The Hobby Webmaster Blog

The two new blogs may be found at: About Music Blog and WebPickUps Blog. The call for content has gone out, but I have not seen any articles slide in yet. I will check back later, and if there is anything waiting I will make the post.

I did update the default post on both of the new blogs. One of the links that came up on the music player site was for my main business site, AudioArt Sound. It took me a minute to figure that one out. I got a notification by email that someone had pinged with a link. When I looked at the email the ping had originated on my new blog. That was a bit confusing because I knew that I had not linked to my site yet.

The category that was available for the About Music Blog turned out to be entertainment. I will need to search for more music articles, I think. There are vast libraries of articles available on the web. I chose the humor and sexuality categories for the WebPickUps Blog. We will see if anything funny slides into place.

I put the DoFollow and KeyWordLuv plug-ins on these sites as well as the Deep Link Engine plug. I also invited guest bloggers for the About Music Blog. The DoFollow and KeyWordLuv plug-ins are designed to provide a bit more incentive for quality comments by producing a do follow anchor text link back to the poster’s site or blog.

Check out the new blogs and tell me what you think.

I have copied my WordPress master folder to two of my domains today. I keep a copy of the WordPress blogging software on the server in the root directory and when I want to set up a new blog I copy it on the server instead of uploading the whole thing from my desktop. To copy a folder on the server only takes a couple of shakes of a lambs tail, much faster than uploading a major software package like WordPress.

I copy the folder to my destination directory and then make a few adjustments for the new blog. The config file has a few settings that need to be adjusted and my background images need to be properly named and uploaded. There are a couple of site specific include files that need to be changed and the WordPress set-up procedure to run. Then the blogs will be operational.

I will be back to post urls to the new blogs later.

I have been testing a couple of WordPress plug-ins over the past few days. It is easy to get excited by the lofty claims made for these plug-ins by their creators. It is a bit disappointing when they aren’t really quite ready for prime time. Both of the plugs that I am looking at fall under this classification in my opinion. While I can see uses for each they don’t quite perform as claimed.

The Deep Link Engine is a plug-in that searches the web for related blog posts and inserts links to these posts at the bottom of your post. The download page states that you can choose which links to post but in practice this is not possible. I think that this is due to attempting to make it work with an auto-content plug-in that the developers have just released today. The plug-in appears to carry out a final search when the publish button is clicked and inserts the links that it finds at that time.

There are two advantages that this plug-in does give. There will be some direct traffic from the linked sites, and if they like what they see there would be a possibility of a better one way link in a future post. The WordPress software by default pings linked blogs and those blogs produce a trackback to your post. If the linked post is good the readers there may find their way back to your site. In any case Google is likely to note the link and this may help your page SERP.

The second plug that I have just discovered is an auto-blogging software. I put one instance of the plug-in up last evening and was able (by jumping through several hoops) to get it working. I have only looked at a couple of the articles produced so far. One had very little text to the post and that appeared to be somebodies affiliate text link with the link stripped out. The other article at which I looked had a little more content. The formatting on the articles was not too good, but I may be able to tweak that in the css file. The software pulls images, but does not produce a margin around the image so the text runs right up to the image.

The plug-in, WP-Article-Fetch, serves the articles from a server maintained by the developers of the plug. They admit that the articles are scrapped from the web. They have an article spin software on the server. The one article with content was not very human readable. I suspect that this is a shortcoming of their spin engine, but there is a lot of content that is written by non native English speakers that does not read so well either. If it is the spin engine one would have to rewrite the articles if you want a site to be proud of, but there would be some possible value if the main objective is just to attract traffic to expose to your ads. In fact people may click on an ad just to get out of there and go somewhere that makes sense.

I will continue to test these software packages to see if there can be significant value to either of them. Being free they are now worth the money spent.

Somewhere in my travels I saw a reference to an open source software package called Dolphin7. This is a CMS based community building software package. It was designed as a platform for dating sites, but has features, according to the website, that rival the web 2.0 social networking sites. A package like this starts me thinking about possibilities. There were three areas that immediately came to mind.

