MarsJupiter Daily News

We have added another web site to our portfolio:

Downsizer.net

The site concentates on all aspects of being an "ethical consumer" and is proving remarkably popular for a site than only opened 6 days ago.

we have now done our first shopping site, still needs a few pictures, but basically up and running:

Arkwrights Homebrew

Looking forward to doing a few of these. We can certainly do them at a more reasonable charge and with better service than the last buch of cowboys employed on this shop!

One interesting point of news for the day for those with an interest in Search Engine Optimization, as any web master should have. We have noticed in the last few days, that our google page rank has risen on a lot of pages from a miserly 4 to a rather more adequate 5. We will be closely checking the search engine referrals to see what difference this makes. These rankings are non linear, with an increase of one in the page rank representing an increase of 5 or 7 times in the pages importance.

Our Alexa ranking is standing at an all time high of 358,000 or so, a 115% increase over the last 3 months.

When will search engine spammers and spyware distributors ever learn? We keep getting emails from these companies, from people who have cleary looked at our site, and still they think we will go into partnership to dump spyware and "pay per click" search results on our users. Give up guys, it's not going to happen.

In other news we have released new versions of Callisto and WhereWasI. The Callisto changes are small, but quite important if you are using a news server with the problens concerned. Conversely you will probably notice very little practical difference on a fast PC with the new version of WhereWasi. The changes are in fact large, making WhereWasI much faster and more efficient, but who really notices the difference between 1/10th and 1/20th of a second!

Once again quite a break in posting news, in this case it has been because of work on a new C++ bitset class, which we may make open source of some description. We think this class could be used in many applications.

This class will find its way into some of our products when testing is completed and will make them faster and more memory efficient.

In other news, the web site, despite the recent lack of attention continues to pick up in the Alexa ranking, being ranked 393,240 today. Not a remarkable rank as such, but a 95% increase on the preceding 3 months.

Seems a while since we last posted any news, this is not due to lack of activiy, in fact there has been quite a flurry of activity in our web site resources section where we try and give back a little to the shareware community with useful articles and lists, such as our shareware site list and now as a new addition some program optimisation resources including some some interesting benchmarks comparing the C++ standard template library with MFC, as well as with some of our own C++ efforts. We found some of the results a real eye opening and if you program in C++ you may well find the results as interesting and useful as we did.

We have added a page to the web site containing a summary of our product range. This has suddenly become rather more important, as we find ourselves with 6 products on the shelf compared to a mere 2 late last year.

The ideas are still coming thick and fast for more additions, but with the latest ThereIWas Internet Explorer toolbar released, now is the time to sift focus back to the web site and promoting what we have on the shelf.

Web site promotion is very important for small shareware companies, and whilst we continue to rise through the Alexa rankings, showing us climbing by 276% over the last 3 months, the pace of growth does seem to be slowing a little. This means we must try and shift up a gear to make sure the growth does not fizzle out.

The development of "ThereIWas" our latest Internet Explorer add on has hit the milestone of being genuinely useful and at least seeming stable. This is the point where we can put it in the hands of a few beta testers.

The release date for "ThereIWas" is still a little uncertain as this is product which requires a build up of use to see all the tweaks that need to be made to make it perfect.

But watch this space, as we think it is a great little idea.

It has been a few days since the last "daily" update, largely because we are heads down on the latest new product, AuntyJean. This is a product in tune with our "Family Shareware" theme and is an Internet Explorer toolbar designed for safer browsing for children and for that matter adults who want to tune out offensive content.

The product is now at an Alpha stage and is being trained to provide a range of censorship levels. Hopefully it will be in Beta within a very short time period.

We know there are other filtering products out there, but we feel ours will fill a useful niche.

Today saw the release of the WhereWasyI? internet explorer history search toolbar.

We have had two shareware sites rate this product so far, based on Beta versions and they both came out with a 5* rating. Hopefully this is a sign of ratings to come as we start the wholesale submission process using our shareware submission resource list.

Meanwhile we continue to be pleased with the results of out search engine optimisation of the marsjupiter.com web site. every month this year has seen significant increases on the previous month and the Alexa ranking system is still showing us as having a 400% increase over the last 3 months.

The work on the release of the WhereWasI? Internet Explorer Toolbar continues. The new search algorithm is now functioning well and and returning results practically instantly.

We anticipate the 1.00 release will occur in about a weeks time. There are no known issues currently, but we would rather be conservative about this, as it does sit within Internet Explorer. It may just be us, but we are finding it a good substitute for use of "Favourites". It takes less time for a competent typist to type something like "marsjupiter home" than to select with the mouse from the favourites menu.

The WhereWasI? Internet Explorer toolbar has already received one 5 star award from a shareware site despite its beta status. We fully expect a large number of such awards for the final version.

