Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Leveraging Lucene & POI to index Excel Documents

I wrote my first piece of link bait today. Based on recent discussions on BoS about link bait and several great posts by Patrick McKenzie on the subject, I figured I should spend a little time and get it done. I wrote a small code tutorial on using Lucene with the Apache POI project to intelligently index Excel documents. While the readers of this kind of content are not my target customers, any inbound links are sure to help.

There is also some truth to me wanting to give back to the larger software development community. I know Google has saved me countless hours of work but finding a little piece of information that solved my problem. Hopefully my tutorials will do the same for someone else.

Since it is technical by nature, I submitted it to programming.reddit.com and see if I can get any traction. If you have a reddit account, and like it, I would appreciate a vote for it. I added the reddit button on the bottom of the tutorial. I have a few other tutorials that I plan to write and see how they work.

Ideally I should have a blog under Omni Customer Support to host the tutorials, but I don't have one installed. I've been meaning to install WordPress, but haven't gotten around to it. Rather than wait for that, I posted the first tutorial and I'll move it (with the proper redirects) once I have a blog set up there. I'm pulling the trigger on this, rather than waiting for it to be perfect.

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