ProjectX Technology

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We’ve been thinking about how to improve Rankr and we thought we’d open up what we are doing for feedback and suggestions. Here is a list of what we are working on now:

Improvements / Suggestions

• Add sparklines graphs to “list” / search results
• Create a dynamic image to show current ranking of website

Bug fixes in progress:

• Get RSS Feeds to work properly.
• Improve flash graphs to show top ranking at the top of the graph.

Ideas

• Links to Google stats? ie Number of pages in the google index ? eg. site:projectx.co.nz

If you have any feedback, ideas, or suggestions, please let us know.

I’ve cast my eye over Rankr this morning, and I’ve been able to extract a couple of stats.

1) Spread of the different types of sites that kiwis visit. There are a high number of portal sites and news sites due to the number of locals and foreigners catching up with news. Also I have noticed there is a dramatic rise in the number of image / file sharing uploading sites. (10 photo sharing/ uploading in the top 100 sites visited.) And notice the small number of pron sites!

2) Origin of the sites visited in NZ. Kiwi sites make up just over a third of the content that people are visiting. Notice that china accounts over 10% of the sites visited.

I’ve just added a couple of links to help research the blog activity of websites on rankr. Now you can quickly check what the blogspace is says about your site.

Check out Blog Activity on the site detail page. eg http://rankr.projectxtech.com/site/show/zoomin.co.nz

We working on figuring out how to integrating the result of the blog activity into the site.

As always your feedback is appreciated!

ps. Has anyone used sparklines ?

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A while ago, I mentioned that I have been working on a “Web 2.0” application in my lunchtimes. After laying idle for several weeks, the app has received some much needed attention and is ready for its first release!

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What is Rankr

Rankr is a tool that enables you to keep track of website ranking of your competitors over time. Every Tuesday, Rankr downloads the top 5,000 ranked websites based on New Zealand traffic via Alexa monitoring system. Rankr has been monitoring the top websites since September 2006.

Rankr has a number of basic features like: search, graphs, rss etc. to help to track your website.

One last thing, before I get inundated with questions if you’re site doesn’t feature that means its not ranked in the top 5000 visited sites in NZ. Sorry!

Kudo’s to Tomek, Nick and Daniel that have helped create rankr.

I have been building a new application over the last week. I was doing some mundane data entry and realised that I could easily automate the whole process. So as a personal project, I am working on converting this idea into a new Web 2.0 site. I won’t give too much details about the site until later in the week.

To make sure that I am fully web 2.0 compliant, here’s my checklist: <font color=”green”>√</font> Select web 2.0 programming language: No brainer, we’re a Ruby on Rails shop, so I whacked together a prototype really quickly. <font color=”green”>√</font> Select Web 2.0 name: I thought of a name and added r on the end <font color=”green”>√</font> Design Web 2.0 Logo: Easy – I went to Web 2.0 Logo Generator, put the application name in and generated a new shiny logo with beta badge! <font color=”green”>√</font> Select Web 2.0 HTML design: I didn’t want too spend much time around on the design, so went to google and found Web 2.0 generator which gave me a shiny new CSS layout. <font color=”green”>√</font> Use external API’s: I’ve hooked into some Amazon API’s and have been customising their XML feeds. <font color=”green”>√</font> Community Interaction: I have added tags to allow users to customise their view of my data.

The site is progressing rapidly and it should be live some time next week.