Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch

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The load balancing, auto scaling, and cloud monitoring features are now available for Amazon AWS. The features work together to help you to build highly scalable and highly available applications. Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon EC2 capacity, Auto Scaling dynamically scales it based on demand, and Elastic Load Balancing distributes load across multiple instances in one or more Availability Zones.

The measurements collected by Amazon CloudWatch provide Auto Scaling with the information needed to run enough Amazon EC2 instances to deal with the traffic load. Auto Scaling updates the Elastic Load Balancing service when new instances are launched or terminated to automatically scale the load-balanced capacity. You can instantiate, configure, and deploy these important system architecture components in seconds.

Read more of the article – New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch.

Django Best Practices

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“This is a living document of best practices in developing and deploying with the Django Web framework. These should not be seen as the right way or the only way to work with Django, but instead best practices we’ve honed after years of working with the framework.”

Read the article in full – Django Best Practices.

Seeker is alive

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The name ‘Seeker’ is derived from the position in the game of Quidditch from the world of Harry Potter. The seeker is the one who goes after snitch and is considered one of the smartest players in the game.

We intend to make our seeker equally smart; it will always get the latest Cricketing information for you. It will continue to grow with features, options and many good things. :-)

Just add seeker@ocricket.com as a buddy using GTalk or any Jabber client and have fun. The first thing you can do is of course, type ‘help’.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

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Hadoop as a service. Basically a web based GUI around Hadoop – you could roll this yourself on EC2 but for a small markup on regular EC2 prices you get to avoid the extra work setting everything up. Data processing scripts can be written in Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++ and are loaded in to S3 before firing off the job.

Check out Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

Harnessing Twitter power for Cricket

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Twitter for CricketWe’ve released the special Cricket Talk, an enhanced Twitter stream powered by user suggested Cricket related keywords.

The app is powered by the user, which means, users suggest a keyword and is voted by other users. Once a keyword becomes hot enough, we track it and is relayed for other users to enjoy the Twitter Experience on a single interface where others can reply there, relayed back to their Twitter timeline. A user can also vote against a keyword and we stop tracking it goes below its hotness level.

Enjoy the Cricket Talk. Tell us what you feel, where can we improve to make your Twitter-Cricket experience a better one. We’re expecting that Cricket Talk will be a way easier way to track Cricket on Twitter and be amongst other Cricket fans across the globe.

So, go ahead and Talk Cricket.

Note: Please keep the keyword suggestion to Cricket related ones (I know you can suggest anything!) And yes, we use Twitter’s brand new OAuth, so you won’t have to disclose your Username/Password to our application.

Real World Django

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There’s plenty of material (documentation, blogs, books) out there that’ll help you write a site using Django… but then what? You’ve still got to test, deploy, monitor, and tune the site; failure at deployment time means all your beautiful code is for naught.

Read Read World Django as it unfolds the tutorial which examines how best to cope when the Real World intrudes on your carefully designed website.

Introducing Runs and Scores

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User Runs

We’ve just added the ability of users to accumulate RUNS. Runs are like reputations which you can get depending on your activities on oCricket. The more Runs you collect, your reputation and rank grows in the user hierarchy. More Runs also means, you’ve more power like editing someone’s content, voting down a comment, even moderating the contents.

It’s not at all hard to get runs. Most activity on oCricket are accounted for in calculation of runs. Writing an article, uploading a photo or a video, submission of articles, photos or videos from external sites accounts for your runs. Amass enough runs and you can be a demi-god on oCricket.

Voting

All contents on oCricket now bears the ability to be voted which will affect their appearance on the oCricket timeline (in the works). Comments can be voted up or down, so can the links, articles, photos or videos. These vote up and down activity adds up to the score of a particular content and in turn affects your runs.

You can also favorite (bookmark) contents on oCricket.

Hope you’ll like the new feature additions, go score higher runs and we’ll surprise you with what you can do with your runs.

New Feature: Live cricket scores and secure email addresses

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We are happy to announce that oCricket now has live cricket scores of international matches! The scores can be seen on the top right hand corner all pages on oCricket and they look like the one below:

Live Score on oCricket

But don’t you think it would be cool if you could put live cricket scores on your website/blog too? We have done exactly that. Now you can easily add a simple JavaScript one-liner to your website and get live Cricket scores. Additionally, we also have a WordPress plugin for all you WordPress users. Head over to toys.ocricket.com for the details.

We have also made a small change which stops spammers from stealing your Email address from your profile page — your Email address is now shown only to your friends and taken some measures in making your Email completely spam proof (hint: the Email that you see on your profile is an image).

Enjoy, and watch out for some really awesome features in the very near future :)

Washington Times releases open source projects

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The Washington Times has released few open source projects. Visit Washington Times Open Source for more.

The Washington Times has used open source projects for some time now. All of our servers run Ubuntu linux. Our database servers use PostgreSQL. Our web servers use lighttpd and Apache httpd, and memcached. We develop entirely in python, using the django framework. We are obviously strong believers in open source.

Vote for oCricket at KillerStartups

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oCricket at KillerStartupsVery recently, we submitted oCricket to KillerStartups for a review and they’ve reviewed us. Please Vote for oCricket at KillerStartups.

KillerStartups reviews established and successful websites as well as new and upcoming internet startups. KillerStartups.com is a user driven Internet startups community. It’s intended for entrepreneurs, investors and bloggers to stay updated on up-and-coming Internet startups and successful websites.

Rails versus Django

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“These are the sorts of differences seen in both stacks. They are common, and commonly pivotal to arguments comparing the two frameworks. Proponents of one framework typically argue one way ‘because it is the way decreed by our language authors’. So really you’re looking at which language you prefer.”

(Via: SuperJared)