Earlier today B-Rhymes was posted on MetaFilter.

Since then it’s been getting social links from delicious.com, stumbleupon, and twitter.

This is all awesome! Hey everyone, hope you like the near rhymes!

Update: The app is now available.

The iPhone app I mentioned before is really coming along:

We’re using PhoneGap — a framework that allows you to write iPhone apps with web technology (JavaScript, CSS, HTML) — which I love because I love web development (it also happens to be my area of expertise). In addition, PhoneGap should make it easy to port the app to Android and BlackBerry.

I can’t believe how fast this is progressing. It should get to the app store before long, and then to your iPhone! Here’s a screen shot in the mean time.

Comments, suggestions welcome.

Apparently the terms slant rhyme and near rhyme are interchangeable, as are the terms half rhyme, off rhyme and oblique rhyme. I’ve been using the terms near rhyme, and almost rhyme for the most part when describing this site. I find people automatically understand these terms and I don’t have to work so hard explaining things.

I bring this up because I’ve been reading about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and apparently I need to research keywords that people put into search engines, especially using this google tool, and I’ve discovered that there’s almost 10x as many searches done for slant rhyme than there are for near rhyme!

Now, my intuition tells me that 90% of those people are wondering ‘wtf is a slant rhyme’, or maybe it’s a British term or something. However, it shows you shouldn’t assume anything, or you’ll be barking up the wrong tree for half your life.

Update: Apparently it’s a hiphop term. Now I feel like an idiot for thinking it might be British.

My friend Pat proposed making a B-Rhymes iPhone/Blackberry app so you can find near-rhymes on the go. We talked it over, and it seems like it would be pretty straightforward. So look for it in the near future at your local app store.

B-Rhymes used to be pretty slow, so in the last month I’ve made a lot of optimizations to make it serve up near-rhymes faster than ever. I’ve:

• Rewritten the entire site with Kohana (a PHP framework), switching from Django (a Python framework).
• Made a ton of web optimizations as advised by YSlow. eg. gzip, image optimization, cache configuration etc.
• Streamlined things, getting rid of unnecessary JavaScript, and added paging so you don’t have to wait for all the rhymes to come in before you can see it.

But after doing all that it was still slow! not all the time, just sometimes. See, I was on what’s called a Virtual Private Server (Cool people call it a VPS), meaning I was sharing a big web server with lots of other people (it being “Virtually Private”, ie, not private at all). If your neighbors don’t behave, and I’m guessing mine weren’t, it can really hurt your performance. So then I was like, screw it, I’m getting a new server!

So I got a new VPS from lylix, and then blam! It’s been blazing ever since! My benchmarks are twice as fast as before. So maybe I didn’t have to do all those optimizations after all, though it won’t hurt to have them, especially once you beautiful people tell all your rhyming friends about b-rhymes, and the traffic really starts coming in (hint hint!).

This is the inaugural post on the B-Rhymes news blog that’s going to keep you up to date on the latest developments and improvements happening with B-Rhymes.

If you haven’t already, take it for a spin. Look up a word like ‘metropolis’ to see it at it’s best. Right now, in this early iteration, it works best for words with at least 2 syllables. For a quick overview about what it’s doing, check out the about page.

This is a bit of a work in progress, so I would love, love, love feedback. Just leave me a comment at the end of this post letting me know what you think.

-ML