Integration

I have succeeded in triggering an event on a page written in C#, then passed parameters to a Javascript/Ajax function, passed the params to a C# function, back to a Javascript function and ended the program. Now I intend to do my cellular automata/evolutionary algorithm page in Ajax, getting data from the user via cookies, retrieving the data in the background processes, and drawing/retrieving a picture in the background processes. I need to find out how to draw a pic without opening a new window. I may perhaps use the UpdatePanel directive.

AJAX

Since I have a lot of time on my hands at this time, I'm getting back into studying code. Like multiple hours daily if possible. Right now I'm implementing AJAX to make a page that deals with AI concepts. Half the page is cellular automata, the other half is evolutionary algorithms. The idea is to calculate and retrieve data behind the scenes. I found a way to do it, but I'd rather come up with my own way, which does not employ ScriptManager.

Cloud pt II

So I changed the use of labels in my tag cloud to the use of hyperlinks. I decided to make it work by using a query string which contains the text that you click on. As a result, when the page is reloaded, the term you clicked on is used as a search term. Right now I have to deal with the postback/pageload logic to make sure it doesn't try to search for a null term. The hyperlinks are left justified now but I will figure out a way for them to fill up some container in a nice orderly fashion.

Cloud

Tonight I'm working on a tag cloud based upon the number of db entries for terms. I use row variables, add them up for each row, sort in ascending order. Then I display the top ten terms inside a panel with label.Font.Size = value for each one's row. So I get size relevancy to the number of times a term was searched. In the future I will have to come up with a scaling factor because I can't have 567 point text.

I actually had to use a decrement in the for loop because I was "rolling down the stack" to make room for the newest highest searched entries.

Last Night

Last night I was working on the parse portion of the search engine. I'm getting rid of words like "and" "or" and "the". I don't need them, yet, for searches. I was also getting bad results because I was not looking at URLs when there was no second term in the search query. Basically I forgot to use "" instead of null, so things got messed up.

Favicon is Evil

I am working on the spider again tonight. I learned a few things. Like HTTPWebRequest.timeout exists. And that favicon.ico is a pain in the butt, it always comes up and stops the spider. I've been using Regex to parse strings that have chars I just don't want to be in URLs.

I was reading about other people making web spiders and they are just out grabbing links, while I am recursively searching links to other links. As such, I am verifying that these pages get responses. I don't travel to them if I can't. Although I use a page that provides random links as a starting point, I'm following them as far as I can go.

some stuff:

wreq.Timeout = 60000;
Regex r = new Regex("favicon");
if(r.Success)
etc...

Pretty much

Well the spider is running pretty much by itself. Used some conditional breakpoints for debugging today. Was dealing with stringURL getting too long to be stored in a database record, basically I am truncating it. I have rearranged the code so that I don't click a button to find each new URL but instead it runs in a loop. I actually went out to dinner, came back, and it was still finding URLs.