Hey everyone, I just released a tool that I hope you will find useful. It's called DIRZAP. The user manual is here. In a nutshell DIRZAP: 1. Brings you directly to hundreds of directory's submit pages. 2. Pre-fills information about your website including the description, name, email, etc. 3. All you have to do is choose the best category and click 'Submit' and then go on to the next directory. 4. Keeps track of all the directories you've visited so you don't waste time. It's completely free to use. It's a tool I've been using in-house for a while now and I thought others might find it useful. I'm going to be adding some more features in the very near future. Let me know if it saves you time.
read # 3. "All you have to do is choose the best category and click 'Submit' and then go on to the next directory." So it actually takes you to the submission page, where you can, I suppose, fill up image validation as well.
Everyone likes a freebie. Good luck with it. Will wait and see from someone else if it's faster than the rival offerings, as the having to put the code into your own site to verify the site is your own seems a bit pointless. If it's faster, will take advantage though. Thanks.
I'm thinking develop the a tool like yours for the past 1 month. Looks like I have to give up now, because there is already one. But I'm going to develop one that will be embedded in my website, not desktop version. If you don't mind, we can work together for that.
bigturnip, are you getting images for most of the directories? If not, let me know. I know there are some directories that it doesn't work for. I tried to make it work for as many as I could without programming special cases. Zazoog, PM me your site that you're limited to validating and I'll get it fixed for you. hhheng, DIRZAP is web-based.
Great.. Looks good. I started submitting my new directory using that tool.. But If I stop in the middle of the submission, it will again start from the beginning or from the place where I stop? And I want to know how many directories are there in your list at present.
It will continue from the place you stop. We track all the directories you have submitted to or skipped and we won't show those again for the same site. There are over 200 directories right now, and I'm adding more and more everyday.
I tried 10 and 6 were okay and 4 weren't, maybe I was unlucky. However, the ones that don't work really should be taken out because they serve no purpose if you can't submit the form. I will give it a bit longer tonight and see what sort of percentage work. The only thing I find annoying is if you submit a listing it clears the form, so if I want to submit to a second category I have to fill the whole thing in manually. Do you screen the directories at all? I'm just curious because it would be helpful to let users know how popular a directory is. At the moment it can sometimes be quite hard to work out even what directory you're submitting to, let alone how big or popular it is. It might seem like I'm being critical, but hopefully you'll see it as positive criticism. I really like the idea and intend to use it a lot once a few functionality problems are ironed out.
I have tried about another 15 submissions tonight and all except for 2 worked. One was the same problem with the captcha image and one just wouldn't let me select a category, so it seems things were a lot better tonight. What would be good is a 'report' tickbox and a 'reason' textbox next to the 'not a free directory' one and then users could report directories that aren't working properly. Also, do you class directories which require a reciprocal link as free? It would be good if we could choose to filter them out somehow if they are allowed.
I appreciate you taking the time to tell me what's wrong! Thank you for the feedback. I will be integrating several changes over the next couple of days based on your suggestions. I'll let you know when they are complete.
I made fixes which should address several of your concerns. Here is an excerpt from my blog entry: I think the only one I didn't address was clearing the fields after a successful submit. I've never submitted my site to more than one category at a directory for fear of pissing off the owner. Is that something alot of people do? The other reason I didn't implement that is because it is sometimes difficult to see if the submission worked or not. One way to tell is if the fields cleared. If they didn't clear you know there was an error. I have a couple of ideas for improvements that I probably won't get to until next week, but if anyone has any other feedback I'll be glad to add it to the list! Let's hear it!!