Well, It's alive ... I've launched SEO Master List. I have high expectations for this application and hope that it is well received in the SEO community. Which, brings me to another subject. SEO's, can be quite pretentious and highly critical ... So, we'll just see how they like it. Then again ... if they don't ... I really dont' care all that much. I like it.

SEOMasterList is basically just a feed aggregator with a lot of cool Ajaxy stuff on it and some cool styling. Ray Camden actually created the app ... the original code is on coldfusionbloggers.org. A Big thanks goes out to him for his help in debugging the install too ... Thanks Ray.

For those that want their 'SEO' feeds aggregated on SEOMasterList.com ... send me an e-mail and I'll get right on it ... maybe. If your feed wasn't aggregated, and I tried to add it to the list ... there may have been a problem with the xml structure - there were many good SEO blogs that I was unable to parse due to xml rendering issues ...

Thats it.

I've come up with a very cool new app that I put together ... The base code for the app comes from one of the baddest CF dudes around, Ray Camden, the ColdFusionJedi. I have really big expectations for this new app, and cannot wait to release it to see how the SEO community takes to it ... sorry, but I just can't say what it is ... yet.

So, I figured that it would be a good idea to try and expand Florida Search Engine Optimization web coverage beyond the Miami, Fort Lauderdale areas. So, I started a project to build a quazi regional network in my site. At first, I tried to be creative and store all of the cities and counties of Florida in an array with the counties as an array of structs.

With some work, I was able to get this running. However, I realized that if and when I want to make changes or additions to the cities or counties, it was going to be quite a bit of work.

After some consideration I decided that it would be much easier to just use a database table with the cities and counties.

Now, everything was going quite well with the addition of the new database when I found that the city and county fields were all in uppercase ... I really didn't want to leave the data like that, so I decided to figure out how to change the 80,000 plus records to propercase, and I found just the thing ... a cool little T-SQL UDF ... that changes the data to propercase ... the code follows ...

create FUNCTION PROPERCASE

(

--The string to be converted to proper case

@input varchar(8000)

)

--This function returns the proper case string of varchar type

RETURNS varchar(8000)

AS

BEGIN

IF @input IS NULL

BEGIN

--Just return NULL if input string is NULL

RETURN NULL

END



--Character variable declarations

DECLARE @output varchar(8000)

--Integer variable declarations

DECLARE @ctr int, @len int, @found_at int

--Constant declarations

DECLARE @LOWER_CASE_a int, @LOWER_CASE_z int, @Delimiter char(3), @UPPER_CASE_A int, @UPPER_CASE_Z int



--Variable/Constant initializations

SET @ctr = 1

SET @len = LEN(@input)

SET @output = ''

SET @LOWER_CASE_a = 97

SET @LOWER_CASE_z = 122

SET @Delimiter = ' ,-'

SET @UPPER_CASE_A = 65

SET @UPPER_CASE_Z = 90



WHILE @ctr <= @len

BEGIN

--This loop will take care of reccuring white spaces

WHILE CHARINDEX(SUBSTRING(@input,@ctr,1), @Delimiter) > 0

BEGIN

SET @output = @output + SUBSTRING(@input,@ctr,1)

SET @ctr = @ctr + 1

END



IF ASCII(SUBSTRING(@input,@ctr,1)) BETWEEN @LOWER_CASE_a AND @LOWER_CASE_z

BEGIN

--Converting the first character to upper case

SET @output = @output + UPPER(SUBSTRING(@input,@ctr,1))

END

ELSE

BEGIN

SET @output = @output + SUBSTRING(@input,@ctr,1)

END



SET @ctr = @ctr + 1



WHILE CHARINDEX(SUBSTRING(@input,@ctr,1), @Delimiter) = 0 AND (@ctr <= @len)

BEGIN

IF ASCII(SUBSTRING(@input,@ctr,1)) BETWEEN @UPPER_CASE_A AND @UPPER_CASE_Z

BEGIN

SET @output = @output + LOWER(SUBSTRING(@input,@ctr,1))

END

ELSE

BEGIN

SET @output = @output + SUBSTRING(@input,@ctr,1)

END

SET @ctr = @ctr + 1

END



END

RETURN @output

END



GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF

GO

SET ANSI_NULLS ON

GO

So all that was required to get this to work, was to call the UDF after it was created ...

END

RETURN @output

END



GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF

GO

SET ANSI_NULLS ON

GO



--Insert your call here ... 

UPDATE TABLENAME 

SET fieldname=dbo.PROPERCASE(fieldname)

FROM DBNAME..TABLENAME

Now this saved me a hell of a lot of time and was a very simple and easy way to format the data the way that I wanted. Unfortunately, when I went to repeat the same action for the counties, I accidentally wrote over the city fields with the data in the counties field ... Smooth.

It would really come in handy if something like this could have been done in ColdFusion without having to create a UDF to do so ... maybe the guys over at Adobe will read this and decide that it merits inclusion into the next release.

Recently I have been going through the fantastic book, Mastering Regular Expressions, by Jeffrey Friedl. Since I first learned the basics of creating a URL re-write in ColdFusion from a buddy that I used to work with, I developed a crazy fascination with Regular Expressions. For the CF developers that are reading this, it may seem like really old news to you, but many of the "SEO" folks will find this to be foreign, (a programmer is laughing right now ...)

So, for the non-code oriented readers, regular expressions are a very powerful and efficient set of tools, methods and commands to manipulate strings of text and data. You might be wondering how that can be of any benefit to the SEO community. I shall attempt to explain.

The first major benefit that regular expressions offer is through SES (Search Engine Safe) URL re-writing. For Instance, let's take a URL that would be considered as "Unsafe" for search engine optimization.

~ section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=3

Now, I am probably going to catch hell for using this URL as an example, but you have got to love the fact that the web site for Section 508 which regards usability standards, does not use search engine safe URL's. ( Is there anyone screaming 'REMatch' out there? ). There are several characters in dynamic URL's that cause search engine spiders to stop crawling - Question marks, equal signs, ampersands, and colons, are but a few to mention. So, in the example above, we could simply run the URL through a regular expression which, replaces all of the unwanted characters with ones that are search engine safe.

Since this is not a tutorial on ColdFusion's Regular expression functions, I'm only going to show an example of how this URL could be manipulated with a regular expression.

<cfset dirtyURL = ('#CGI.PATH_INFO# #CGI.QUERY_STRING#')>

  <cfset fixit = #ReplaceList(dirtyURL, "?,=,&","/,/,/")#>

  <cfset cleanURL = #ReReplace(fixit,"([[:space:]])","/","ALL")#>

<cfoutput>#cleanURL#</cfoutput>

So, here we simply store the URL as a string variable, and replace the unsafe characters with desirable ones.

The end result above, would take an unsafe URL, like this ...

~ section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=3

And return a SES URL like this ...

~ section508.gov/index.cfm/FuseAction/Content/ID/3

Which, is much better for the search engine spiders to index the content on your site ... and ... "it looks prettier".

In the mean time, I have concocted a cool little cheat sheet, based on the one from Dave's IloveJackDaniel's site ...

I'm putting it here so that I can remember what the hell all the different Metacharacters in the various flavors of RegEx syntax do.
Feel free to do with it as you will.