Solr is a great application, and its out-of-the-box features still amaze me. With the newer versions, it’s incredibly easy to hook Solr up to any data source (using the Solr Data Import Handler) and just let it do its thing.

I don’t have any thoughts about communication, but one of the tennents of the code4lib community is “less talk, more code”. Public media spends a lot of time planning collaborations or trying to find funding (or worse, talking about doing those things) instead of actually doing it. I’d love to see more prototyping, iterative development, and open sharing and discussion about what new and interesting services we can provide.

On an earlier post to the list, John Tynan suggested the potential of providing a “More Like This” service for NPR News data, and in the interest of just getting something out there, I spent a little bit of time hooking everything together. To give it a pretty front-end, I also hacked in a Solr AJAX interface.

The NPR/Solr demonstrator uses this solr endpoint. I’ve locked down the indexes, but left everything else open so you can see how the pieces fit together. If there is enough interest in this application, I would be willing to develop it out further if you provide ideas, use-cases, etc in the comments.

The source code is available from the github project npr-solr.

None of this took very long to develop, the most time consuming part was importing from the paginated NPR API (with its absurdly low 20 records-per-request maximum..).