similus

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= Similus

Similus is a Ruby library that allows to find similar objects and recommendations using generated activity. Examples of usage:

• Find similar articles based on what other users also viewed.
• Recommend articles to users based on their activity.

== Authors

{Horaci Cuevas}[http://github.com/horaci] [email protected]

== Quick overview

• Setup
• Store activity
• Show similar objects
• Show recommended objects

== Setup

Before using Similus, you need to setup the redis configuration. In rails this can be done inside a preinitializer in the config/preinitializers folder.

Similus.config do |config| config.backend = :redis config.redis_server = "localhost:6379" config.redis_db = 8 end

=== Store activity

Locate where you want to store activity. For example, in Ruby on Rails, inside the show method of the ArticlesController class:

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController def show @article = Article.find(params[:id]) Similus.add_activity(current_user, :show, @article) end end

=== Show similar objects

Once there is some activity stored by users, you can query for similar objects:

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController def show @article = Article.find(params[:id]) @similar_articles = Similus.similar_to(@article) end end

=== Show recommended objects

Even better than just showing similar articles, show recommended articles for the user's previous activity when there is a logged in user:

class HomeController < ApplicationController def index @recommended_articles = Similus.recommended_for(current_user) end end

== Configuring and installing Similus

As of current version, Similus only supports redis backend.

Install Redis 2.0 from [http://code.google.com/p/redis/] and start the server.

Install the Similus gem:

gem install similus

== License

Copyright (c) 2010 Horaci Cuevas

See LICENSES for details.