Hello.

I am starting to have trouble finding things on my site and am in need of a search engine for the contents. I was thinking of going with Googles site search because I might be able to get Advert Revenue, but I don’t think that it is really an issue.Does anyone know any good, free site searching software. If you do drop me an email: paul.kinlan@gmail.com or leave a comment.

This is the third installment of my Failures of my First AJAX application and it is titled “It looked absolutly terrible!!”If you take a look at my application you will see that it looks diabolical. I realised about five minutes into my experimentation that I really need to improve my design skills. I thouhgt initially that it might have been the tools I was using, but as the old saying goes “A bad worker blames his tools”.

This is the second instalment of the “Failures of my First AJAX application” and is subtitled “It didn’t help reduce bandwidth”.One of the initial goals of the application was to access all the web services directly from the page without having to pass any queries through my own server. This would mean the only data that my server sent to the client would be the HTML and JavaScript for the page.

After months and months at being at the bottom of Technorati Rankings (because I had no one linking to me), I just noticed [besides other problems that I have had with Technorati] that someone had linked to me. It was someone whose article I read after they left a comment in my blog. When I read his blog, I didn’t realise he linked to me.But yay, I have an inward link :)Thanks Zoli ;)You know, I criticize a service, it gets fixed and works for me, and I feel bad for criticizing :)

I was spell checking my last entry, and Blogger’s spelling suggestion for Technorati was Degenerate.It made me chuckle.Bloggers spell checker is so poor, it doesn’t recognise Blog [or British English Spelling]. At least it keeps me on my toes.

I use AWStats for my log analysis, which is the one my host provider uses. I was looking at the logs for the visitors who have accessed my site via a Search Engine.Currently this month, Google is at 4 and so is MSN. Yahoo is nowhere to be seen. Anyway, I noticed one of the searches was for “does blogging make money”. This got me thinking, I’ll type this in on Google and MSN (I can’t tell which search came from which search engine).

After a comment from Zoli Erdos on my blog entry about Technorati, I don’t completly agree with the article, but then again the only problem I have seen is that my posts don’t get indexed correctly [although, each time that I mention they don’t about a day later they appear in the listing]I do however agree with the following statement:Now, let’s talk about communication: emailing techorati support is a complete dead end.

It appears that the RSS feed that Feedburner produces wasn’t outputting any content to the articles.I think I have fixed it. You can view the RSS feed by clicking the Feedburner Icon in the top left portion of the Title. The ATOM feed is at http://www.

Start.com/myw3b has been promoted to the main http://www.Start.com site. It is a really cool AJAX style web portal that processes Web Feeds (RSS etc) and displays them in a really snazzy HTML Interface.The problem that I have had with it is one that I mentioned ages ago (http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/07/startcom-little-annoyance.html) and is still there. It revolves around not being able to cancel a close event on the RSS feed panels that you have when you enter the page.

I would like to add a quick note. The problem I had with their support, may or may not have been rectified. I can see some results that I have been looking for, my main problem is the fact that I didn’t recieve a response from the Technorati Support.A quick email saying: “Your site was black listed” or, “yeah we had a problem”, or “your site was down when we tried to index it so it was taken off our lists”; would have sufficed.

Over on Sifry.com, David Sifry talks about some of the failures that Technorati has been experiencing whist they have been achieving great successes and tries to placate the masses by letting us know the steps they are taking to rectifying their problems.Some of the failures they have experienced are massive slow downs in “cosmos” search and massive backlogs in their support queue.I would like to add in my 2 pennies (2 cents (2 yen etc)) here, I sent a support request in close to three weeks ago now and have still not recieved any reply.

This post is a link to my uncles business, my uncle deals in Recubent Cycles. For anyone who doesn’t know what a Recumbent Cycle is:A recumbent bicycle is a variety of bicycle which places the rider in a seated or supine position (rarely, in a prone position). Recumbents hold the world speed record. The back of the rider is supported, and the rider’s legs are extended forward to pedals that are about the same height as the seat.

Just thought I would say that I have removed Google Desktop Search Beta 2 from my machine. (But I kept the index - just in case)My machine now runs back at normal speed, yeeehaaa!Ah well, you live and learn.

This is the first of my entries about the failures of my first AJAX based web application.I have been talking about the positive successes that I achieved out of doing the little mini project. I must state though, that this has nowhere near been a complete failure, and that for each of the failures that I will talk about over the next week or so, I have still learnt from them and most of what I have learnt will go into the next project that I embark on.

There are several Websites that I really respect on the Internet, one of them is Channel 9.Channel 9 is a Microsoft website that is run by some of the developer/evangelist (Robert Scoble, Jeff Sands et Al [sorry if I missed anyone else out]) guys over there to let the Developer Community know what is going on in Microsoft. Over the past year, I have been watching their videos (Most of them are excellent), just to see what happens there and what runs through their heads.

I have been using Google Desktop Beta 2 for a couple of days, I have not really needed to use the searching functionality, but I can tell you this, it really slows my machine down.Browsing the Web is so slow now, each page can take an absolute age to render.I have also noticed Tabbed Browsing in IE7 (Internet Explorer 7) is pretty much useless on my machine now, if I go to one tab, type the address in that I want to go to, then move to another tab, the content will be displayed in the window I have just moved too.

Finally, here it is after a busy week.What follows is a listing of the code I created to create a proxy that would allow me to access the Yahoo API from any browser with out having to worry about Cross Site Scripting.This works in Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7) and firefox, and is used in my AJAX example.Bascially, it retrieves a POST request from the browser and forwards the result inside another POST request to Yahoo, once I recieve the response, I pass back the XML to the web browser.

One of the other features that my AJAX application had was Related Searches. This API connected to the Yahoo API and performed a query. The query is a single search term; the results are searches that a User could perform to get similar results.For instance if you were to put the keyword “Kinlan” into the API, it might bring back searches that would related to “Kinlan”, so “Funky Person, Cool Dude and Amazing Geeza” might be some of the searhes that would also relate to the topic of Kinlan.

I am coming up to one hundred posts on my site now. Yay!Anyway, I have noticed that I said I would post my Perl request forwarding on my website and then I realised that I haven’t done it yet. So my task for tonight is to put my Perl scripts up online, and start talking about all the things wrong with my first AJAX application.

I have talked about it in the past, but there is an Image Filter Library for .Net available.I highly recomend it for anyone who wants to learn about Programatic Image Manipulation.The article is at CodeProject and it is by Andrew Krillov. The article is easy to follow and so is the code.Here are the two links to the articles [CodeProject] Image_Processing_Lab.asp Motion_Detection.asp I have made a fish eye filter for the API