These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Wildfire Content Generator

My company has a need to easily integrate existing content on the web into new websites. This could be product data, directory listings, or even blog postings. The data is used to generate content for the purpose of search engine optimization (SEO) and will be crawled by the search engines to improve page rank for our customers. The data being gathered is either public knowledge or product data which our customers either own or have access to legally to sell the products.

The Excel tool has two parts: the data collector and the database connector. The data collector is operated automatically (statically set for a single site, but able to be altered for additional sites by just changing a few variables) by using a button on the user form (see Appendix Exhibit 1). The program is currently configured to hit a website and gather dentist information for each city in every state in the US and compile the information in the workbook organized by state. When the collection is complete the user will receive an email notifying them that it is complete (this is optional if the user chooses to enter their email address). The database connector portion of the program allows the user to select a state (sheet) of the workbook to be uploaded to the database. The database information is entered by the user including username and password, database server, and database name. The program connects to the database and loops through each entry on the sheet chosen to upload and inserts the information into the database. The database is set up to have categories which are city names. Whenever a new city is encountered in the data, a new category is created in the database and the entries that belong to that particular city/category are labeled as such when added to the database.

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/11w/mgk4/WildfireContentGenerator.xlsm

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/11w/mgk4/Final_Project_Writup.pdf


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