Thursday 8 May 2008

Homebrew Google Position finder for Keywords / Domain

SEO sites like http://www.seomoz.org/rank-checker are great if you want to check out how your page ranks in Google for a given set of keywords, but you can only perform 5 searches per day using the free account :(.
There are others out there that will let you perform lots of searches, but restrict you to the first 100 results.

Apparently Google limits a given user to only so many (1000?) searches per day before having to use a CAPTCHA to perform subsequent searches, which I guess is understandable.

But what if you want to do more than 5 but less than 1000? And you want to scan the first 1000 results, because your site is really crap and you want to see if it's getting better? Luckily ,it is trivial to replicate the behaviour of SEOMOZ using simple screen scraping techniques. If you use the code below and install it on your localhost IIS you will be able to perform (practically) unlimited SEO searches. With the caveat that Google may at their whim change their HTML of course and hence break it!

Use at your own risk would be my advice.

You will need the latest .Net Framework 3.5 to run this. Create a new web app project in Visual Studio Pro 2008 or Web Dev Express and make a new .aspx page. Copy and paste the code below and voila, it should all work! (Oh yeah, you'll need a couple of images too if you want the nice AJAX effect - I suggest http://www.ajaxload.info/) If you are wondering it's Open Source so feel free to make it work better for you!


(Copy all to new .aspx page)

Sunday 4 May 2008

Online Viewstate Viewer / Decoder for Asp.Net 2.0

I got frustrated trying to find an online viewstate decoder for ASP.Net 2.0(.aspx), so wrote my own. You can use it below. NOTE! this is very basic; if you do something wrong you will get a generic error so make sure you copy the viewstate carefully (Firebug in Firefox makes this easy!).

Also, if you have a large viewstate it will take a while for the Treeview to build as I am just using the MS TreeView control which is very verbose in its HTML output.

Breaking news : World's first (possibly) online hex file viewer written entirely in Javascript!