Tutorial Seek Development Blog

We were told that Mr. Desmond ( Personal Project Coordinator ) will be checking our process journals this Friday. This Friday being Septermber 29, 2006. YAY! I don’t have a lot of entries to show, but then again - it is a website. I can’t be posting source code so that the entier WWW can see my progress. Every now and then, I try atleast once per week I will post something that I was up to regarding the site and so forth. In the near future though, I will be posting code, concepts, designs and bugs fixed. But for now for the pre-beta process, not much can be shown! It is all under wraps.

Some things that have been going through my mind is whether to include user interaction through accounts on the website. As always, security plays an important role in any website’s development and stability - I have been thinking of how to approach this.

Using a forum software with intergration cababilities such as Invision Power Board ( www.invisionpower.com ) will ensure a very fun and rewarding experience with the new features coming out in their 2.1.x series. It would make and give a more community bonded and shared experience to the user. With their new system, it is pretty much guarenteed that it will be secured, heck its shareware! Intergrating the website through that user database would not be hard at all and I would also have ensured security on the website side as well.

Going custom is always the prefered option for websites. They would then have a unique system that users can register / login / change profile settings and so forth. Doing that is also fine by me, but it does not give or make a community atmosphere like the forum software. Obvisouly creating my own forum from scratch is an option but that would take a lot of time, R&D and testing from users to ensure stability and security.

In the long run, I think I am going to use my license that I already have with IPS to go ahead and use their forum as the mainframe of my user database. Not exactly sure if this decision is final, but at this point in the web development era where your site can be killed with one major exploit, it is sometimes not worth it to take the risk.

For those who do not know:

Real simple syndication (RSS) is a relatively new and easy way to distribute content via the Internet. For email marketers, it is a way to distribute messages while avoiding spam filters. Typical applications include email newsletters, blogs or even Web sites. Similar to newsgroups, RSS feeds require a special “reader” like Bloglines or NewsGator to view messages.

www.anvilmediainc.com/search-engine-marketing-glossary.html

Most modern sites try to impliment the use of RSS Feeds so that there would be more user - interaction with the website. Readers and Users of TutorialSeek.com would be able to keep track on the latest tutorials indexed on TS, or in a specific site. Saying that, every website indexed would have its own rss feed, along with certain tutorial categories, and so forth.

I have been coming up with some ideas for the final version of the site to be released. One of them is a system called SeekRank. Similar to Google’s PageRank system in which websites are given a rank from 0-10 depending on the quality of the page and how well it is indexed in Google’s database, Tutorial Seek will have its own system in which each site submitted into the databse for indexing will have a SeekRank.

How the SeekRank will be calculated is something that I am still formalating behind the scenes at the moment, but it will definitely be implimented into the website. What I have been thinking is that it will involve the number of tutorials that we have listed for this site, their actual PageRank provided from google mished and mashed with all these variables that could be used to calculate a given number from 1-10 based on a sites score. That score will be that site’s SeekRank.

For the past couple of days, I have been working on the API’s, also known as Application Program Interface. What these API’s do is expand and extend the functionality of the site, making it easier to manage and to ensure a smoother operation. Intead of having multiple repetations of line code all over the site, I can just have one in which the API can be changed, altered and modified leaving results being immediately made sitewide.

The SeekBot API will be one of the most important functions and class that I will use. This API will control the tutorial search bot which would crawl each site, adding newly found tutorials into the database for listing. Currently, I am at approximately 150 lines of code, but I expect a good 500 when I am finished with this class. What is necessary for this class is to ensure logic is not being wasted but implimented to make it fast as possible to keep the server load to a minimum. This spider will definately be a large resource eater. I am sure of it.

I have planned to get a few concept designs done for the site itself. What I am looking for is a nice simple - yet sleek web 2.0 template. Nothing too fancy here, just minimal and efficient enough to get the job done and the message across to the user. Since this is a tutorial search engine, it needs to be fast loading which needs to be a first priority because unfortunately for web developers, 56k dialup users still exist.