Help Evaluate My Dissertation!

arrond

arrond

arrond

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Hi all,

I have built a research website as part of my final year degree dissertation. In september of last year I selected a project title called "Research Topic Information Website". Here is what I had to do:

We sometimes wish to maintain and distribute a list of all useful research URLs on a particular topic. This project is to develop a tool to regularly scan the search engines for a particular set of keywords, maintain a database of valid URLs, assist in their classification and present them on a research website. Other researchers could then find out the state of the current research on the particular topic.

This website is my solution to this problem. Please check out the links and leave some comments on the comments page. Remember that the website is just a way of presenting the links, so please dont comment on the website as a whole but im willing to accept criticism on the design issues, quality of links etc. All comments will be used for my evaluation so leaving a quick note will be a great help. If you prefer to post your comments here then thats fine. Im just looking for construcive criticism from people who would be looking to research into a direct x 10 card such as the 8800 series in this case and does the site provide them with quality links.

Thanks in advance.
 
jcb33 said:
You might wanna add some validation rules to your comment book there
Click to expand...

I had some in but for some reason its not working :confused:

Need to include some code to remove all < characters. At the mo im on a deadline to get all the write up finished. Ive stop almost all cases of SQL injection tho.

Thanks for the reply. Could you comment on the quality of links and are they useful to someone researching 8800 series?
 
arrond said:
I had some in but for some reason its not working :confused:

Need to include some code to remove all < characters. At the mo im on a deadline to get all the write up finished. Ive stop almost all cases of SQL injection tho.

Thanks for the reply. Could you comment on the quality of links and are they useful to someone researching 8800 series?
Click to expand...
Aye I need to get that working on my site, tried a few things but it just wont remove the < and > for me :/

Anywho, yeah the links are great, whenever I am researching a new bit of hardware I always search around for hours finding different reviews, your site just lets me load up the links, speeds up the process etc, should keep doing it after uni :D
 
jcb33 said:
Aye I need to get that working on my site, tried a few things but it just wont remove the < and > for me :/

Anywho, yeah the links are great, whenever I am researching a new bit of hardware I always search around for hours finding different reviews, your site just lets me load up the links, speeds up the process etc, should keep doing it after uni :D
Click to expand...

Thanks for the comments. I should change it to the ATI R600 though because everyone will be looking for reviews, benchmarks, froogle links etc, thats if i decide to kepp it going ;)
 
I like the idea of this, as said above I usually spend forever searching Google for reviews of various things and this seems to work very well. Perhaps include the option of sorting by date, rank on Google (or Alexa or something)?

edit: did you use the Google API to do get results in a text format, or did you have to manually strip out all unnecessary HTML from the search results?
 
Last edited:
Pho said:
I like the idea of this, as said above I usually spend forever searching Google for reviews of various things and this seems to work very well. Perhaps include the option of sorting by date, rank on Google (or Alexa or something)?

edit: did you use the Google API to do get results in a text format, or did you have to manually strip out all unnecessary HTML from the search results?
Click to expand...

Good question. I did use google api at first but my lecturer said that 8 results per query wasnt enough. Yes only 8 results :( so i started configuring an open source web crawler to grab the query results for me (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rcm/websphinx/). Due to time limit i had to resort to more quicker methods so i found a black box software package called visual web spider to grab the links for me. From there i extracted the links to produce php code and create tables on an sql server then created the website. Your comments on sorting by date and google rank are something ive included in the future enhancements and recommendations section of my report. I wish i had another six months to code this myself :(

Thanks for the reply. Very apppreciated ;)
 
Ahh, thanks :).

I was looking into it, and have you seen this in Google's ToS?

You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them, or mirror the Google home page or results pages on your Web site.

No Automated Querying
You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system without express permission in advance from Google. Note that "sending automated queries" includes, among other things:
Click to expand...

Best keep that one quiet ;).
 
arrond said:
Im just looking for construcive criticism from people who would be looking to research into a direct x 10 card such as the 8800 series in this case and does the site provide them with quality links.

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

I can't provide constructive criticism in that department but I can in others. As mentioned already, you need some form of data validation. I just submitted the URL '-='.

Site looks nice and seems to do its job. Nice work :)
 
sniffy said:
I can't provide constructive criticism in that department but I can in others. As mentioned already, you need some form of data validation. I just submitted the URL '-='.

Site looks nice and seems to do its job. Nice work :)
Click to expand...

Thanks. I just checked the table and it showed =_ so i dont know if that worked ;) I have tried bits of validation but im stuck on time but validation is not essential to complete my objectives. I added the submit link, report bad link and comments page as extras as they would normally be present on a research website. The links, colours, layout and use of the site are the most important. Thanks again for your comments.
 
arrond said:
Thanks. I just checked the table and it showed =_ so i dont know if that worked ;) I have tried bits of validation but im stuck on time but validation is not essential to complete my objectives. I added the submit link, report bad link and comments page as extras as they would normally be present on a research website. The links, colours, layout and use of the site are the most important. Thanks again for your comments.
Click to expand...

Sorry, I actually submitted '=-' :)
 
Ive added some extra validation using this code:

Code: 
$theValue = preg_replace(array('/</', '/>/', '/"/'), array('&lt;', '&gt;', '&quot;'), $theValue);
$theValue = htmlspecialchars($theValue, ENT_QUOTES);
$theValue = preg_replace('/&#0*39;/', '&apos;', $theValue);

Just need to stop a few more characters such as = and - ;)
 
Looking for some more opinions on colours, font, size selection. Are the loading times fine with a low speed internet connection? anyone using netscape? and any other opinions will be great.

Cheers.
 
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