I just joined the Mystical Maze traffic exchange. It has a unique feature which is a maze you can play after you've viewed some web sites. Perhaps I should start developing my own maze program furthur.

Get a free Mystical Maze account here.

Here is a sample of my maze program. It is written in PHP, and I've also created a 3D maze in C++ for Windows, and a 2D maze for PalmOS.

http://sproutworks.com/maze3.php

Dani took some pictures of a monarch butterfly on our wildflowers.

Click the link to view them on my picture website, sproutpics.com

http://sproutpics.com/index.php?gallery=butterfly

I found this site called Link Vault through a mission on BlogShares. When I loaded Link Vault, the first thing I noticed was a graphic of a combination dial. I read some of the information on the page, and gathered that it is an automated system of exchanging links.

The way it works is simple. You add some code (PHP or ASP) to your site, which displays other members' links. In return, other members will display your links. When you display links, you get 'vaultage', which are like credits to display your links.

I thought this sounded interesting, so I created an account. I added my site, and it is awaiting approval. I glanced through the instructions a bit. You can choose to use either PHP or ASP code to handle the link automation. I chose PHP, since that is what my site is written in.

Being a PHP programmer, I looked through the code a bit. The main script is about 400 lines, and contains no comments. I didn't look at it enough to get an understanding of the total program flow.

In the instructions, one thing that seemed iffy to me was the code to use ini_set to add a few levels of parent directories to the include path. Since I have designed all of the scripting on my site myself, I'm not too sure about adding stuff to my include path.

I don't see why the link vault script needs access to so many levels of paths. I would like it to keep all it's stuff in one directory. Since I haven't looked at all the code in depth, I don't know if that approach would work.

In summary, I think link vault is a good idea, but I think the code should not need to modify my include path.

http://www.link-vault.com/ad-network

The other day I found this site called Ping-o-Matic! Ping-o-Matic's main purpose is to let the major blog/rss aggeregator sites know that you've updated your blog. I am going to try Ping-o-Matic after I post this, and if seems beneficial, I'll make a script to automatically send a ping when I post new stuff.

Also, at the moment I only have 1 RSS feed, which gets content from my blog. I am going to start making feeds for each topic in my forums, and see if that helps get more visitors that are looking for specific topics.

SproutSearch, my blog search engine, now has thousands of feed files, thanks to a new RSS script that I wrote. I will try to get some of those distributed on the aggreagators.

In a few seconds I will send a ping.
http://pingomatic.com/

Over the last few days I've been researching free ways to promote my site. I have been visiting many blog directories and submitting SproutWorks and SproutSearch. SproutSearch has really been growing it's content, and now has links to over 1.3 million blogs. It is now my task to turn it into a unique and useful reference. I have started to organize the blogs into pages related to various words and phrases. I even thru in some foreign-lanugage blogs for good measure. My mind is actively churning the data mining possibilities.

I have joined several traffic exchanges.

When I am surfing on a traffic exchange, I wonder if the extra traffic I receive is going to make much of a difference. If I sit here clicking away for an hour, is it worth the extra maybe 100 visitors I will get? If you are reading this, I hope you are getting at least a morsel of worthwhile information.

I am working on a web/blog promotion page, to try to get someone to sign up under me in these traffic exchanges. It seems like there are only a few good resources on traffic exchanges and RSS promotion tools.

My email address is plauged with spam, I get a few hundred spams every day. I use spambayes to filter out most of it, and it goes into a spam folder on my computer. At least every few days, I get a "Nigeriam email scam". These are written to look like a personal email from some banking official in Africa somewhere. They always say that someone has died, leaving a huge sum of money. For some reason, they need you to help retrieve the money, and you get a part of it.

Being a knowledgable computer user, I don't take these seriously, and I read them just for laughs. However, there are a lot of naive people online. Apparently, these scams rank as the 3rd or 4th top money maker in Nigeria's econonmy, with over 100 million stolen each year. As a public service, I will post one such message I found in my inbox recently. If you search Google for some of the terms in this message, you can find other copies of it.

Here it is:

FROM:MR.CHRISTOPHER GEZI
Business Phone: 27 83 416-1704
PLEASE REPLY DIRECTLY PERSONAL EMAIL
mrgezi2002@hotmail.com

HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

I know that this message will come to you as a surprise since we dont know each other before but for purpose of intruduction,I am MR.CHRISTOPHER GEZI. An
Auditor in AMALGERMATED BANK OF SOUTH AFRICA (ABSA).

There is an account opened in this Bank in 1980 and since 1990 nobody has operated on this account again. After going through some old files in the records, I discorvered that if I do not remit this money out urgently it would be forfieted for nothing. The owner of this account is MR SMITH B. ANDREAS, a foreigner, and a miner at Kruger Gold Co.,A Geologist by profession and he died since 1990.

No other person know about this account or anything concerning it, the account has no other beneficiary and my investigation proved To me as well that his
company does not know anything about his account and the amount involved is (US$ 18.5)Eighteen Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars. I am only contacting you as a foreigner because this money cannot be approved to a local Bank here, but can only be approved to any foreign account because the money is in US Dollars and the former owner of the account is Mr.Smith B. Andreas is a foreigner too.

