If you've taken a look around my site you will notice I use a Captcha on the comments and contact pages.

I wrote this recently and once I have sorted out a few other things will post a link on this blog.

It works very simply and I'll include all the necessary code when I post the link.

I've had some feedback about the google PR checker I have written in C#.

Basically I will be adding a property that allows you to select the datacentre to query and I will be randomising the PR requests where this property is not set.

Additionally I will be adding an automatic double-check facility so if a site ending in a slash doesn't return a PR it will check again without the slash and vice-versa.

I will post again once the updates are made and post a link to the download.

For those of you wanting to download the current version, you can find it here:PageRank tool in C#

Thanks,

AR

A few months ago I started having trouble with my hosting provider. This started off with short bits of downtime which you attribute to updates and essential maintenance - no problem.

Then things got more serious and I noticed that the hosts had been having hardware and software issues and not correctly restoring my sites, access passwords and databases.

At this point I started to look elsewhere.

I decided that after using lesser-known companies for the last few years I would use xyz - a big name who offered exactly what I thought I wanted. They offered .NET2 hosting with MS-SQL.

Initially I kept my old hosting account live (and I'm glad I did).

Things didn't get off to a good start with the new hosting company.

Firstly I couldn't use SQL Management Studio to access my database but was instead forced to use some pathetic web-based system which made creating databases a complete pain.

Importing data was even worse as in order to import data on their system you had to either import a CSV file from your PC (which means it must be small or the script times out and import fails). Or you could upload a backup or Access database for import.

If you upload a file, sometimes it doesn't show for hours and other times it shows straight away (I put this down to vetting or some such human interaction on xyz 's part).

In order to import a backup it must use the same or earlier file reference (or version). Using SQL 2005 myself I found this a struggle. The alternative is importing a MS-Access file which means a load of conversion problems from the off - no thanks!!

So I am not currently using the MS-SQL service from xyz in any meaningful way (which was my main reason for choosing them as a host).

Then I come to using .NET and hosting multiple domains.

Let me just say having spent ages faffing about with ways to do this: it's not worth it.

The icing on the cake is if you take a look at xyz.com (I am forced into using xyz.co.uk) you can see that US developers are getting a much better deal for their money: vastly bigger storage and huge bandwidth allocations in comparison to the UK version (hosted in Germany by the way).

Just found out something else today. As a windows hoster, I cannot set (in the control panel) my default page!

So what have I learnt from this experience?

1. Not to use xyz for Windows hosting of multiple sites using .NET and MS-SQL.
2. Their control panel is great for day to day stuff.
3. Their email service is great and I haven't got a problem with it.
4. Not to try and get any useful response from their support department.

Please note this is a rant on my behalf and not a generalised slating of xyz. If you want a generalised slating of xyz then just have a look in Google. xyz are not popular with windows hosters.


If you want to know who xyz are then get in touch. Since this is a personal blog site I'm not gonna name them on here.

After much trawling of the Internet all I could find for automated PageRank gathering was a PHP script or two.

Now since I don't like to write in PHP, I wrote a version in C#. I haven't included the source code but I have created a downloadable ZIP containing the C# dll and a test project.

This is the download link for: PageRank tool in C#

In order to use the dll, simply reference it in your project as follows:

using PageRank;
...
private void btnPR_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            try
            {
                TGooglePR _pageRank = new TGooglePR();
                string _PR =
           _pageRank.ReturnPageRank(txtSiteURL.Text);

                lblPageRank.Text = "PageRank: " + _PR;
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                lblPageRank.Text = "Fault Occurred!";
            }
        }
...

Have fun with it!
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This blog has now been superseeded by: http://www.aaronreynolds.co.uk/blogs/20070720203640.html ==================================

The code for calculating the distance between points that I have posted in C# was based upon the work published at: http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html

Anyone interested in this should also look for a downloadable list of UK postal OUT codes which is freely available (If I find the link then I will include it here).

All these things can be put together with something like Google Maps API to display routes, POIs and locations.