SiteHoundSniffin' 101

As many of you-all already know, I have been trying to reconnect with my children for the past several years.  Sadly, it has not been going all that well for a number of reasons I will not disclose, but I have been recently told that one of my grandsons is an internet whiz.  This has bolstered my hope that he will want to become involved with SiteHoundSniffs much sooner than later and take the reins of the directory when I can no longer hold them.  So, this piece is more for his benefit than anyone else, but I suspect that many of you-all are dying to learn just what is going on behind the scenes.  Of course, many of the following steps can be automated with a few lines of code that I hope my grandson will want to learn (if he does not already know it).

Step 1: Find the site.  Since I already have links to around 10,000 sites, this step mostly involves looking in a private list, and with each site usually having links to several other sites, the begating goes on and on.  Virtually all of the sites on my private lists came from individual’s blogrolls and favorite sites lists.

Step 2: Quickly glance over the site to see if it has enough content to justify inclusion.  A site with less than a dozen posts is usually dropped unless the entries are truly outstanding in one way or another.

Step 3: Seek to find the actual name of the owner and an email/Facebook address to send private communication to.  This information goes in the “Littermates” MS Excel spreadsheet.

Step 4: Google Bookmark (not to be confused with Google Chrome Bookmarking) the site under zzzd (don’t ask).

Step 5: As part of the Google Bookmarking process, the site name (sometimes) will come up in a separate dialogue box.  Copy and paste it to a blank area of the MS Word Notifications document (again, don’t ask).

Step 6:  Also on the separate dialogue box from the bookmarking process is the site’s URL.  Copy and paste it to the dialogue box involved in attaching a hyperlink to the site’s name in a Word document.

Step 7:  Copy the hyperlinked site’s name and paste it to the first column of the “SiteHoundSniffs Master MS Excel spreadsheet.

Step 8: Click on the hyperlinked site’s name to insure that it works.

Step 9: Copy the site’s URL from the browser address bar and paste it in the second column of the “Master” MS Excel spreadsheet.

Step 10: Type the corresponding Littermates row number in the third column of Master spreadsheet.

Step 11: Seek to find the country of origin for the site.  If found, type it into the fourth column of Master spreadsheet.

Step 12: Seek to determine what the site is really all about and list each category in a column of the Master spreadsheet.  No, one cannot rely upon the site title.  For a site that sounds like it is about Cooking/Foodstuffs may be actually about humorous observations, and a site that looks like it is from India may be actually from Singapore.

Step 13: Make a screenshot of the site header/logo if the “Save Image As” function is not available from right-clicking.

Step 14: Resize the site header/logo to 300 x 100 (pixels).  This might involve a few additional steps to make the image more presentable.

Step 15: Go to SiteHoundSniffs.com and pull up the “All” page in the categories.  Click-on “Edit Page” at the top.

Step 16: Scroll down though the content in the text-editor box until you come to where the new site should be placed in alphanumeric order.  Left-click to the right side of the image immediately ahead, and click “Enter.”  Then click-on “Add Media” in the text-editor options.

Step 17: Click-on “Upload Files” when the “Insert Media” dialogue box comes up.  Click-on “Select Files.”  Find the folder where the Site headers are saved on your computer and upload the new site header to the SiteHoundSniffs Media Library.

Step 18: The new site header will be already selected in this first round, and the dialogue box will be shifted down to where the image link can be pasted/typed in at this time.  Another way is to link the image through the options in the text-editor.

Step 19: Click-on “Update” to the right of the text-editor.  After the update has been made, click-on “View Page” above the text-editor.

Step 20: Click-on the new site image to make sure it is correctly linked.

Steps 21(+): Repeat the previous steps (with a couple of exceptions) involved in adding the new site in its other categories and country, along with “News.”

Final Step: Send a notification email or Facebook message to the owner of the site that explains what SiteHoundSniffs is and gives an option to have the site immediately removed.  This notification is left as a comment when a way to send it privately is not found.

Removal Steps: If an owner wants their site removed, most of the previous steps are reversed.  The Google Bookmark tag is switched from “zzzd” to “x,” and the owner is notified that their site has been completely removed from the directory.

Yeah, I have probably scared-off my grandson, but by the time he is old enough to take over the management, there might be some revenue rolling in.  Besides, a code can be written to automate most of the steps, which will drastically speed-up the process (not to mention make it much, much easier).

Speaking of not being so easy for me, I am currently trying to learn what to do to develop an app for Android smartphones and tablets that will enable people to simply give the icon a tap to go to SiteHoundSniffs.  I would also like to develop an iOS/Apple app, but I discovered that one has to have a Mac to run Xcode, which is the Apple developers platform.  Android Studio is needed to develop Android apps, and there are free versions of it for both Windows and OS/Apple computers.  Now, there is a way to run Xcode on a Windows computer, but one has to download a free VMware program that converts a portion of their computer into a Mac.  One has to also purchase the latest version of Mac OS X (at this time).  So, I will probably just hire some to write the iOS app if the Android app proves to be fairly popular.  Oh how I would like to go on another rant about just how rotten Apple truly is, but this would probably be cutting off my nose to spite my face.

Alas, it will probably be a year or so more before there is any advertising revenue to share, but the steady growth of the traffic has been encouraging.  There are now over 1,500 unique visitors from all over this world coming by each mother, and the number would rise exponentially if more of the Littermates would start promoting the directory more.  Hey, it is in the best interest of us all.

Our physical health is basically the same.  The last two times Arlynda went in for a [paracentesis], they pumped-off over eight liters of fluid.  Getting her to the hospital and back in the house is very hard on me, but her feeling much better afterward makes it well worth it.

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[SiteHoundSniffs.com]

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