The major step from the beta to the actual release is going to be the search speed. The Beta searches at about 3000 pages per second on a typical PC. The last test on the new search algorithm was about 7 pages per second! This was debug code, the even in the release code the search speed at the moment would be much slower. However our new search code has the feature that the more pages there are too search, the faster it will go, and we estimate when you have 30,000 pages to search, it will search at least 50,000 pages a second. Tomorrow some further testing and benchmarking will put this to the test.

Meanwhile back at the web site, our Alexa ranking continues to make good reading, showing a 500% increase in the sites ranking in the last 3 months.

The next project at MarsJupiter is due to attain "functioning" status is a day or two. Just what it does is still under wraps, but we think it has great potential.

Sometimes small is beautiful, and this project which should be completed in a total of weeks promises to be just that. This project marks an interesting trend in the scale of our projects.

UpFront - GUI for Ingres FRS - Man Decades in development.
Callisto - Bulleting Board Browser - Man Years in development.
Foboz - Meta Search Engine - Man Months in development.
New Project - Man Weeks in development.

Partially responsible for this trend is the fact the we are building on previous experience. But it is also the case that the market is getting that much more crowded and investing years of effort in projects is increasingly risky for small companies.

A few more tweaks continue to be made to the Foboz - Meta Search Engine toolbar, the signs are though that the basic toolbar is pretty solid.

The keyword there in many respects is "basic". This is a very useful toolbar which gives you simple and direct access to the powerful Foboz Search facilities and that is all it does.

A logical extension of these facilities would be the highlighting of search terms when you open search results and the extension of the Family Friendly features (if enabled) into web pages, providing a net nanny type feature.

Our current thinking is though that we have seen examples of toolbars from that introduce problems into Internet Explorer, especially when those toolbars hook into every web access you make. Before we move into this sort of area we want to be very sure that the toolbar as it stands is a solid trouble free peice of software.

The Foboz - Meta Search Engine toolbar, designed to integrated Foboz into Internet Explorer giving you easy access to the powerful search capabiity of Foboz directly within your web browser is now in the final stages of development.

There are a few wrinkles still to clear up and the installation code which has now been developed is scheduled for testing tomorrow, but there is no question that the core of the job is complete and working well.

The Toolbar will be released first for Alpha testing and then will be packaged into the first maintenance release of Foboz which will deal with some very trivial issues in Foboz itself. The release will of course be a free upgrade.

The development of Foboz - Meta Search Engine toolbar has now crossed that important dividing line and is now an actually usable and useful piece of code. Well just barely! It does have quite a few things remaining to be done.

However the old rule in software development that when you have 90% of the development done, you have another 90% of effort remaining, does not apply to a first activex based project. It is more like 90% of the effort to get anything up and running and more to the point understood.

we are looking forward to making a test release of the toolbar very soon now, as we anticipate things completing very rapidly.

We are very pleased to say we think an Alpha of the Foboz - Meta Search Engine toolbar is now in sight. The toolbar is finally producing search results into an internet explorer window, albeit with still several issues to be resolved.

But from a point of view of satisfaction, actually seeing any results at all is very good from our point of view. We may well want to find a few customers willing to be victims of a toolbar alpha quite soon, anyone willing to help should contact support. Actually victims is too strong a word, Internet Explorer integration is done purely via the system registry and therefore whilst it can temporarily make internet explorer crash if there are bugs present. The problems caused can always be fairly easily rectified.

It seems like we think it every day, but we think we have finally cracked the last major issues with the Foboz - Meta Search engine toolbar. More and more we can see the reasoning behind embracing the C# language, for which a lot of the code involved is inbuilt. Then again by sticking to C++ we can at least understand a lot more of how it all works.

The upshot of all the toolbar work has been to cause some temporary neglect to a few other projects, though we have found time to add a couple more Bulletin Board types to the Callisto - News Reader. Adding these was quickly done following a report in the forums, and we would remind Callisto users, that we are always keen to hear reports of any Bulletin Boards that do not currently work.

Work on the Foboz Meta Search engine toolbar continues with the restructuring of Foboz into components. This should separate the user interface, the toolbar and the actual search engine, making it possible to make automatic downloads of updated components practical. Note that search engine definitions which are the core of Foboz operation are already automatically downloaded.

We would still hesitate to put a time scale on the release of the toolbar. Currently we have a set of compiling and linking components that contain most of the functionality we require. But integrating it all and getting it working is another leap upwards on the learning curve of activex and shell extensions.

Possibly the main issue with a toolbar is what should it do apart from searching, we are certainly considering using our Family Filter technology to scan incoming web pages, and it is tempting to incorporate popup blocking. But the latter is done very well by other products, and doing something second best is not our philosophy.

