Who's to Blame for SelfPromotion.com?
SelfPromotion.com is written entirely in WebSiphon
by Purity Software. WebSiphon is a wonderful tool for
Macintosh Webmasters that basically lets you embed programs into HTML pages. All of SelfPromotion.com,
including the program that actually promotes your site, is coded entirely in WebSiphon.
The "guts" of SelfPromotion.com only took about 15 hours of programming to implement (WebSiphon is
that powerful!) but the gathering of information about all the sites it promotes to took longer
to compile (and this effort is still continuing). When you add in all the cute JavaScript bells
and whistles, and the nice user interface, all told, I've probably spent 500 hours or so
developing this site - and continue to spend perhaps 3 hours a day maintaining and upgrading it.
SelfPromotion.com was programmed by yours truly, Robert Woodhead, and
uses the WebSiphon TCP/IP Libraries created by Mark Holtz. Thanks, Mark!
SelfPromotion.com is generously hosted on the webserver that also runs
AnimEigo and Videoz.
How It Works
SelfPromotion.com relies on several databases, but fortunately, WebSiphon has a built-in database system
called Verona. One database keeps track of the users (like you). Another keeps track of the sites
that are being promoted, and contains information like what sites have been promoted to,
what the results were, and what information the user typed in. But the most important database
contains a list of all the sites SelfPromotion.com can promote to. This database tells SelfPromotion.com
what information is required by each site, and also contains scripts that tell "Tooter" (the
submission daemon, so named because he toots your horn for you!) how
to do the promotion.
Industriously, 24 hours a day, "Tooter" awaits promotion requests.
Whenever a request is pending, "Tooter" wakes up, picks a request off the queue, and
promotes that site to a target website. For each website SelfPromotion.com can promote to, a complex
promotion script has to be written that tells "Tooter" how to pretend to be a human
being filling out the forms. The script contains instructions not only on what to do, but
what to do if things go wrong. In some cases, you'll get email from "Tooter" telling
you things. For example, if, as a result of a submission, a Website issues you a name
or a password, "Tooter" will email this information to you.
As courtesy is to be encouraged on the Internet, "Tooter" is most active
in the middle of the night when activity on my webserver (and those Tooter talks to) is lowest. So depending on the
number of people using SelfPromotion.com, it may take several hours to several days to
completely promote your site.