I have downloaded the software and will begin to investigate those possibilities in the near future. I have been interested in hosting an article site so I will see if the software can be adapted to that end. Along with that goes my live sound wiki site. I tried some wiki software but the security (maybe my settings) left something to be desired. I checked it one day to find over 3000 spam comments on the home page alone. The other thought that I had is a shopping community site.

This may also prove to be a solution for my music site. I had found a file upload software and installed it on the site. This software seems to draw a lot of attention from a bad element via the search engines. When someone tried to upload a .php file last week I took the upload software offline. (A php file could probably be used to take control of my server space.)

Expect a further post on this software package when I have had opportunity to check it out. Being open source the code is available to modify as desired. This may lead to some new knowledge and be a bunch of fun.

Check out the software package and tell me your thoughts in a comment. If the software spawns ideas that you think would work but have no interest in pursuing let me know!

This is the week for the annual spring BikeWeek in Daytona. I am working the event mixing sound at the Full Moon Saloon on Main Street in Daytona Beach. This is cutting into my time to fuss with the websites (in a moderately good way). I also worked a second gig on Sunday at the Freedom Rally held at the Volusia County Fairgrounds.

I am going to try to get an article or two posted. I have the free PDF on WebSite Basics available from my ‘Before You Buy a WebSite‘ site and I need to support the site a bit. I am also making a few blog posts, primarily about the event.

While going through some of my traffic today I noticed that my Buzzle article supporting the ‘Mixer in a Box‘ site was showing with a higher search position than my site, but they were both on page one of the search results. Traffic is building on several sites, and that is a good thing. With the number of sites that I have up there is always a list of things that need to be done. Most of my sites need more content, some basic content and some tweaked for on page SEO.

I will have more time next week to get to some of those things, but the season is cranking up and I need to tend to the business that pays the bills. I will continue to make steady progress.

If you check some of my sites and have any suggestions please leave a comment. Thanks!

If you are in Daytona for the rally stop in and say ‘hello’ at the Full Moon Saloon. I am there from 8:30 PM ’til.

I have been preparing my first ebook in PDF format. I downloaded Open Office to produce the ebook because one can export as PDF from the open source Office Suite. The book is titled Website Basics and contains some information that I hope will be of value to those interested in owning a website.

I sent a preliminary copy to Jo at Magic Mega MoneyMakers. She not only offered an opinion on the quality of the book but also did a through proof read and made a couple of suggestions for improvements to the book. I have taken care of the typos and reworded a few awkward passages. I also added a bit of explanatory content.

I am producing this ebook in the hope of generating some traffic to my Before You Buy a Website site. I will offer the ebook as a give away in an article marketing campaign to try to build some traffic to this site. I will offer the opportunity to sign up for an email list, but not require the sign-up at this time. If I build some traffic and don’t get names for the list I may produce another ebook and require an opt-in to download the second book.

The revised PDF is on the server. If you would like a sneak preview go to the DownLoad Page. If you check out the PDF please leave a comment. Thanks!

I have put the article directory script up on the World Soapox site. I did a minor update of the rest of the site as well. There is more that I should do, but maybe I will wait and see if there is more traffic. I will be reporting the installation to the article-exchange. They will put it on their list and promote the site a bit. Many of the faithful will also begin to include the site in RSS feeds that they create to promote their own articles.

I will be making a post on the Money from the Web blog about this article directory script. I will follow up there at some point with my impression of the value of the script. There are some things that I do not quite understand about this script. The content is pulled from the article directory server. It does not reside on my server and is only displayed when called. I am not sure how material could get indexed on my sites. The content of a WordPress blog resides in a data base and the pages are dynamically built at the time that someone clicks a link to the post, and they get indexed, so maybe this will really appear as content on my site.

I will push a few articles through the system to check for results as well. I will also be announcing this on the Words from the SoapBox blog this evening.

I did look around a bit and saw a few variations of this script. One site had different promotions on the left. There is also a script for WordPress that uses the same database. There is no variation with most of the sites I have seen using the script. I fussed with the css a good bit and shoehorned the directory into my mold as much as possible. The two instances that I have up more or less fit in with the sites design that I had produced. I also took care of a couple of problems with the original design. My instances work better than the originals.

Check out The World SoapBox Article Directory and tell me what you think in a comment here.

