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So I’ve been hammering on this for quite some time now in the background and downtime; it’s drawn a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and sleepless nights (honestly, some 20 hour stints trying to figure it out).  But I’d have to say it has come out exactly like I had hoped it would!

Learning PHP has been a task and I’m about a 4.5 of 10 in total knowledge of it, but I’ve gotten enough to get the SiteStock widget up to snuff and ready for the masses!

What?

It’s fairly self explanatory as to “what’ it is - the screenshot above pretty much says it all, but basically it’s a widget that will run your site through a series of criteria and spit out a fancy little chart as to what your site is doing as of today, similar to the stock market.

Have you been an active poster on your blog? Have you sent a lot of people to your site? How long have you been established?

The widget takes all that info in and gives you a slick widget you can cut and paste on your site!

Why?

I started this out with an idea after seeing several other sites around the web coming up with these fancy widgets and scripts that told you what your blog was worth or how many links and how high your Google Pagerank was.

Well, that’s good and all but it’s very scattered and the web is more than any ONE set of those datas.

Not only was the data scattered, but some only produce a ranking based on being part of a certain group.  Technorati’s API comes to mind.  It’s good, but how deep is it?  Only as deep as their bot can crawl when in reality a site encompasses much more than that.

It’s not just about Technorati or Alexa rankings. Wrap them up in total and give me something tangible that can be put to any site. In comes MiB SiteStock.

How?

To access the site yourself, you should see it in my projects bar near the top, see the screenshot here?  Or just go to http://myinvestingblog.com/sitestock!

I’m not a programming professional by any means, so it may have a few bugs and glitches that I need to hammer out - let me know when you see them!

I’ve tested it about 1000 times on Firefox and Internet Explorer 7, and have had success with Internet Explorer, but I’ve seen a few glitches, let me know if I’ve got them all figured out - another reason I’m a big Firefox fan.

Where?

I get the metrics from several sites across the web including Google, Technorati, Alexa, Yahoo, and Altavista to name some of the magic ingredients.  They all have their own bots, and their own answers, but none are THE answer.

Combining them all and weighting them accordingly has produced exactly what I’ve been looking for - a baseline that doesn’t gauge you on ONE specific metric or bot, but everything, combined.

What Now?

Welp, I’d hope you’d go out and spread the word! Put the cut and pasted widget on your own site and come back often to see how you’ve went up or down in the world!

If you see it’s got errors or holes in it, let me know as it is still “technically” in the QA testing phase being just opened up to the public, so please let me know your thoughts on it. Too much? Too little? Wrong data? Does it smell funny?

If you still have questions, check out the FAQ section on the SiteStock homepage!

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