RSS-Spider

If you want to see what items are hot in the RSS feeds we’re polling check out the WhatsHotYesterday.php link under the Beta section.  What we’re doing here is taking all the feeds we’ve spidered that have a post date of yesterday (what ever that might be) and mashing the headlines and bodies together sorting out all the words then figuring out which words appeare the most.

So far we’ve see Alito pop up a few times on our Friday test, as well as Bush.  Guitar seems to be a big one.  Right now it’s only going to return blogs where the language is EN or english.

Soon we should have a whats hot yesterday database of every pubdate in our database.

I’ve started capturing Google search strings that are being carried over to RSS-Spider in the query string.  They now replace the top 10 searches for the day & top 10 most searched for terms of the last 30 days on the home page.  A bit more logical since 90% of all searches done on this site start out somewhere else…

I love Google. Every time I turn around they’ve got some new and cool tool for using the web. A few months ago they introduced Google Site maps which allows web managers to upload sitemaps to Google so it knows where to spider. Recently Google updated the stats page of this system to show the top twenty search terms users searched for and found your site (in this case www.RSS-Spider.com) and clicked on. This saves me tons of time not having to go though all my weblogs and pull up this stuff manually.

I have to admint that most of the terms below I know nothing about… Robot Rage keeps popping up all over the place on my logs. I did a little digging and it’s actually a neat little free Flash game where you can build a “robot” (more like a car since you control it) and battle other players in an areana. You battle for points and more points you get the more “upgrades” you can make to your machine. Very very similar to the Battle Bots idea except no cheesey host.

Anyhow.. the list…

1 robot rage
2 robot rage rearmed cheats
3 amanda wenk
4 secret santa poems
5 robot rage cheats
6 amelle berrabah
7 natasha marley
8 son of dork website
9 son of dork official website
10 son of dork pictures
11 viezone
12 robot rage rearmed
13 roadrunner united guitar tabs
14 2hot4blog
15 sugababes ugly chords
16 son of dork
17 cheats for robot rage
18 brent corrigan
19 robot rage hacks
20 my hunps

One of three TV shows I have my Tivo set to tape is the Office which is the American Spin off of the BBC mocumentary/reality show from a few years ago. The show got off to a very lame start when they simply recycled the BBC scripts but came in to its own late last year with new and original writing. One of the things that I’ve enjoyed so much about the show is the way the sceens are shot. All camera angles keep very close to the “look and feel” of a reality show. Usually one camera very jery movements and very few close ups. Tonight’s episode tossed all that away. Dual camera closeup shots, and worst of all one of the main characters who had this tention for another exposed, pretty much pulling a Northern Exposure. The date June 10th has been set for a wedding and I suspect that that date is one week after the final show.

I’ve been reading a book I got for Christmas by Thomas A Limoncelli called Time Management for System Administrators. I’ve found it totally engrossing. So far in the 3 chapters that I’ve read I’ve been able to clear out the clutter in my office at my “real job”, start to focus on priorities a little better, and I’m even tempted to start using my Palm Pilot again. Now if I could only get everyone else in my office to read this book. Our research directory is constantlly frazzled… our production people are always on edge, and our sales reps are always in foul moods.

Tomorrows task is to clean out all the crap on my desk that has been sitting there since 2004. I’ve got a few files which I haven’t looked at in years which can go in the trash. The book also says that there should be zero distractions on your computer. A clean desktop is a focused mind. Task #2 will be to reduce the number of desktop icons from 8 columns to as few as possible. Again I’m sure some of them have been there for months without me using them.

With the free time I plan on working more on “my.rss-spider.com” Who wants to be a beta tester?