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Thank you for your interest in our Web Design and CGI Programming services.
This document illustrates our work by helping you to understand one of our products. It explains what the product is, and at the same time displays how well we understand our job. To give you a better feel for what this product is and how it works, we've created a special demonstration site. You can add your own material to the product, and even make changes to its appearance and behaviour.
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AutoList is a toplist utility written by Mike Stannett for NoiseFactory, using the popular scripting
languages perl 5 and JavaScript. Mike has been cited as one of the pioneers of
hypercomputation, the construction of "super-Turing" computational devices and theories. He's a
keen mathematician, with a secret love of coffee, ancient history and whodunnit stories.
We offer both web design and advanced programming services, including the construction of one-off scripts and programs. If you would like us to consider a project, please submit an outline of the work you require in as much detail as possible. |
| What is AutoList? | What does it look like? | How do I use it? | What about installation? |
AutoList and the toplist concept
AutoList is a collection of interrelated CGI scripts which interact with one another to keep track of the entries in a toplist. Unlike normal HTML lists, which always look exactly the same no matter how much they're used, a toplist reconfigures itself to reflect usage. A typical toplist might display the URLs of several registered clients. In exchange for referring potential customers to your site, their entry is automatically pushed further up the list, so that your own users are more likely to see their entry and visit their site. In other words, it's a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" type of program. The more people they refer to your site, the more likely it is that people will be referred back to theirs.What else does AutoList do?
A basic toplist may be useful, but it's very difficult to manipulate. To make things simple, AutoList introduces several extra features. One of these is a proprietary definition language, specifically designed to make manual construction and editing of AutoLists as straightforward as possible. However, it's unlikely that you'll ever need to know this language, because everything can be done using the comprehensive AutoList Administrator utility. This provides an easy route to changing the appearance of the list and lets you split the entries into blocks according to their score - that way, if clients refer lots of people to your site, you can do more than simply push their entry to the top of the list. You can actually thank them by highlighting their entry to make it more attractive to users. This in turn makes it even more likely that they will promote your own site...What are the benefits of AutoList to commercial webmasters?
Toplists have proven to be popular with commercial webmaters because they provide much needed feedback. Because popular entries are promoted towards the top of the list, you can try out alternative page designs and layouts, and see which generate the most interest. More to the point, you can fine-tune the way you advertise other people's URLs. Rather than simply promote URLs, AutoList gives preferential treatment to those sites that are actively sending you large numbers of referrals.AutoList also allows you to control the route out of the HTML page containing the list. You can arrange for all outgoing referrals to be shunted through a "trap" page, specifically designed to let users choose between the URL they've already selected and other pages that you want them to know about. Or else you can place adverts on the trap page, so that every time someone's tempted to leave your site for another, your own products and URLs receive preferential promotion.
What are the benefits of AutoList to intranet managers?
Intranets take advantage of the Web's capabilities, but they also suffer from its problems. You need feedback just as badly as a commercial webmaster. What's the point of creating large numbers of documents, say, if you don't know if anyone is reading them? With AutoList you can get an exact count of how many times a document has been selected from the list. Moreover, by embedding your hyperlinks as AutoList entries, your HTML documents will automatically reconfigure themselves so that the most popular hyperlinks are the ones that spring most readily to the reader's eye. This not only makes your documents easier to read, but saves staff time and makes for better comunication of the ideas you're trying to convey. And by examining the ranking of the various hyperlinks, you can get a feel for the way people are navigating your documents, which concepts they seem to need help with most often, and which documents are rarely consulted.
On the surface, an AutoList looks just like any HTML list of ranked items. Here's a typical, if somewhat small, example to show you the general appearance (the actual HTML definitions for an AutoList is much more sophisticated).
Rank Site details Referrals received Referrals generated 1 GamesCrash.com Test Link 14076 25644 2 NoiseFactory:
Authoritative Web Design and CGI Programming11892 10897
AutoList21 Free Adult Toplists from
Rank Site details Referrals received Referrals generated 3 Your site goes here? 10765 15227 4 Mike & the Alchemist 8206 10478 As you can see, the entries are split into a number of blocks, each of which has the same general layout, and you can insert adverts and other material between consecutive blocks. In this example, there are two blocks each containing two entries each, but you can display as many entries as you like, subject only to the limitations of your computer system. Currently, we allow up to five separate blocks, each of which can contain any number of entries (more than five blocks tends to look messy, and can be confusing). Block membership is defined either by rank or score, where an entry's score is determined by the number of referrals generated (you can choose incoming or outgoing referrals to be the relevant value). For example, this example is scored by Incoming Referrals, and the first block contains the entries with ranks 1-2. You could also define block membership by saying something like "this block contains all entries whose score lies between 5000 and 9999". If a block contains no entries, it simply isn't displayed, but as soon as a new entry qualifies for membership that block is created automatically. You have complete control over which data are displayed, the fonts that are used to display them, their backgrounds and their colours. You can decide which items appear in which columns, and what the associated column widths and headings should be.
Embedding adverts and other information between blocks
AutoList can even keep track of text you place between blocks. You can arrange for an advert or other information to appear between the 4th and 5th blocks, say, and AutoList will ensure its correct placement no matter how the blocks themselves change in response to usage.How AutoList embeds information inside HTML documents
AutoList works by embedding a number of special tags into the text of the list. As a result, you can edit an AutoList page just like any other HTML document, provided your HTML editor is well behaved and doesn't change tags and layouts without asking. These comments tell the AutoList scripts about the general layout of the tables, and keep track of any information that is currently hidden. For example, you might decide not to display the Referrals Outward counts, in which case the information is stored in one of the special tags. These tags have been designed to keep memory overheads low, while ensuring as much flexibility as possible in the way multiple lists are handled.Because all of the relevant information is embedded in the HTML page itself, AutoList creates no log files on your server. Instead, every AutoList instance is completely self-contained. This means you can move or copy an AutoList from any one page to any other without ever worrying about keeping track of extraneous data files in unexpected places. No matter how many AutoList instances you create at your site, you will only ever need one copy of the scripts and administration page.
Adding new entries
New users simply fill out their details in the "Add Entry to AutoList" form and press the button marked "Add New Entry". Alternatively you can create your own form to do this for you. The name of the script and the parameters it expects are explained in the documentation you receive when you purchase AutoList. Entries are allowed to appear only once, so if the URL is already listed the request will be denied and an explanatory message displayed.Keeping track of referrals
This is handled automatically - you don't have to do anything.How easy is it to cheat?
Sometimes people will boost an entry's score artificially by writing a program that generates a referral ever few seconds, so they can make their entry look very popular without ever sending any potential customers to your site. To get round this problem you can tell AutoList not to count referrals that come too soon after one another. For example, you might tell AutoList to increment the Referrals Inward count for an entry only if the previous referral was more than 10 minutes earlier (you can specify any interval from 1 second to several years, or you can turn the feature off altogether).
See Frequently Asked Questions.