Take My Word For It

I said goodbye to NFreak-Bot a couple weeks ago, but I changed my mind, and he’s back kicking harder ass than ever. You can find his crawl right here. Now this is a very complex project that I have invested lots of research and programming into, and it’s finally in it’s final stage.

The goal for my project is to calculate the PageRank for all the pages on NFreak.net. Before I could do that, however, I had to first crawl the entire site and discover all the pages within it. This took over a month to complete, and a total of 17,000+ pages were found; this was the easy part.

The lengthy part is now in progress. Calculating PageRank takes dozens of iterations, and each iterations will take an estimated 36 days to complete. The idea is that the top 20 pages listed will be those with the highest PageRank, and should be most relevant to Google. You can find more on Google PageRank here. That article will explain everything to you.

As of this writing, the bot has only finished .06% of the pages on the site, and it performs one operation every three minutes to cut down on load time, so you can expect this project to lay low for awhile, as it could essentially take a year just to get a somewhat accurate depiction.

If you are interested in receiving a copy of my source and running it on your own website, comment here and I will see what I can do. I am thinking about making it open source, but I have more optimizations to work on. Let me know.

NFreak Site Statistics Bot, Google, PageRank

So you might be wondering what I’ve been up to lately. I decided to check in, and while sifting through over 2,000 spam comments I found some important ones that were actually legitimate. This made me realize the importance of the blog, as I was unsure of how popular it actually was.

In order to post a comment to the blog, your IP address must first be approved by Wordpress. I have to do this manually, which is to ensure that spambots don’t get through and post dozens of links to unrelated sites in a sad attempt to gain Google PageRank.

Speaking of Google PageRank, our site has finally hit the charts. For the longest time, www.nfreak.net (our domain name) was listed as PR N/A. That is different than PageRank 0 (much worse, in fact), and it made me think that the site was sandboxed by Google, which is a penalty that Google uses to prevent websites from exchanging links and gaining a top spot on the search engine results page (SERPs) as a result. Anyways, we jumped from a despicable PR N/A to a respectable PR 1 for many of our pages. That is very rewarding to me, as I spent a lot of time optimizing the site for Google, and getting rid of many pages that were no longer used, fixing some duplicate content issues, etcetera.

Now let’s get to the main point of this entry in the blog, which has to do with a World of Warcraft website that I have been working on for the past few weeks. I have been working as a web designer/programmer for my university for a little while now, and I have learned a lot of new design techniques in this short time. I am moving away from using tables to form the layout of the website, as I was ignorant for so long about the div tag. The World of Warcraft Information Database is the title of the new website which I plan on launching shortly, and so far the template is complete, along with a few extra pages (such as registration).

So you wanna check it out? Finally being released for public viewing is the World of Warcraft Information Database. There is not really much content at the moment, but I am very proud of the template I formed. Take a look, and comment below to let me know what you think of it. Currently, registration is complete, but the login page is only about halfway finished. You can login, but there is no user panel or any extra features to the site that are available. I have been working rapidly on the site, so by the time this is being read that may very well have changed.

How is it different from other WoW websites? It is very similar to a Wikipedia site, in that user’s will be able to post their own articles once logged in, but I plan on making it rewarding to those members that write articles (something that Wiki doesn’t acknowledge). Every member will make fake website currency while being logged in. It is in the same format as World of Warcraft currency (gold, silver, copper), and will be earned in several ways.

1. For every article a member posts, they will receive a set amount of copper for every letter within it.
2. They will also receive copper for every unique person that views their article.
3. Being logged in to the website will also give the user copper (time online, logins, and page views reward copper).
4. A bonus simply for registering also exists to encourage people to join.

I figured that making a leaderboard with the top authors will help encourage people to create articles, and a content-based website that writes itself should be very nice to have, even for the purpose of keeping in my portfolio for when applying to a job after college.

I still need to figure out a name for the website. I am going to go with a “.com” domain, and most of my clever ideas have already been taken. If you think you have something clever, comment and let me know. I will get back to you with updates when appropriate, and I hope you all continue to read the blog, even after my long absence.

Take care!

NFreak World of Warcraft PageRank, World of Warcraft

In the past couple of days this blog has received a dozen spam replies which have been appropriately deleted. I knew it would happen eventually, and there really is no easy way of making it spam-proof. I suppose in a sense it is a “good” thing to see that our blog has been archived by spam bots. This is by no means “good” in the sense that I enjoy getting spam, but rather it is pleasant to see that we are reaching out.

Getting comments on our posts is something we really like to see, as it helps let us know that people are reading and are interested in the content that we offer. Lately, our blog posts have been getting archived by Google merely hours after they have been publicly posted, which is truly a great thing. Our quest to gain official PageRank from Google continues, and hopefully we will someday reach the top of more search results pages (SERPS).

If you haven’t noticed, this blog is a big part of the site to us, as we have continued to provide at least three posts per week, but usually more. School work does conflict at times, as on certain days we have absolutely no time to work on the site.

NFreak General PageRank, Updates

Here is another post regarding the mighty Google. I did a lot of research the other night, and I finally understand the concept of Google PageRank (PR). It is way too complicated for me to attempt to explain in great detail, however, I will give a brief explanation.

Every page on the Internet starts out with a single point of PageRank. When a page links to other pages, it gives a portion of it’s PageRank to that page, but most pages on the Internet link to dozens of other pages at once, so that “share” of the PageRank is distributed evenly between all of the pages being linked to.

As you can probably tell, getting links from other websites is very important when it comes to increasing PageRank. Otherwise, a website is just trading all its PR back and forth to the other pages within the site, and nothing is gained. Right now we have a PageRank of zero (PR0). Some say that to get PR1, a page needs six points of PageRank, and the amount needed to get to PR2 is logarithmic, meaning that the difference between PR4 and PR5 is much less than the difference between PR5 and PR6.

I hope that this article has made sense, and I promise to lay low on these types of posts for a little while, as I suspect that many readers may not find this all that entertaining. Please realize, however, that these are some main concerns when it comes to running a website, and they can’t be left unaddressed. Anyways, I hope you all continue to read and comment on the blog. Good things are to come; take my word for it.

UPDATE: NFreak-Bot
I created this bot to crawl one page of NFreak.net every minute. I suspect it might take days/weeks before it is finished, but it might be interesting for you to check out. The above page will display the most recent page that the bot has crawled. After it is finished, I’m going to make something to calculate PageRank. If anyone is interested in running the bot on their own website, comment here and I can hook you up.

NFreak Site Statistics PageRank, Stats