Foboz toolbar progress

Today has seen the Foboz toolbar pick up a little more momentum. Though we cannot really say it is flying yet. Mostly the coding is a learning experience in just why so many people are switching to the c# language! We are sticking to c++ for the moment, but it does make life rather harder as we have to deal with what seems like converting between every way people have tried to contrive string variables since the dawn of time. c# we understand is written from the ground up with data types that are complient with the needs of COM/ActiveX.
Pragmatically though at least in C++ you are left a little closer to undertanding what is actually going on.
Coming from a background in coding that started off in assembly language, e.g. one stage above typing hexadecimal bytes into a machine manually, I have always had a desire to know when I code, just what is actually happening at the coal face.
This is often confused in my experience with the "not invented here" syndrome where programmers are supposedly prone to reject code they did not write themselves. I have never been one to believe many programmers are that prone to this anyway. Preferring to think that most programmers, say:

"I can write this myself in a week"

or I can spend:

"1 day trying to find the code elsewhere"
"1 day pursuading the company to pay for it"
"1 day getting the code"
"1 day learning it"
"1 day implementing it"
"1 month trying to get the originators to fix the bugs..."


I have seen many projects on the bleeding edge suffer this way. Though on the whole in areas where you would have been crazy to try a diy approach.
In our own projects we have examples of the diy approach. In the Callisto - Newsreader there are extensive "hashing" routines to speed up access to all the indexes. These have been through extensive revisions to be exactly opimised for what is needed in Callisto. We could have used existing hashing classes in MFC, but once you do that, the matter is effectively out of your hands. If it did not work fast enough there would be little milage in complaining to Microsoft!

Alexa ranking

In other news our Alexa ranking continues to move up and down like a yoyo, now showing a 400% improvement in our sites ranking over the last 3 months. But we would not expect solid and consistant results until our new look web site has been re-indexed by the major search engines.

Progress continues to be made on the Foboz toolbar edition, or to be more to the point progress has got a little more off the ground after a rocky start. By some quirk of fate our projects at MarsJupiter had not really involved much by way of windows shell programming and ActiveX and these technologies are not the easiest to master.
Since we are determined that what we create for the toolbar will be a valuable add on, it is vitally important that we get it right.
Thus whilst the toolbar work continues, we are also making amazon.com shares a good buy at the moment, by significantly boosting their quarterly profits by buying a trick load of programming guides!

If you are in search of something to lighten up the day, a quick joke, a funny anecdote, or a "true" story from the outer fringes of reality or sanity, then the Foboz - Meta Search Engine is the place to look for it.

Along with all our serious Search Categories, we have a "New of the Weird" and a dedicated "humour" category.

With the addition today of the incredibly funny "Darwin Awards" you have almost 20 Search Engine specially dedicated to your amusement.

In other news, we think our series of articles on the tricky issues surrounding SEO, Search Engine Optimisation are now a pretty good starting point for any webmaster looking for a reasonably concise place to start studying the subject.

For a Mambo site, things are even better as we have an excellent Mambo optimisation guide with information you simply will not find elsewhere.

All heads down here working on Foboz Toolbar coding.

It will be a good addition to Foboz from the completeness point of view, but we fall in the camp of preferring the search to be separate to the browser. We see to many browsers with too many unwieldy toolbars to have a great love of the things.

Time scale for this free upgrade is a little hard to predict as there are quite a few technologies involved.

On a brief humorous note for Saturday, we see our Alexa web site ranking has changed again.

It now shows the site recording an 800% increase in rank over the last 3 months, equivalent to a doubling of traffic each month.

If this trend continues, due to the fantastic power of doubling we will be bigger than Microsoft by this time next year and take over the entire web shortly after!

Of course in reality these figures will being to level off, but they do go to show, what paying a little attention to the way you run your web site can do.

For the last month and it is in the last month that the figures have started to climb, we have started paying attention to Search Engine Optimisation and have made a great number of changes for the better on our web site.

The next month will be even more fascinating for us, as we see what effects occur as the changes start to get indexed by Search Engine Spiders.

Just when we thought we would launch into our new project for which the spidertheweb.com domain has been registered, we get notified that the final patch for Mambo portal has been released and that it is a recommended update for all sites!

So instead of the new project we have spent another day updating the web site, and for good measure we have compiled a comprehensive article on Search Engine Optimisation for Mambo portals.

We think this is very useful reading for Mambo Webmasters.

So it looks like we will start the spidertheweb.com project from Monday, which is frequently not a bad thing with software projects.

Another busy day at the web site face and another major transformation for the web site.

We have implemented SEF advance for Mambo Portal Which may sound a bit of a mouthful, but has the extraordinary effect of making all the links on a mambo driven web site come out in plain english.

This makes our site much better to navigate and rumour has it, does wonders for search engine ratings.

It has however left our periodic regression test of all the Search Engines used in our Foboz Meta Search Engine running a little behind schedule.

