The other day I read an article that said that a lot of search engines will ignore parameters in URLs after the question mark. Google has indexed my message board just fine, and also the first page of most of my blogger index. I don't think it has indexed any of the other numbered pages in each letter, which constitute the vast majority of the blogs.

A while ago I used Apache URL rewriting to make the URL for the first page of each letter into a more search engine friendly format.

In a fit of brilliance, I went ahead and made every page use this nicer format. My hope is that the other pages will start to get included in search results. If they do, I should get a boost in traffic.

So let us all pray to the search engine gods, for them to spider more of the blogger index. Amen.

I happened to clicked on the WebMonkey Frontdoor email I got today, and there was a nice article on finding out how many users are visiting your site. The first method simply counts the number of files in your session directory. I implemented this method. Now the users online box can show how many people are viewing the site, and they don't have to be signed in.

I've added a contact form to the site, something it's needed for ages. Maybe someone will decide to use it. I also added the Blogger index to the main tab bar and added a Blogger search box.

I also improved the layout of the forum messages slightly.

The first SproutWorks script modified in 2005 is the blogger aggregator.

The blogger aggregator now can read the contents of more types of blogs. The parser now look for more class names from which to grab the articles. Each article can now display a title, if a compatible template is used.

The parser still cannot read the blogs in which the entries are not contained within a named class. I think these are old formats, but I will need to study the templates to find out.

The script now makes a link to the orginal blog.

I changed the style of the articles a bit. I'll probably add some graphical flair later.

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I have also designed a new gallery. It will be integrated with the site shortly.

Welcome to SproutWorks Software, now featuring a Blogger Aggregator. "What is an aggregator?", you ask. An aggregator is one who collects things. In this particular case, it is a program that collects information from Blogger.

Blogger is a free blogging tool owned by Google. The other day I created an
account on Blogger. I looked through the source code of my blog and thought that it would be relatively simple to extract the text of each post. So in the last couple hours, I have created a program to do that.

My biggest curiosity at the moment is:

When Google finds the link to my blogger script, it will spider the links it contains, and index the text of the latest posts on Blogger. Then eventually Google's index of my site will grow and my site will turn up in more search results. Only time will tell.

I just updated the blogger aggregator. I have split it into two main scripts. One script checks blogger for updates every 10 minutes, and puts any new blogs into a database. I discovered that blogger has an XML file for their latest updates, which is easier to parse than the HTML file, and it has less overhead. My script now reads the blog names and titles from the XML file.

The second script displays the blogs in the database. You simply click on a letter and all blogs starting with that letter will be displayed.

The next thing to add is pagination. After I let the updater run for a while, there could be hundreds of thousands of blogs in the database.

I upgraded my gradient script a bit so that it can now make subtle color blends. I will develop a way to edit the gradient backgrounds in the theme editor.

I just wrote a simple blog script to display selected messages from the forums on the main page. This is now the default entry page. Ever since the site was relaunched with a PHP backend, the products page has been the entry page.

The products page is a mess, and I haven't worked on any of my products for quite a while. I figure most people don't come here looking for PalmOS software anyway, so I changed the default page. The products page is in the main sections module, for those of you who are actually looking for Palm software.

Sproogle hasn't been working, I don't know for how long. I just tried using it and it wouldn't return any results. I tracked down the problem, apparently Google stopped defining a font color for the text that shows how many search results there are. They just put color=. I know they are trying to squeeze out all the extra bytes they can, but I think they're going a little overboard.

Anyway, I modified my script to look for the exisitance of any color tag, not just a black color tag. I also fixed the code that looks for links to the other numbered search pages. Previously I was just making a list of the next 10 pages, but for searches with not many results, 10 pages is too much.

On a side note, damn it is really raining hard.

The counter now keeps track of how many visitors this site recieves per day. If it seems to be working in a few days, I will update the calendar day info to include stats on site visitors each day.

The counter mysteriously keeps resetting to zero, so I just added file locking to the code. Hopefully that's what the problem was. I also need to filter out bots and stuff from the stats, and provide more details of visitors.