, your site tries to focus on the person as much as possible - does your activity go beyond the world wide web?
The audience of the site is 62% male. These are those who registered as regular visitors. But the newsletter subscribers are 58% female. These are mainly people from 18 to 40 years old (most of them are 26 to 30), but there are also those who are over 55 (about 6%). Geography is the whole world, including Africa, Australia and South America. Surprisingly, the site comes from Japan, New Guinea, Korea, New Zealand, South Africa and Ireland.
Most of the visits from non-CIS countries are in the USA, Germany and Israel.
People who are interested in parables are not quite the average Internet user. These are people who think, feel, value the accuracy of the word, and the purity of the language. They can be called the elite, the intelligentsia of the Web.
After Proverbs.ru found its current form (with the possibility of discussing parables), relationships with readers became relationships. There are more authors who want to post their parables on the site. And having placed them, they also enter into discussions with other readers, discussing their work. In addition, I am very grateful to the readers and visitors of the site for writing letters with suggestions for improving it.
Thanks to the site, my activity related to parables in 2004 came true, so to speak: I was offered to publish the collected parables in printed collections. Since 2005, the Rostov publishing house Phoenix has released a series of 9 thematic collections, which have now become a bibliographic rarity. Now 2 more collections are being prepared for publication. I will tell you a secret - they will be more voluminous than the former.
5. Now a series of updates are taking place at Pritchah.ru. Please tell us what
these improvements are, and what is the reason for their appearance?
The site, since its opening, has been constantly updated. Initially, there wasn’t: an indication of the size of the parable, movement in the rating, the ability to evaluate comments to parables, send the parable by e-mail, and much more. But recently, there have been many ideas for improving the site, which I wanted to implement immediately, and not gradually, and I got down to business. The first step was
adding audio versions of parables. Then we succumbed to modern trends and on December 23 this year bought the Cyrillic domain of parables.rf, it redirects to our website. After the phrase “Pritchi.ru” became a trademark, I had to open a kind of representative office on various sites where people could contact us, I already mentioned this. But the main goal of change is always to increase the interactivity of the site. I think that now sites that do not meet the requirements of WEB 2.0 will not be interesting to visitors.
6. Surely a lot of interesting things happen on your site. Could you tell about something remembered?
Indeed, there was everything: both pleasant, and not very, and funny.
Pleasant - these are thankful letters from readers. Often they write about how parables miraculously help in current affairs. One woman said that her friend died, and for several days she did not go on her own. And then suddenly a parable from Walsh came in the mailing list, and somehow she brought the woman's condition back to normal, reassured her. The woman wrote about it. It was nice, and even nicer to know what it is - not uncommon.
From unpleasant events, mistakes are recalled. For example, there was a case when I once had to apologize to readers for publishing a “false” parable. I posted the parable from Oscar Wilde “The Nightingale and the Rose”, took this text from somewhere on the Internet, from some forum and did not check the original. And then it turned out that someone rewrote the end of this story in his own way, as he wanted, and did not say anything about it. And on my site for 2 years hung a parable of Wilde with someone's alteration, until someone who was familiar with the original text made a remark to me.
But it seemed funny to me when a visitor registered on the site and began to criticize everyone in a row: both the authors of the parables and other visitors who left their comments. In the end, he began to use inappropriate criticism in his criticism, after which he was banned.
Thank you for your attention and patience! I hope the post has brought you pleasure and / or benefit.
Have a nice holidays!
Merry Christmas New Year is coming. Usually at this time, people begin to strongly believe in miracles, God, the renewal of themselves and their lives. And I thought: why in this case, these people (who in 8 cases out of 10 will spend the January holidays in front of the monitor) did not talk about such a spiritual and intellectual site like Pritchi.ru ?
The author and owner of the site is Andrey Viktorovich Yakushev, he is 42 years old, he lives in Rostov-on-Don. Given the specific focus of Habr, I decided to just interview A.V. as the chief technical specialist in this subject.
