Month: December 2011

Why should you help out web bots trying to scrape your data? Most users try to make their websites easy for search engines to crawl, but search engines usually only care about words and cache the entire page. There are other bots that look for specific data based on patterns it can find. Most of these bots get a bad reputation since you mainly hear about them when one gets in trouble for stealing email addresses that users leave openly on their website. Some users can get crazy and lock up all sorts of information bots would love, (including Google), such as user pages that hold information like post counts, game scores, or other statistics that can be used.

Making your HTML readable for web bots is generally easy. Most times you already iterate the data and put it in a way web bots can traverse it. We should always use plenty of ID attributes to clearly identify parts of the web page. This is especially important if you are not iterating data, like a user page, where you do a query at the top and place all the data appropriately. If none of the user profile has an id or another distinguishable feature, it might be difficult for web bots to find appropriate data. Also, make sure items are separate from their labels. Putting them next to each other can make it difficult to parse; a separate tag and the same parent is ideal.

Web APIs are also a great way for bots to use your data. Most sites already have RSS feeds for bots and users to use freely. Some sites even allow bots to freely use their site search engine, others ban it due to possible abuse. Since APIs like this are easy for bots to parse and less data is sent out, it can help both the website and the bot. If you make some sort of API, make sure all important information can be obtained from it.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Blaine Schmeisser

I recently visited my parents. As usual they always have some question regarding some issue they have encountered with their computer. This used to irk me, but anymore, I just bear it and grin as it’s usually something relatively simple (ie can you make that little icon on my desktop that takes me to Gmail again?) This time my mother was looking for a way to organize her pictures based on the date and time they were taken. Windows Explorer sorts alpha/numerically when you sort be name, but the program she used to import the pictures didn’t label them in a fashion that would allow this order to be chronological. Knowing that the file names were arbitrary forced me to rely on the EXIF data stored in the JPEG file. For those of you that don’t know, most all digital cameras these days store date and time information, among other data, inside the jpeg file itself. Assuming the date and time settings on your camera are correct, this information can be used to rename files using certain programs. One program I found online is called Siren.

This program is able to see the EXIF data stored in the photo and uses that to create a new file name based on whatever EXIF data you would like. As I said, I wanted just the date and time. To do this, in Siren, you first browse to the folder that contains the pictures you would like to rename. Next, in the expression box, you enter your file name. This can be anything you want, though to pull the EXIF data you need to use an expression variable. %Xdo%ncs.jpg in the expression box will rename all the pictures in the directory you’ve selected to YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg. With %Xdo meaning to use the pictures’ date and time stored in EXIF and “%ncs” meaning to give a unique name if two pictures were taken in the same second. You can add whatever you would like before the expression variables to even further classify your pictures (ie. Uncle_Bobs_Colorado_%Xdo%ncs.jpg). This would create file names like this: Uncle_Bobs_Colorado_ YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg.

As you can see, Siren can be a pretty powerful tool for renaming files. This was just a taste of what it can do. Extensive information can be found in the help section of Siren regarding all the other expressions that can be used. Hopefully this has equipped you with the knowledge to better tackle the endless help desk requests from family and friends.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Dustin Fry