Web Page Scraping

One of the ways we've been gathering data for years has been called "screen scraping." You log onto a program, find certain text in certain portions of the page, and "scrape" it off for your own application's needs.

This has become a whole new animal with the explosion of the Internet. So much more information is available now, but it's constantly changing as well! We are able to use RSS, blogs, XML, Web Services and other types of feeds to obtain much of the information you may need on your site, but every once in a while we still have to get out there and scrape certain information right off of a page.

We can provide this functionality on your website, or can provide you with the development tools to do it yourself! Contact us for more information or click here for a live demonstration.

Data-Driven META Tags

We have recently developed an ASP.NET control that allows for database driven META tags and page titles for pages on your website. This control, when placed on a page, will look up META data and page TITLE information from the database and incorporate into the page. This is extremely useful on sites that use master pages and completely data-driven virtual pages, such as this very page, or any other in our 'Content' directory on this site.

We invite you to check out this tool in action by looking at the bottom of the Contact Us page on this site, or any other of the pages where we have added custom META Keywords or Page Titles. This control automatically removes existing titles and tags if it finds conflicts, and will help you make your data-driven site much more search engine friendly.

For more information on this project, click here.

Website Uploads

If your business is a service provider to other businesses or even individuals, you may often need for them to send you large computer files for you to work on for them, such as accounting software backups or logo designs. Often these files are too large to send via email, so another method must be used. We have developed a simple "web site upload" application that will allow your clients to upload files of any given size to your website. The files can be marked as public or private, and can then be accessed via a password from your place of business.

Additional features of this application include an automatic email notification feature that will send you an email whenever someone uploads a file to your system. We can also add additional levels of privacy protection so that each of your clients has their own private "store" of information and they, and only they, can access those files.

We can add this feature to any website we develop for you, or can even add it to many existing websites you may already have. All of the source code is also available for purchase. Contact us with any questions you may have about this product.

You can view a working example of this application here

Data-Driven School Corporation Websites

We've been doing some work with some local high schools and entire school corporations and are beginning to see a need for consistency and data-driven templates to better allow these organizations to effectively communicate and connect with the visitors to their sites.

You can read more about this project here.

Daily Bible Reading Companion

We've recently built a smashup (I think that's the technical term) that combines several types of information feed into a single page. The application reads a database to find a Bible reading for a given day of the year from a SQL Server database hosted on the site, and then queries an external web site via a URL and Querystring for that passage. Depending on copyright rules, the text is displayed in-line or in an IFRAME html element. The page contains links to other days readings, making it ideal for search engine placement, as well as the RSS feed that is made available via the URL bar or an RSS link. The page also contains other RSS feeds from the Daily Audio Bible Forums site, which is a messaging board for people going through this reading plan together.

You can view the application here. We'd be happy to create a reading plan or other similar type of smashup application for your site. Get your creative juices flowing and give us a call!