dotcut online news monitoring

Hi guys,

I just want to get feedback from people on a system which I have developed called dotcut .

Dotcut is completely free and is a quick and easy way to automate information gathering, search, online press cuttings or competitive intelligence. Instead of trawling your favourite new sources and blogs manually every day, you can register your searches with dotcut and receive the results every morning as a concise email in your inbox. It's currently set to run at 7.30 am GMT, but could be adapted for US users.

Dotcut has been in development for about 12 months now and there are a handful of regular users, but I would like to get as much feedback now as possible. I'm not so interested in the design aspects at this stage. I know it looks bland, but that's something I'm willing to address later. Right now I'm interested to hear what results people get and whether or not the system appears to work as it should. I'm also interested in any thoughts relating to the online user interface and the manager screens on the site.

I personally have a list of about 15 search terms, including things like 'WiMax', 'RFID', 'Sibneft', 'i-Mode' and I usually get a handful of results every day, pointing to new articles and papers on the internet. I love the system. It keeps me up to date with topics which are of interest to me and I think features such as case-sensitivie searching and an ability to browse your history of results all make this tool stand out from the crowd..

Well anyway, I don't want this to become too long winded, but any feedback would be really useful. Let the system run for a few days and see what you get..

Thanks,

christo

When you redisplay user input to them in the HTML or within a form, make sure you run it through htmlentities first.

Umm... am I supposed to be able to click on the FAQ questions or something? Nothing works on that page for me.

I can't be bothered to sign up, but the site looks nice and is easy to read, navigate, etc... I assume you're sending confirmation emails and not just signing up people with anything they submit, right?

---John Holmes...

Good point about html entities.. I think I've done that in most places.

The FAQs are unfinished, although you should see the page load with a list of questions, just no answers in there yet.

As for the emails on the sign up process, you're right and it's something I haven't actually convered - it would make more sense when they register to actually send an email to their email address with a link to click on to actually activate their account. Good call!

thanks for the ideas


christo