I've been working on a personal project: http://www.tiptoptweet.com which has taken up a whole lot of my time. Because of that I've been neglecting this site somewhat. Well, the site is now finished and I could do with some feedback, but equally I should be able to pick up the blogging slack a bit too.
What Is TipTopTweet?
Its a twitter application that lets you vote for other @users or URL's by simply adding a #hashtag to a message.
By adding either #voteup or #votedown to a message which contains a user or a link, tiptoptweet will pick up your vote and record it. The website then shows top ranked links and users over a week / a day / a month in any vote category.
You could say that its basically a Digg or Reddit for twitter.
Why?
I was getting a little fed up of all the sites which track a user's popularity on twitter by simply measuring how many other people are following them. I want to know who people actually think are interesting, letting users vote is an obvious way to do that.
Technically speaking I also wanted to get some good experience with ASP.NET MVC, which the whole site is built in. I've learned an aweful lot about MVC actually, so I'm glad I did it.
What's Next?
I need feedback! I don't really care whether or not it becomes super-popular, but I do want to know if its useful, if it works properly, and how I could improve it.
If you're reading this and it sounds even vaguely interesting, then please check it out and let me know what you think!
This has happened to me with this site, and seems to be a common problem, but fear not, help is at hand.
According to Brendan Kowitz this is due to ASP.NET being unable to match the googlebot's browser signiture and thus defaulting it to the 'MOZILLA 1.0' setting.
He's posted a solution to the problem, and you know what, it works! The solution is a simple genericMozilla.browser file which you need to include in your site. It also solves similar problems with other search engines.
You can check what response google will receive from your site with this tool.
Through the tool I can see that my site now returns the correct HTTP/1.1 200 OK status message, whereas before it was returning a 500 error.
Hope this helps someone.