plugins: January 2004 Archives

Turned the Perl script into a Movable Type plugin and rechristened it "Google Love"! Download it here; MT_Google_Love.zip Added a few options, namely; --Option to display Google rank. You must have a Google API key for this to work (easy to get one). The server will actually perform a "reverse Google lookup" on all incoming Google referrals in order to retrieve the rank of your blog for those search terms. Pretty sweet. --A "Limit" parameter to show greater / fewer than the default number of results. --Delete option for maintenance. --Option to specify any MySQL compliant date format for the dates. --Slightly better formatted code... I am still learning Perl... What a cool language...

Cool, I finally got my "Google referrals" idea working-- as evidenced in the righthand sidebar under "RECENT GOOGLE LOVE." Basically, if you arrive at Samology via a Google search, I am adding your query to a database and linking it back here for all to see. The search terms listed are clickable, too- go ahead and try it, it is fun! It is my first Perl script, here have a look! Short but sweet. I also got a nice introduction to MySQL, DBI, CGI, Server Side Includes and CGI environment variables while I was at it! (UPDATE: Link goes to current version of script with various additions/cleaning up...) At present, various loopholes exist- paving the way for hackers to really screw everything up, but oh well. Things to work on (***begin extreme geekiness***); --A Google-referred client that "reloads" the page adds a duplicate data record (various ways to fix that). --Google referrals to my old ".html" archives fail to show up (my host provider requires a .shtml extension to trigger the Server Side Includes). It would be nice if changing the .html files to symbolic links to the new files would circumvent this problem, but guess what? It doesn't. Hopefully the new .shtml pages will eventually replace the old ones in the Google database. UPDATE: Done! Thanks, Joe! --Add results from other search engines (MSN, Yahoo, etc.). UPDATE: Done! --Translate the ASCII escape character stuff to something more legible. UPDATE: Done! --Append the "result rank" in parentheses (this will be fun). --Develop graphical interface to resultset table for easier management. Whee! By the way, I accept steak dinners or cash as payment for consulting work, your choice... UPDATE: Boy, lots more stuff to do. I.e.; --Investigate AOL "encrypted" queries to see if they are easily decrypted to display properly --Get rid of recursive behavior (i.e., clicking on a Netscape result generates a duplicate record for that result because Netscape by default loads loads search results in a frame). Should be fun... --Disallow multiple record additions from a single client in any short period of time (5 minutes?). Anti-hacking stuff...