When we do this test there are always a few engines that have gone a little awry due to format changes etc. This time round is no different, but to put things in proportion it looks like only about 2-3% of the engines may need attention, which is not exactly critical, especially as even with those engines with issues, Foboz may still manage to get the top results.

Daily report for Wednesday 25th February.

Just a couple of days ago we mentioned in passing that a webmasters work was never done, but we seemed to have got to a landmark point in our web site development. This was of course asking for trouble and we almost immediately found out a few more pointers on how to make the site more attractive to search engines. One method is documented here and as we progress the other, we will post more on the method involved.

We also registered a new domain today "www.spidertheweb.com" as the name would suggest it is a placeholder for a new product we plan to develop that will spider web sites with the aim of reporting on them. The product will report broken links plus over time a whole lot more.

Now we know there are similar products out there already, but several things make a product of our own appealing.

• Some of the products we have used are clumsy


• Some are broken in some fundermental ways


• We want to establish more of a presence on the web site front


• With both the Foboz - Meta Search Engine and the Callisto - Newsreader/Bulletin Board browser, we already have a sound basis for this sort of program.

Tuesday February 24th - Daily Blat

The Foboz - Meta Search Engine now has 350 search engines.

Today's increase being down to us filling out the software search category to contain 10 popular shareware site search engines. This makes Foboz the best way to search for software that we have seen.

It has to be said though, that is has taken us rather longer to make the leap from 300, to 350 search engines, than it did from 200 to 300! Part of this is simply a matter of priorities, we think that Foboz already has the best selection of search engines and adding more is not quite as important as when we started out. But it is also getting increasingly hard to find engines that meet the search engine selection criteria.

We don't believe for a moment that the sites we want are not out there, but that the backwaters of the web are not easy to navigate. Ultimately we think that Foboz will be a good weapon in the fight against this growing trend that we see on the web that leaves many sites invisible, but meanwhile we are also trapped by the tendency of the major search engines to miss out good resources in favour of a flood of the banal.

Consider the statsistic that 85% of web traffic is driven by search engines and people using search engines do not look beyond a page or two of results. Now consider a web search on current events! In the case of a major search engine, how many different sites would be returned?

In the Foboz Meta Search Engine we have 56 news and current events search engines. This means our results from Foboz would be infinitely richer in variety.

A webmasters work is never done. web sites must continue to evolve or they will wither and die.

However there are points at which you can at least say you have reached a marker point, and in our case the new look of MarsJupiter which began exactly one month ago has reached such a point.

We think we look a lot better, and equally importand we think we have gone a long way down the road of making sure the site is visible to search engines.

On the subject of search engines and search engine optimisation SEO, we have added another article:

Just how important are search engines anyway?

To our increasingly important resources section.

The main news of the day though is for shareware authors. We have radically upgraded our free list of shareware submission sites The list is now ordered by the ranking the site receives from Alexa.

The importance of this cannot be overstated, it means you can prioritise your submissions against an unbiased reference as to just how significant a shareware site is. Other ways of estimating the importance of sites, such as how well they work, how many listings they have, or how good they look. Have all in our experince proved pretty meaningless.

We continue our series of articles on Search
Engine Optimisation. If you are a webmaster or shareware author, we think
the articles are well worth a look.

We are combining our own insights, with research into all we can find out on
the subject.

Our own product the Foboz -
Meta Search Engine started us out on this learning curve, combined with
the realisation that we had been suffering from our own lack of attention to
this important issue on our own web site.

On the subject of Foboz we have added more search engines to
the "science" search category, giving a total of 24 search engines dedicated to
finding science related information.  This is a classic case of where
categorised searching makes sense. To paraphrase one of our users:

"try typing 'dolly' into a general web search. It won't be 'dolly
the cloned sheep' that comes to the fore!"

 

In todays Blat we range from cooking dinner to cooking up web sites.

For cooking dinner or indeed any meal at all we refer you to the recipe search category of the Foboz Meta Search Engine where we have 17 of the best recipe sites available for you to search for that perfect meal. These range from the very indulgent EatDangerously to the Atkins diet site, which some to think of it at least in some peoples opinion may be much the same thing!

For cooking up web sites, the beginner could do a lot worse than start off by
looking in our resource section at web
portals. These days it is more important to know about Content Management
Systems than it is to know about html.

We had a blast from the past today, with an ex - Alex employee getting in contact with the urge to "bat and rat". Even
today this programming language had an adherance amongst the few who know of it,
and indeed for numerous little projects it is a language that is still hard to
beat, as well as being a language that can be picked up in minutes by anyone
with some programming experience.

We are planning a product that will be source code based, so that users can
fully configure its operation, and we will be writing it in Alex.  It is
the language that is best for the job, and one of the few that can work cross
platform on windows and unix systems.