I recently finished the front-end of my blog search engine. I'm trying to build it up at the moment, in preparation for selling it some time soon (if anyone's interested, please pm me). I hope for traffic and use to become significant one day. I'd be grateful if those of you with blogs would be kind enough to submit them Any comments, feedback and bug reports welcomed too. I would like your thoughts so I can implement them. You'll notice it's dependent on submissions as it does not use a spider. I'm debating whether to create my own and use one, though. Some features I'm working on adding: - Users who submit receive a unique "key" which they can use to edit the details indexed, such as keywords, again. - Post submissions/ping service. What do you think? Thanks, Brum.
If you are relying on submissions to build the database, then the search result would not be very effective since it would cover only very limited blogs...which would eventually hamper your traffic stats...just my 2 cents... Btw....best of luck to your efforts in improving the same... Regards, RightMan
I tried it. It's fine. You need to remove the word "Optional" next to the picture, if you're require the submitter upload picture. Or, if it's optional, you need to modify your web code to not validate the picture field.
Ah sorry about that. I got carried away with making sure everything was secure that I undermined the optionality. Sorry about that, it's fixed now RightMan, I am debating whether to use a spider or not, you see the problem is that if I create a script to crawl the web and add blogs, seeing as PHP image library neglects flexible screenshot functions (it requires the server to use its desktop) it would be very inconvenient to have most of the blogs without corresponding pictures. I'm thinking of adding an RSS ping function too which would bring in lots of updated blogs and articles.
A great site, concept, idea, though I do find the submit part less noticeable try to make it more catchy to get more notice. Also, you don't seem to have an "About" or "Contact" page. Try adding some more necessary informative content.
Thanks Rapidmoney and Anmar Today I'll be tinkering with it and should hopefully finish an about/contact page. I'll take what you said on-board Anmar; I'll make the submitting more obvious. I might code some blog software to allow the owner to add and update information too.
I've made quite a few nice changes to the site. Do you agree it looks much better? Updates: 1. Streamlined display - fewer images are used in order to speed up the rendering of the layout - more CSS reliant. 2. Spatial consistency - smoothed the flow around the site with uniform positioning, 3. New graphics - added eye-catching colour to 'submit your blog' button, advertisement and 'More' buttons, 4. Search handling functions - fixed some bugs and improved handling of search input, 5. Changed 'latest submissions' - now only five are shown instead of ten and only those with uploaded pictures are too. Should give slightly more incentive to upload own picture. 6. Blog area - began front-end for my blog system. Thanks for your interest. Further feedback would be greatly appreciated
The front page seemed to very faded almost washed out. I would brighten it up a little bit. Other than that it is good.
Thanks for the feedback b2breps. Any idea on a particular colour library/scheme? EDIT: I have updated the colours. It should now look less 'faded'.
Hi googlepwner. Do you mean instead of entering keywords, the keywords/title should be taken automatically? I have been thinking about that, but there are websites without keywords. I think ultimately the best idea would be for the script to take and use content, maybe the few most common words, from the blog.