LinkDiagnosis' Blog

Posted by sam on January 20th, 2008 39
Posted in Uncategorized |

After 6 weeks of development I think the product is ready. There are still many things I would like to improve but they are not essential. I would like to get some feedback first and then I will improve on it.

It has been a long way for me as I changed the whole technology about 3 times. I knew what I want to create but initially I thought the best way will be to create a whole application as a reporting tool where you initiate a request and the application will schedule your job and will email you the result. The amount of data that the app is gathering is huge so it wasn’t possible to get it all in real time. I created a windows service that was  doing all sort of black magic with hammering Yahoo/Google servers with requests through proxies in parallel threads. It was working fine, but I wasn’t satisfied that users would have to wait for the report.

So I had an idea to move all the requests to a desktop client. Every user who wanted to get a report would need to install a windows application which would do the requests from his machine. In this way the data would be available quicker for the user and I wouldn’t have to use proxies, which is difficult to scale.

I have almost finished the app but then, while swimming (all the good ideas come from swimming , I realized that I could try writing a firefox extension rather than desktop client. Since beginning I was a bit hesitant, whether people would want to install a desktop app. I knew that there were successfull SEO tools like SEOElite etc. but still I wanted to make the tool easier. I then did a quick research and found out from Matt Cutts blog that more than 65% of webmasters use Firefox .

The idea of Firefox extension started to be very interesting to me as I always want to learn new things and I haven’t created any extension before. Soon I realized that its just a Javascript + XUL and it will not be that hard to build it. The biggest downside was that I had to throw away a whole month of work. Ouch

The firefox extension is the easiest for the user and seamlessly works with the website, which is good. The only problem so far I see that javascript is not executed in parallel threads so there will be a performance hit.

Anyway, enough of the background. I hope its not my first and last post here

Enjoy and let me know how it works for you!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.