Dwight Watt Georgia Kiwanian Article

August 2008

Tech upgrades

By the time you read this we will know who the winners of the web page competition were this year. All sites that are listed on the district web page were entered (if your club page is not listed send me an e-mail with the url and the name of your club at Dwight@DwightWatt.com) and judged.

Once again we had the honor of having webmasters from other districts being the judges. We had the webmasters from Eastern Iowa-Illinois, New York and Kentucky-Tennessee serve as judges. In addition I had the honor of judging the website competitions in those districts.

There is a new search engine out that was created by Google veterans that is receiving publicity at the end of July. It is called Cuil and it is available at www.cuil.com. They claim to have a much larger database of pages they have searched and claim to be more accurate on getting results.

My experience in using the search engine was disappointing. I did searches on Dwight Watt and Georgia Kiwanis. In both cases many more pages were found, but oddly after looking thru several pages of results the main page of each (www.DwightWatt.com and www.GAKiwanis.org) did not turn up and there were a number of sites it showed that had stuff on descriptions from one of those pages but when I went to them had nothing about either subject in them and looked like name holders. I will see if they get it better. Until then I don’t see any threat by them of Yahoo and Google.

Zuula (www.zuula.com) is an interesting search engine that actually works off several engines and lets you look at the results from several places. Accoona (www.accoona.com) was a new search engine that appeared several years ago, but has turned in to a business search and does not seem to work correct anymore.

I will be converting the club links page and officers page soon to using the database also. Officers and clubs will be separate tables.

I am using HTML/XHTML, PHP , MySQL and SSI to do the web pages currently. When I began working on the site we only used HTML.

Dwight

Copyright 2008 by Dwight Watt