Not just another new directory.

I've just finished the basic work on my new directory at http://www.axelis.com. I haven't put much into the design yet, but the functionality seems to be working fine. The purpose of this directory is to create a link sharing facility. There is no cost to join, and there is no reciprocal link requirement, at least not in the conventional sense. What is required is simple. You have to post the entire category that you are in as a links page on your site and link it somewhere the search engines can find it.

Of course, this means that every other site listed in your category has to do the same thing, putting your link on all those sites. Right now I'm in the process of working out the distribution scheme so I need links in the directory for testing. So get your links in there and in a couple days I should have the code to distribute for page distribution. For the time being think of this as a beta test. Once all the bugs and kinks get worked out we should have a link trading tool that's fair and beneficial to everyone involved.

 

I'm not sure if a lot of people are going to want to give their full address and phone number just to add a link (You must register to add a link).

Also, if you insist on having the requirement, you might want to make it a bit more "international" as it only accepts a US format address.

Plus when I tried to register to test it, I never got an email which is required to place a link.

Way too much to ask of people.

 

Now it just keeps displaying:

Post an update when the directory is actually finished

 

You're right about the address and phone stuff. I've removed it as it really dosen't matter either way. As far as not getting the email I don't know what to tell you. I've tested it against several addresses I have and at least one other person has been able to successfully register and add a link. I don't have a gmail address so I can't test that. I'm not sure why you got that that db error notice, but when I went to phpmyadmin to look at the db it did give me an error initially, then worked fine when I did a refresh. I've tested since then and it seems to be working. I've also put in a request with my provider to make sure things are as they should be. I'm going to remove your user record and you can give it another try whenever you want.

 

I've nailed down the cause of the problem. It seem that just as you were trying to add your link my host company was in the middle of moving my account to another server. I can't tell you how much I appreciate them doing that and giving me no warning at all. It also screwed up some file permissions so for 20 minutues my main site was coming up with all kinds of errors on the front page. Also very helpful as you can imagine.

In any case everything is working now, and I'm getting a decent amount of submissions. Thanks to all who've submitted already, and to the rest of you, what are you waiting for?

 

Added 3 sites. I added the first before knowing that I had to activate membership. So, hopefully you got it.

I actually like the look and feel a lot. Pages loaded quickly, and everything worked. Thanks.

 

Looks nice and clean, registered and added 1 site

Congratulation!
Pierre

 

I will echo that...why does it allow you to enter url's without activating. It leaves you wondering if you were successful or not.

 

That's a good question. In fact I noticed that happening and wondered myself. When I first set up the registration process and tested it couldn't even log in to set anything up without being activated. I'm in the process of looking at that now, should have it fixed shortly. Must have mis-tweaked something somewhere.

 

Ok, that's taken care of. It looks like when at one point I changed the way I was setting the cookie I left a parameter in a condition unquoted when I shouldn't have. In any case, there are a couple of guys that still haven't confirmed their registration that have links in. I'm not going to worry about it, but if they don't confirm they won't be able to get back in. Also, since the server move I've noticed I've gone from PHP 4.3.10 on the previous server, (an upgrade they also screwed up by setting safe mode on for several hours), to 4.3.7 on the new one. I'm not sure if that had an impact.

Also, I've gotten a lot of the preliminary work done on setting up the page distribution process. On the server I'm just going to generate a text file that includes all the data from the directory database. This file will be generated at least once a day. Then I'm going to distribute a piece of code that will grab that file and parse out the links relevant to the site that's grabbing it and write them to a text file as formatted links. The code writes that links file and a time file that it looks at every time it runs. If it's been 24 hours or more since the last time it resets the time file and regenerates the links file. That way it stays up to date every day and doesn't put too much of a load on my server or yours. You'll be able to run the thing via an include in one of your pages, or just run it separately. Then all you have to do is pull the links txt file into a page with an include and you're set. Still have some details to work out with it, but functionally it works pretty well.

 

I assume the links.txt file will reside on your server. If so, are there any issues with including a file on another server? I've not tried that.

 

Actually, the answer to your question is yes and no. The main links file does reside on my server and is updated at least once a day from the database. Your links file resides on your server. That's what the code is for. It goes out once a day and gets all the links for your category from the file on my server and updates your local file with them. As far as including a file from a remote server it is usually not a problem, at least no functionally. It's just a matter of being able to read the file from the server. I don't recomend it generally though as it can be a real BW drain if you're not careful.

 

Are you also thinking of mod-rewriting the URLs?

 

I hadn't really thought about it at this point, but it's worth consideration.

 

I added my sites thanks!

 

submitted one,thx