xml

Get yourself into the search engines – FREE xml-sitemap generator

Jonathan general , ,

XML-Sitemaps.com is an interesting web site, it not only has cheap software to let you create unlimited sitemaps for the search engines, but it also has a free online version that will index up to 500 pages. The xml-sitemap online software will take care of all the xml formatting required by Google and Yahoo to make sure that you can create a properly formatted sitemap. Your generated sitemap can instantly be uploaded to your web site – usually via FTP.

Once you have created the sitemap and placed it onto your web site pop over to Google webmaster tools and submit your sitemap so that it can be indexed by Google. xml-sitemaps can generate xml, text files and html files for your sitemaps, the commercial package costs $14.99 and runs locally on your PC, it requires the opensource PHP package installed (simple installation). This sofware apparently supports indexing over 50,000 url’s, plus takes into accounts robots.txt exclusions and many other key site generation features.

On the site there are some useful tools; the search engine bot simulator is especially interesting as it shows you what is being indexed on your web pages as a search engine. The results can be very interesting. I have used this tool along with the online search engine meta tag tool to check how well my web pages are formed. This tool looks at the anchor tags (text links) on your web pages as well as the keywords to build a percentage of keywords on your web page. This can be interesting if you are looking at ‘how’ you write your web pages – especially if you are looking at getting better ratings within the search engines.

Web Services, SOAP, MSXML and Microsoft Access

Jonathan programming , , , ,

Thinking about integrating Web Services? The PerfectXML website has some great articles about SOAP and MSXML and other technologies that will allow you to do this. I’m fairly new to the world of web services and not yet a proficient .net programmer (VB migration on the way…), but seems to me that Web Services are the thing of the near future.

This article from PerfectXML is a good allrounder that includes stuff on standard asp programming – easy to follow and very logical. I’m particulary interested in simple bits of code and interfaces (perhaps Google or eBay) that I can test using Access 2000 and VBA. I understand that it’s possible without over complicating everything. The recent Access user group meeting (May 2005, UK) was very interesting. Peter Vogel (editor of Smart Access, Pinnacle publication) gave a brilliant presentation of Microsoft Access using SOAP, etc. to access Web Services; so it must be possible. Continue reading →

Class implementation for using webservices in ASP

Jonathan programming , , ,

The Code Project – Class implementation for using webservices in ASP – ASP: “Class implementation for using webservices in ASP
By asanoguera

Recently, I tried to use for the first time a webservice from an ASP page and I really had problems, after hours I could access to my webservice from ASP with Microsoft.XMLHTTP, but the code was not very easy (if it is your first time), so I decided to package the implementation in a simple vbscript class with a few properties that allow to access to a webservice.