GSoC wrap up & more updates

Better late than never, here’s a summary of the activity from the last few months. GSoC has concluded, and I’m happy to say that the project has been successful. I didn’t manage to complete all the envisioned user-facing features, but on the other hand we made heaps of improvements on other areas, e.g. the whole architecture and hosting platform of the app. Even though GSoC is over, I am still working on the site, albeit at a slower pace than before. Future improvements will be announced on this blog as usual. Without further ado, here are the latest updates on the site:

The latest changes to crantastic have focused on keeping you up-to-date with what’s going on with CRAN and crantastic. You can now sign up for regular email updates, we are tweeting daily digests (also available on identi.ca), and there are a range of feeds you can sign up to if you’d like to track an individual author, tag, or package.

We’ve also started sending weekly announcement emails to r-help. This will help you keep up with the latest and greatest R packages by listing new packages, updates and new reviews on crantastic.

Another major feature we’re rolling up is full text search for packages, documentation, and functions. The first stage of this development is already available on the site, making it much easier to find packages. The search results are being improved as users continue to tag packages, since packages now can be found by searching for tag names. Popular packages with many users will show up higher in the results. If you haven’t tried the new search yet you can give it a spin here. We are working on some quite exiting features for the search – another update will be provided when we are ready.

Please let us know if you find these new features helpful, or if you have any ideas to make the site better. Visit the site, rate & review your favourite packages, and give us some feedback! If you run into any bugs or errors, please report them at GitHub Issues or send us an e-mail.

Written by Bjørn Arild Mæland, 18 Oct 2009