One old goal is now fact: I got the under 100K Alexa rating, eventually, not much sure what that means, but it should be noted… (I am not sure why I was waiting for this in the last 3 years, probably something in Alexa gave me this number as a “goal”, now, when I saw this for first time, I felt I must be happy, although I don’t even remember why )As you probably already noted, I was fixing the site in the last days. Broken links, bad behavior in small resolutions and so on. However, I think it is fixed now and the new look should be labelled as “ready” with the start of the new month… New month, new look, new luck Now, I am on my road to get several important decisions about the close future. Which tool must get the priority? the css menu generator? The shaker? The new sitemap generator or the good old screen ruler? … There are some important (for me) considerations: should I continue with the current codebase? Should I start with MS Visual Studio? Or why not Qt? Am I planning cross-platform versions? Should I “commercialize”  the site a little (in order to make it possible to move it to dedicated hosting and purchase some goods that will make the whole project better)… Well, I am pretty sure all these are not important for you, but I am writing in this blog not only for the visitors — as it was said once: verba volant, scripta manent, so — for my own future reference — let it be written…Ok, that’s all for now. Let us hope we will have more good news very soon.

I received, again, a note from user that Sitemap Generator includes Virus/Trojan. In the last years I saw this situation several times, and I didn’t even ask him which antivirus solution trigerred the false alarm (they call it “false positive”, but that phrase is ridiculous because there is nothing positive when you accuse someone that he put virus in his program). I know, already, that in 99% of the cases it is Kaspersky. I suppose it is great antivirus scanner, but I am little tired to repack and repack this toy with different setup compilers and compression just to get rid of their fake alerts… Anyway, I repacked the tool, again, with different version of the crawler component and with different compression level, and right at this moment it says everything is OK (I am testing all of my programs with virustotal, the link for this particular test is here) but no one could say how long it will take before Kaspersky start again to alarm you that there is a Trojan or Virus inside the setup. So, if/when that happens — please, let me know. I will try, again, to fix the setup to fit their algorithm. Meanwhile, I am starting to think — should I get a MS certificate for these tools? Could that help in such situations?…However, the quick fix I can (and will) do is to add CNET button to every download page — they (CNET) are saying that everything hosted on download.com is tested for viruses and spyware, so that could be additional level of security for these visitors who don’t know should they believe me or not.Finally, why on earth I am writing this post? My family, so far, is not “Kaspersky”, so, I should not get such thing so seriously… but because I already wrote the post, let me leave it here for future reference…

Finally I found the time in the last two days to play around and eventually change the good old wonderwebware template with something new. I know the black background isn’t the most loved background on earth, and I am not big fan of dark sites… however, it looks like I found a way to use black background without killing the readability of the template… Ok, let us hope you will not hate the new look…

Yes, the new revision of  Site Map Generator 0.97  is now available for download. What’s new:

• Now you can set additional attributes for the xml site map (last modified date, refresh rate, page importance)
• You can now send the program to the windows tray instead of keeping it all the time on the desctop (I suppose this is more important for XP users than 7, but however, it is here as an option)
• Some new settings added for better control over the crawling process (will describe the changes in the help pages soon)
• the usual code improvements and bugfixes (remember: sitemap generator is still <beta>…)

I think the tool becomes better with each new version. Something is still missing — the ability to work with large sites, so be warned that the maximal potential size of site that you can crawl currently is something like 50,000 pages (depends on your computer’s resources). In fact, there is no adequate reason to push the generator over this number, because it is still not capable to split site maps (and the maximal size of one sitemap file for google, as I remember, is 50K pages)… So, that’s the limitation that still persists…

Quick, very quick note: this site is now 3 years old. And one big, personal secret revealed: 15th of May is special day for me — it’s my mother’s birthday (and that makes this day more important than my own birth date). So, now, everyone knows why I selected this date to be the “official” birthday of this site… Happy birthday to everyone who was born today!