Developing eWrite

I’ve recently read a few blog posts talking about how Google will soon be offering RSS feeds for basic search results.  I thought this was very cool. As I began thinking of the various uses for this I decided I couldn’t wait for Google to bring it out so I created a basic facility using PHP to provide Google search results in RSS form.

Try it out:

Google.ie search results in RSS form

Check it out, see what you think. At the moment I’ve limited it to 50 results. In the coming days I’ll add to it, get the feeds to automatically update every 24 hours or so. I’d like to add some sort of indicators to show if a website URL has moved up or down and to keep track of some of my own URLs. If anyone wants the PHP code for this, let me know.

Some related articles :

• Finally! Google to Offer RSS Feeds for Web Search Results
• Google Confirms RSS For Web Search Results
• Google adding RSS feeds for web search results: mixed emotions

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google is introducing RSS enabled search real soon
• Google Web Search May Get RSS Feeds via Google Alerts

Running low on ideas this week, long week.

• Coffee flavoured porridge would be cool.
• A active directory of Irish business websites similar to Irishblogs.ie would be excellent. I know there are similar directories already such as browseireland.com. It would be good to incorporate other Irish business solutions, such as Loudervoice to show reviews of business as you search the directory. Attach to Yell if it changes to allow a user to be notified if a site changes. Show their Google Rank,  Show how long the website has been online, Show how many pages in a site, now many pages recently updated, any related businesses, how far are they from your current position.

In an earlier blog post of other Friday invention Ideas, I thought it might be interesting to have a Thunderbird extension that would record email stats. I continued to think about this one, instead of creating a Thunderbird extension I created a PHP script to monitor and record emails coming into my POP3 email inbox directly.

Using Cron, I now have a PHP script that checks my email inbox periodically to record details of the emails passing through. The details are stored in a mySQL database. I’m going to let this run for at least a week and then review the stats it records.

I think I will write another PHP script in the near future that will summarize the results with the help of Google Charts.

Here is the PHP code for checking an email inbox and recording some stats, use it for your own email inbox if you like.

log_email_stats_php_script

To use it, download or Copy & Paste the PHP code and upload it to your server. Use Cron to schedule it to run whenever you like to check your email inbox. I have mine set to run every 15 minutes.

The script needs to be told your mySQL database details and email address details. It will create a table and record the details there. If you have any feedback, let me know!