|
PullRank is a program that gets the PageRank of a web site by opening
a Google-toolbar-enabled Internet Explorer browser, hitting the web site,
and screenscraping the PageRank information from the window.
My goal in creating PullRank was twofold:
- To build a tool that could log the PageRank of my blog every day so that
I could plot my blog's PageRank over time.
- To see if I could develop an application in C# without spending any
cash. (Meaning that I would only use the free tools on Microsoft's site
and the information that I could find on web pages instead of
purchasing Visual Studio .NET, an MSDN subscription, or even an O'Reilly
book.)
I never created this software with the intention of using it to harvest
PageRanks for some sort of commercial research, though I do not deny that
PullRank could be used in that way. However, such use would result in abusing
Google, so I ask that you embrace their mantra of "Don't be evil" and
limit the use of PullRank to your own, gentle, personal use.
Author's Note:
Those of you who are crackerjack C# programmers may find my
story of developing this software pretty silly – perhaps the walls
that I hit along the way you would have walked over. If that's what you take
away from this, then you're missing the point. I took the time to write
all of this up in order to demonstrate how to solve a problem with limited
resources. In this case, my only resource was a laptop with an Internet
connection (and a bit of programming experience). Thus, beyond the porn
and the bad poetry, this demonstrates that
there really is some useful information out there on
the web. Learning to find it, and to synthesize it,
is left as an exercise for the reader.
|
a tool to enable you to log the Google PageRank of a URL