I hope it brings you some interesting minutes.
0. Tell us about Andrei Yakushev - who is this person?
It is very difficult to write about yourself, especially when a general question is asked, to which you can answer anything you want. I, like any other person, have many sides, qualities and personalities. But here, I think, it makes sense to say about those of my parties that at least somehow relate to the site of Proverbs.ru.
So, I was born as a programmer in 1988, when I started writing programs - first in BASIC, then in Pascal, then in Assembler. Since about 2002, I have been programming for the web.
In 1992, I could be called a poet. Although the first poems appeared back in 1983, but then they looked like ugly ducklings.
In 1996, I became a journalist, working in the Rostov newspaper Easy Breath.
My birth as a philosopher could be observed in 2000, when I came to grips with the study of the Bible.
Around the same year, I was born as a writer. Then I began to write short stories, mostly pure fiction, less often - based on what I watched. Despite the fact that I started writing short stories a long time ago, my print media were not connected with my previous work. Around the same time (2005 - 2006), collections of parables began to appear, where I am the author and compiler, and the book
“Getting Started on the Internet. Quick Guide ”, written by me personally.
In 2008, I tried to open my own charity fund. Rostov newspapers wrote about these attempts, but, unfortunately, my efforts crashed into the rocks of stereotypes and administrative obstacles. But I still did not leave charity. Since May 2009, the site of Proverbs.ru monthly transfers money to the account of the Children's Homes charity foundation.
In April 2009, I participated as an expert in the television program "Night Channel" on the TV channel "Capital", dedicated to the "books we read."
That's probably all.
1. How did you get the idea to create a parable site? How did it all start?
If you start from afar, then I got carried away with parables a very long time ago, in the year 90: a person whom I can in some sense call my Master often used them to illustrate my own views on life.
When in 2000 I got access to the Internet (from work, there wasn’t much thought about homework then), I came across the “Most Different Parables” newsletter, which was then conducted by a girl named Tanya Krol. I decided to collect these parables. I considered the newsletter a rich source, but I wanted to have these parables at hand and use them in my life. Since I am a programmer, I decided to make an electronic collection of materials from this newsletter. By that time, she had been leaving only a few months, and after sitting for half a week, I drove all the parables that came out in her into a hlp format collection, and then I wrote a letter to Tanya Krol with an offer to advertise my collection in my newsletter: “All issues of the newsletter are in one file” . She agreed. She said: “Wow, how many people said they were ready to help, and when I agreed, they disappeared. And you did it first, and then you said. ”
A few months later, the newsletter stopped coming out. Tanya is gone. I wrote letters to her, but she did not answer. I myself began to receive letters from readers with questions about whether there would be a sequel (I was perceived as a co-author). I said that I do not have access to the newsletter. Then they started asking me to update at least the collection. And I began to look for materials myself and upload new versions of the collection.
For a year I tried to find Tanya, but could not. People wrote letters and asked to continue mailing. Then I wrote to the administrators of Subsribe.ru to send the newsletter to me. They tried to contact Tanya on the details that were indicated in her author's profile, but they also did not succeed. And then they handed me the newsletter. That was in May 2003. Since then, I have been releasing the newsletter.
After some time, I began to receive letters asking them to organize a discussion of parables. But in order to discuss parables, they must be posted on the Internet in the public domain. The mailing list archive was not suitable, because there were more parables during the downtime of the mailing list than its releases. Then I opened the section “Proverbs” on my site avy.ru. For some time, not very long, a community worked on the Rostov.ru portal to discuss parables. But then the portal was reformed, and the discussion was closed there. I made a forum on my site so that you can discuss parables directly on the site.
In 2006, the idea of separating parables from my personal site matured. In December of the same year, the site of Proverbs.ru was opened in the form in which it is now. The site is constantly being upgraded. Since 2007, I have got helpers who process and upload texts to the site.
