Archive for the 'Development' Category

The ability for express submissions to include a RSS feed as part of their submission has now been added to World Site Index.

The feed is read and displayed within the listings detail page giving visitors arriving at World Site Index more information about the listed site, an example of a listing with RSS feed can be seen on the listing for TOLRA Web Hosting.

For listed sites opting to supply a feed it gives them a way of publishing their latest information without having to go through the submit, review and update process.

World Site Index has now been updated to use the latest version of our directory script.

This upgrade helps us locate listings within the directory where the domain is no longer active but instead parked for Ad revenue, these sites are of little use to our visitors and so are being removed as soon as they are located.

The aim is to keep the listings current and of good quality, however with over twenty thousand listings this is quite and extensive task and therefore we do still rely on visitors reporting problem sites for our attention.

Keen to improve the experience for the site visitors we looked at improving the search functionality within the directory.

This started by changing the way we used the full text search functions of MySQL. These changes do seem to have improved the relevancy of listings returned for a search and so have been incorporated into the directory script that powers World Site Index.

The next step in making information more readily available is to pull the different search options together as at the moment searching the directory doesn’t return results from the blog and neither will a search within the blog return pages from the directory. As World Site Index grows and more information is added this separation of searches will become more of a problem.

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