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.