I would like to put a "Search Partners" Search tool on this page:

http://www.beadsofbali.com/index.asp?PageAction=Custom&ID=20

Link partners often come to my site (on repeated occasions) to insure that I am reciprocating their link. I want to make it easier for them to find their link on my site. Quite honestly, being able to search links would save me a lot of time, too!

Anyone know how to do this? It would have to search just those custom pages that I set up for the link exchange categories.

I know that some kind of server involvement would be required.

Thanks!

Robert,

You may want to consider a tool similiar to this >>

http://www.linksmanager.com/

I signed up to use it... but never had the chance to work on it so I canceled my account.

I posted the above link to make clients aware that there is links management software available on the market. Which one is the best? I don't have a clue!

Captain,

I am familiar with Links Manager but have resisted for three reasons.

(1) I have heard that google sees LinkManager sites as link farms. (I don't know if this is true.)

(2) I anticipate that will eventually come up with something better -- something that will reflect our collective wisdom and experiences. At minimum, you would come up with something integrated into the store -- not something that stands beside of it. Besides, I'd rather support "the home team."

(3) I fear that it won't work with Sites, based on a forum post or two from the past that I can't seem to locate. We have asp pages; Links Manager generates html pages. Not sure how that is going to work, unless the links part of the site is somehow detached visually from the rest of the site.

Back to my original question. Can limited search capabilities be added to our sites?

Thanks!

Regarding LinksManager; I'm currently using my '30-day Trial' with them. Honestly the code does look nice and can integrate well into the site. Of course I would rather throw a couple extra bucks towards instead of another company.

It automatically adds, removes and sorts links - along with many other things. However, they have a automatic FTP option to 'upload' updated pages. We no longer have FTP so I would need to manually download my pages, unzip the file and upload it to my site almost daily.

I'd rather not add more 'manual' things to my current todo list, so I'll be cancelling it soon.

This was my concern! I'd rather just wait until makes it a module we can pay extra for.

Maybe when the post-migration era comes...!

I have an idea about this... we discussed developing a platform for MonsterCommerce stores to exchange links easily... and since all stores are on the same platform, it will be easy to develop a system that facilitates this process.

Perhaps it can be a function of the marketplace since the marketplace will speak directly with each participating store. Speaking of which... we will need about 10 Beta testers for phase 1 of the marketplace in about 2 weeks.

I will post for volunteers in the near future.

E-

I wouldn't forget about you. hehe. You are one of the top clients on my list. You're always willing to jump into the depths of Beta!

Regarding the marketplace... we will be rolling it out in two phases. The first phase will be a simple "directory" of MC stores broken down by cats and sub cats.

The second phase will be more complex and provide "search" for all participating MC stores. The design of phase 1 is complete... we are not programming the DB etc.

I will provide more on this over the coming month.

What does the beta tester need to do Captain?

Are you talking about a Froogle-like database that would reach into our sites and list all of our products? Now that would be cool!

By the way, what about the search question -- adding an ability to search links from my links page. Is that possible?

I ran across this post while searching for something else... but if you just want a simple and free way to scan a page for words or links, (besides the "find on this page" command) just use the free Google Toolbar. If you enter text in the box, the words show up to the right and then you can click them and it will jump to them on the page. You can also use the highlight command to find multiple instances easily.

http://toolbar.google.com - That is for MSIE, and there is also one available for Mozilla / FireFox, (though not from Google) that does some, though not all of the same things.