In the summer of 2009, an application was filed for the registration of the Pritchi.ru trademark;
in November 2010, a positive decision was received. Now, Proverbs.ru is a registered trademark.
By the way, the original collection still exists, grows and replenishes. Only he has undergone a change: from the hlp format, he turned into chm. This was due to the fact that the latter is supported by a large number of platforms, in particular (which is valuable) mobile devices. So those people who want to constantly have at hand all the parables located on the site can purchase this collection and, figuratively speaking, always carry it in your pocket.
2. If you enter the word “parables” into the search engine, almost 5 million links are displayed, but yours is the first. How are Proverbs.ru different from other parable sites?
The peculiarity of the site, unlike many other collections of parables on the Internet, is that parables on the site are not laid out by visitors, but by a team of administrators. We and only we are responsible for the quality of the material located on the site. First of all, it should be just parables. Although the definition of a parable is quite broad, a certain tendency is emerging now and, I think, the word “parable” takes on more clear boundaries. In addition, the text is being processed, which includes determining the section for its storage, correction (correcting spelling and punctuation), determining the meaning of the parable and selecting for it the keywords that make up the index on the site. If you look more generally, we can add that we are perhaps the only site that has representative offices on Twitter, LiveJournal, and various social networks. This is no longer just a place
3. How was the site created in a technical sense? What difficulties did you encounter, were there any non-standard moves?
One of the main reasons for creating the site was the need to discuss parables directly next to the parable itself (on my website parables were in one section, and they were discussed on the forum). Therefore, initially I had a choice: either adapt the forum engine and lay out parables in the form of forum topics, or do it yourself, and write some kind of discussion mechanism and everything else related to it. I chose the second, because, in addition to the discussion, other ideas began to appear that were still easier to implement myself, initially exactly as you imagine it.
I have long dreamed of creating a forum in a hierarchical form (I somehow saw one in the Orthodox Talk - I liked it). In such a forum, you can do without quoting, because it’s immediately clear what message is being answered, and quotes do not allow a coherent reading of the discussion. I understand that these are controversial statements, nevertheless there are not so many hierarchical forums, but this was a personal wish, and in a sense it paid off.
The next idea, which I really wanted to implement, and which was supposed to be the “highlight” of the site, is to analyze the preferences of visitors based on parable ratings and make individual forecasts: the site offers visitors parables that they have not read (not rated), choosing exactly those which are more likely to appeal to each individual visitor. The idea is not mine, it is again peeped. There was once a site iqrate.com, which arranged the same with films: it was necessary to evaluate several films that you watched; and based on these estimates, a forecast was created. The ratings of other visitors were checked, matches for the estimated positions were searched, and the unvalued positions with the maximum rating were selected. So it is with us.
Now the site of Proverbs.ru makes not only online “predictions”, but also offline: tens of thousands of newsletter subscribers receive a new parable 3 times a week and evaluate it. As it turned out, many of them do not have Internet access. Those. email for them is the only window on the world wide web. And I gave them the opportunity not only to vote via e-mail, but also to
order a parable supposedly interesting to this reader for my reader. Now the site makes approximately 1.3 million sentences (each reader is offered the 30 most interesting parables; therefore, the site makes an offer of approximately 45.5 thousand people). About every 30 minutes, a program is launched on the website that looks to see who needs to update the offer (or
the person has already appreciated something from the proposed one, or appreciated something else, and the list available for him needs to be adjusted).
The main difficulty with the site was that the site is now located on a shared hosting. And when the load began to increase, I had to think about how to resolve issues with the hosting support service, which made claims about exceeding the load limits on the CPU and database server. One step was an upgrade of the tariff plan, the transition to more expensive conditions, where these restrictions are not
hard. But that did not save. The fact is that many just wanted to download the whole site, this, of course, created a very big load. I had to roll up my sleeves again and start programming. I wrote a script that does not allow this. If the user accesses the site too often, he will be warned with a request “do not rush to press F5”. If this warning does not lead to the desired result, then the user's IP address is blocked by htaccess for 2 months ( link to the script for the curious).
