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Search engine hits: a logfile analysis

I get most of my website hits on two posts: Yahoo Mail Problems and Using JAAS for Authentication and Authorization. It’s common knowledge that if your business “does not rank in the top 20 spots on the major search engines, you might as well be in the millionth ranking spot”, but that’s apparently not strictly true for content. I looked at my webserver logs over a 42 hours stretch, when I got 125 hits from search engines, and looked at the start parameter, which generally indicates what page the results were on (0 is typically the first 10 results, 10 is the second 10, etc).

Here’s the graph of my results:

I have to admit I’m suprised by the number of hits beyond the first 20 results (columns 0 and 1)… 71.2% were from the first two pages, but that measn that 28.8% were from deeper in the search engine results. And someone went all the way to page 20–looking for a “servlet free mock exam” if you must know.

Interesting, for sure. Not that I’m claiming this is a long tail.

Technology | moore |

Useful Tools: wget

I remember writing a spidering program to verify url correctness, about six years ago. I used lwp and wrote threads and all kinds of good stuff. It marked me. Used to be, whenever I want to grab a chunk of html from a server, I scratch out a 30 line perl script. Now I have an alternative. wget (or should it be GNU wget?) is a fantastic way to spider sites. In fact, I just grabbed all the mp3s available here with this command:

wget -r -w 5 --random-wait http://www.turtleserviceslimited.org/jukebox.htm

The random wait is in there because I didn’t want to overwhelm their servers or get locked out due to repeated, obviously nonhuman resource requests. Pretty cool little tool that can do a lot, as you can see from the options list.

Technology Useful Tools | moore |

IVR UI Guidelines

I was just complaining today to some friends that IVR systems (interactive voice recognition, or, the annoying female voice who ‘answers’ the phone and tries to direct you to the correct department when you call your credit card company) need some guidelines because it seems like every system does things just a little bit differently–enough to annoy the heck out of me. Well, lo and behold, google knows. Here is a paper on the topic and here’s a coffee talk on the topic by a former coworker (today must be a day for references to former coworkers).

Some of my frustrations with IVR systems are due to the very market forces that drive companies to use them (making it hard to reach an operator helps when trying to cut labor costs) and some are due to limitations on audio as an information conveyance (typically, reading is quicker than listening).

Updated Sep 12 2006 with correct link and tags.
[tags]IVR, interactive voice recognition, inovdesigns[/tags]

Technology | moore |

New tech comic

Jut got an email from an old coworker who used to do some pretty great comic strips. (Nothing nationally syndicated that I know of.) He’s started a new one, Bug Bash, that is ‘updated weekly, technology-focused, and based loosely on my experiences at “a large northwest software company.” ‘

Take a look…

Technology | moore |

Installing eRoom 7 on Windows XP Pro

This is a quick doc explaining how to install eRoom 7 on Windows XP Professional. It assumes that Windows XP Pro is installed, and you have the eRoom 7 setup program downloaded. This is based on the events of last week, but I believe I remembered everything.

1. Install IIS.

2. Make sure the install account has the ‘Act As Part Of The Operating System’ privilege. Do this by opening up your control panel (changing to the classic view if need be), double clicking Adminstrative Tools, then Local Security Policy, then expanding the Local Policies node, then clicking the User Rights Assignment node. Double click on ‘Act as part of the operating system’ (it’s the 2nd entry on my list) and add the user that will be installing eRoom.

3. Restart.

4. Run the eRoom setup program. At the end, you’ll get this message:

Exception number 0x80040707
Description: Dll function call crashed ISRT._DoSprintf

5. Re-register all your eRoom dlls by opening up a cmd window, cding to C:\Program Files\eRoom\eRoom Server\ and running

regsvr32.exe [dllname]

for each dll in that directory.

6. Run the eRoom MMC plugin: Start Menu, Run, “C:\Program Files\eRoom\eRoom Server\ERSAdmin.msc”

You should then be able to create a site via this screen.

Technology | moore |

Metafor: Using English to create program scaffolding

Continuing the evolution of easier-to-use computer programming (a lineage which includes tools ranging from assembly language to the spreadsheet), Metafor is a way to build “the scaffolding for a program.” This doesn’t mean that programmers will be out of work, but such software sketching might help to bridge the gap between programmers and non-programmers, in the same way that VBA helped bridge that gap. (I believe that naked objects attacks a similar problem from a different angle.) This obviously has implications for novices and folks who don’t understand formal problems as well. Via Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends, which also has links to some interesting PDFs regarding the language.

However, as most business programmers know, the complicated part of developing software is not in writing the code, but in defining the problem. Depending on how intelligent the Metafor parser is, such tools may help non-technical users prototype their problems by writing sets of stories outlining what they want to achieve. This would have two benefits. In one case, there may be users who have tasks that should be automated by software, but who cannot afford a developer. While definitely not available at the present time, perhaps such story based software could create simple, yet sufficient, applications. In addition, software sketching, especially if a crude program was the result, could help the focus of larger software, making it easier (and cheaper!) to prototype a complicated business problem. In this way, when a developer meets with the business user, they aren’t just discussing bullet points and static images, but an actual running program, however crude.

Programming Technology | moore |

Article on XmlHttpRequest

XmlHttpRequest popped up on my radar a few months ago when Matt covered it. Back then, everyone and their brother was talking about Google Suggest. Haven’t found time to play with it yet, but I like the idea of asynchronous url requests. There’s lots of power there, not least the ability to make pull down lists dynamic without shipping everything to the browser or submitting a form via javascript.

I found a great tutorial on XmlHttpRequest by Drew McLellan, who also has a interesting blog. Browser based apps are getting better and better UIs, as Rands notices.

Technology | moore |