I know that this message will come to you as a surprise as we do not know ourselves before.we will sign angreement but be sure that it is real and a
geniune business.Please reply urgently so that I will inform you the next step to take immediately.Send also your private phone and fax number including the
full details of the account to be used for the deposit.

I want us to meet in person or sign a binding agreement to bind us together so that you can receive this money into a foreign account or any account of
your choice where the fund will be safe.And I will fly to your country for withdrawal and sharing and other investments.
I am contacting you because of the need to involve a foreigner with foreign account and foreign beneficiary.

I need your full co-operation to make this work fine because the management is ready to approve this payment to any foreigner, who had correct information
of this account which I will give to you later if you are able and willing to handle such amount in strict confidence and trust according to my instructions and advice for a mutual benefit because this opportunity will never come again in my life.

I need truthful person in this business because I dont want to make mistake,I need your strong assurance and trust.with my position now in the office I can
transfer this money to any foreigners reliable account, which you can provide with assurance that this money will be intact pending my physical arrival
in your country for sharing.I will destroy all documents of transaction immediately we receive this money leaving no trace to any place.

You can also come to discuss with in person after which I will make this remittance in your presence and two of us will fly to your country at least two days ahead of the money going into the account.I will apply for annual leave to get VISA immediately I hear from you that you are ready to act and receive this fund in your account with appropriate clearance forms of the ministries and foreign exchange departments.

At the conclucion of this business, you will be given 25% of the total amount ,70% will be for me,and while 5% will be for expenses both parties might have incurred during the process of the transferring.I look forward to your earliest reply and PLEASE REPLY DIRECTLY PERSONAL EMAIL:mrgezi2002@hotmail.com

Yours truly,

MR.CHRISTOPHER GEZI.

I have started running a few promotions for SproutWorks Software. My traffic has been increasing, and I've been excited about the growing opportunity to show the world some of the software I've written.

Here is some output from my code counter program:

Total lines:
22,679
Total Pages: (12pt Times New Roman double spaced)
872.3

Sproutworks.com is operated using the SproutWorks Content Management System, which is written in PHP. SproutWorks CMS is written for PHP 4, with PHP 5 compatibility. MySQL powers the information retrieval for this site.

SproutWorks CMS contains forums, chat, account management, menus/tabs, a gallery, a news aggregator, and more. Research into PHP image processing using the GD library has produced several graphical scripts. SproutTree is currently being displayed in the background of http://sproutworks.com

SproutTree generates a drawing of a tree.

A gradient script produces interesting gradient backgrounds.

The blog directory is one of my projects I have a great deal of Interest in. In my studies of downloading and parsing web pages, I thought a blog aggregator would be an interesting project to develop. I already had written an HTML parser for my Google aggregator. This let me parse Bloggers XML feed in a few lines of code.

All I had to do was store this information and reproduce it in an organized format. I had the initial program running in not much time. I added caching to it and it performed okay for my modest hosting account. Now it is getting me more search engine traffic because it is amassing a lot of content that people are interested in.

It seems like I get good search engine rankings on a lot of niche topics, like the title of someone's blog. Usually when you are performing search engine optimization, you try to get high rankings in a few key search terms. I am getting high rankings on random terms, based on whatever the search engines get out of my site. I wish I could peer into the brain of Google and find out why it probes my site in such an odd fashion. Google likes to use GET parameters it sees on one page, then apply them to another page. My scripts don't all take the same input values, but Google hasn't figured it out because my blog displays a changing subset of my forums.

I am now starting to get incoming links to the second pages of some of the blog index. This means some search engines now are actually using some of the hundreds of extra pages of blogs they haven't been using. I don't know how they decided that everything but the first page was less informative. I heard about a Google sandbox, where a site must stay for a while before it shows up in search terms. Maybe they have multiple sandboxes per website. That would explain a few things in my site statistics.

On Wednesday I attended March Mingle at Dave & Busters in Mission Valley.

http://www.marchmingle.com

March Mingle is a large gathering of web developers in the San Diego area. I met some techies, and won a coffee mug in a giveaway. I met Bernard Wong, who presented at MSDN events the next day. I am now more interested in .NET development. I think I'll stick with PHP for my web stuff, however. PHP does what I want it to do, it does it well, it's free and widely available.

At MSDN Events in San Diego, I learned how easy it is to make a fully functional .NET application. It's a more visual way of creating an application than I'm used to. I won a copy of Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Windows. That will come in handy.

My first visual development environment was HyperCard, which used to come with a Macintosh. Sadly, Apple has abandoned HyperCard, which could have served the same purpose as Flash does today. It was ahead of its time, I suppose. I started making HyperCard 'stacks' when I was 13, and I made an expansive adventure game. I also took a HyperCard class at Bell Jr. High.

I just read that the author Hunter S. Thompson has commited suicide. I read 'Fear and Loating in Las Vegas' a few years ago and found it very interesting. I've also seen the movie a few times. The movie is interesting as well. I don't know much else about him.