But the problem was not completely resolved. Search engines also did not doze off. And they did not want to ban them at all. Then I decided to write another utility - caching sql queries. This thing is not unique, many engines use it. I decided to do this in my own way, as I myself imagine it and the way I need it in my work ( link ).
4. What is the audience of the site? What does Pritch.ru have to do with his reader? Apparently, your site tries to focus on the person as much as possible - does your activity go beyond the world wide web?
The audience of the site is 62% male. These are those who registered as regular visitors. But the newsletter subscribers are 58% female. These are mainly people from 18 to 40 years old (most of them are 26 to 30), but there are also those who are over 55 (about 6%). Geography is the whole world, including Africa, Australia and South America. Surprisingly, the site comes from Japan, New Guinea, Korea, New Zealand, South Africa and Ireland.
Most of the visits from non-CIS countries are in the USA, Germany and Israel.
People who are interested in parables are not quite the average Internet user. These are people who think, feel, value the accuracy of the word, and the purity of the language. They can be called the elite, the intelligentsia of the Web.
After Proverbs.ru found its current form (with the possibility of discussing parables), relationships with readers became relationships. There are more authors who want to post their parables on the site. And having placed them, they also enter into discussions with other readers, discussing their work. In addition, I am very grateful to the readers and visitors of the site for writing letters with suggestions for improving it.
Thanks to the site, my activity related to parables in 2004 came true, so to speak: I was offered to publish the collected parables in printed collections. Since 2005, the Rostov publishing house Phoenix has released a series of 9 thematic collections, which have now become a bibliographic rarity. Now 2 more collections are being prepared for publication. I will tell you a secret - they will be more voluminous than the former.
5. Now a series of updates are taking place at Pritchah.ru. Please tell us what
these improvements are, and what is the reason for their appearance?
The site, since its opening, has been constantly updated. Initially, there wasn’t: an indication of the size of the parable, movement in the rating, the ability to evaluate comments to parables, send the parable by e-mail, and much more. But recently, there have been many ideas for improving the site, which I wanted to implement immediately, and not gradually, and I got down to business. The first step was
adding audio versions of parables. Then we succumbed to modern trends and on December 23 this year bought the Cyrillic domain of parables.rf, it redirects to our website. After the phrase “Pritchi.ru” became a trademark, I had to open a kind of representative office on various sites where people could contact us, I already mentioned this. But the main goal of change is always to increase the interactivity of the site. I think that now sites that do not meet the requirements of WEB 2.0 will not be interesting to visitors.
6. Surely a lot of interesting things happen on your site. Could you tell about something remembered?
Indeed, there was everything: both pleasant, and not very, and funny.
Pleasant - these are thankful letters from readers. Often they write about how parables miraculously help in current affairs. One woman said that her friend died, and for several days she did not go on her own. And then suddenly a parable from Walsh came in the mailing list, and somehow she brought the woman's condition back to normal, reassured her. The woman wrote about it. It was nice, and even nicer to know what it is - not uncommon.
From unpleasant events, mistakes are recalled. For example, there was a case when I once had to apologize to readers for publishing a “false” parable. I posted the parable from Oscar Wilde “The Nightingale and the Rose”, took this text from somewhere on the Internet, from some forum and did not check the original. And then it turned out that someone rewrote the end of this story in his own way, as he wanted, and did not say anything about it. And on my site for 2 years hung a parable of Wilde with someone's alteration, until someone who was familiar with the original text made a remark to me.
But it seemed funny to me when a visitor registered on the site and began to criticize everyone in a row: both the authors of the parables and other visitors who left their comments. In the end, he began to use inappropriate criticism in his criticism, after which he was banned.
Thank you for your attention and patience! I hope the post has brought you pleasure and / or benefit.
Have a nice holidays!