I did battle with the article directory script last evening. It was only a skirmish but it did take a while. There is an external CSS file that is editable, you just have to find your way around in it. The location that I have the script in its current state is:  Articles Directory at Articles – Here’s The Site. It does work ok in FireFox but still needs some tweaks for IE-6. I have not checked with the newer versions of IE.

There are pluses and minuses with this script. The script is encrypted so you cannot edit the output aside from the CSS file. I wanted to add a nav bar at the top since the directory is only a part of the site. There is hope of doing this, but not in the normal way. I did trick it into displaying a couple of links, and I later thought of a way to do this better, but having access to the script would make things easier.

An other minus with the script is that there are built-in affiliate links. You can get a reasonable affiliate payout on these links, but they may not be your first choice of things to display on your site. You can add ads in three places in the script, and it is through creative use of this option that I was able to display my own links.

The other drawback to the script is that only the site owner can post articles to the site. There is a library of articles and all articles submitted by other participants are immediately displayed on all of the more than 200 directory sites. If you are looking for a script to start a real article directory site, where people can sign up and submit articles this is not the script for you.

On the plus side, with over 200 of these scripts in operation you do get exposure around the net. With the major article directories you will only get the one backlink unless the article is picked up for publication. There will probably be more individual surfers that are exposed to your article on a high page rank article site, but the link love may not be any better than with this article service. The owner of the script states that he does spot checks on articles posted to the directory and will block further posts if he catches someone not complying with his terms of service, but every article is not necessarily checked by a human editor.

The experience has been interesting and I will be submitting some articles through my site. I will post at some future date if I have positive or negative opinions on this service. In the mean time check out the first instance of my article directory and leave me a comment here if you have thoughts or questions.

Last evening I ran across an article directory script. I have downloaded the script and will be checking the possibility of integrating it with one of my sites. This will be an interesting challenge.

Article directories allow people to post articles to the site. Articles posted to the web are an important source of backlinks. Backlinks are important to a site because they help in placement in the search engine results pages presented to searchers. A page with more backlinks will usually be listed higher than other pages if they contain information relevant to the search terms.

I have a few articles posted to article directories. I have just had my fifth article accepted by Ezine Articles and I have articles posted on GoArticles and Buzzle.com. These articles have directed some traffic to my various sites. An article on a directory site like Ezine or GoArticles may be reprinted by webmasters around the world. At least one of my articles has been picked up for reprint.

The script that I found is part of an article directory network. There are over 150 instances of this script in use around the web. This means that an article submitted to any site running the script appears on all of the other sites, so the opportunity for exposure is at least fair. These sites are not likely to have the traffic that a site like Ezine has, but the articles may stay near the top of the list longer, too. If the script works as advertised I will probably support the site with a few articles on some of the major directories.

I will be checking this out over the next few days and post about the outcome. I had considered doing this a few months ago, but all the pieces of the puzzle were not available at the time. Perhaps this is the final puzzle piece that I have needed to complete this puzzle. Be sure to watch for my further post. If the script is good I will provide a link to the source and I will be providing a link to my instance of the script on my selected site.

Have you tried article marketing? What results have you seen? Leave a comment telling of your experience.

I have installed DaDa Mail on my web server. This is a program that allows one to build mailing lists. List building is important for Internet Marketing. The list is double opt-in. You sign up for the list and then receive an email with a link that you must click to be included in the mailing list. There is also the option to opt out of the list at any time, and the software takes care of all this. With an add-on this software can also be used as an auto-responder with scheduled mailings. It will also do the work of mailing in a fashion that is friendly to the server.

I have also produced my first PDF. I downloaded (150MB) Open Office 3 and installed it yesterday. I needed a full word processor for some things that I need to do, not just a simple text editor. Open Office has the capability to export as PDF. I need to produce a couple more of these for other sites, but my first effort was to assemble a group of articles into an ebook in PDF format to offer as a reward for visiting one of my sites. I uploaded the PDF to the server and checked that it could be accessed. I made a download page with an optional sign-up for the email list. I just checked and the download page works and the mail opt-in form works. I have not gone live with the program at the present time. I will make an announcement here when I do go live with the program, so check back or subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up with the latest news.

I may break the PDF into two sections. The PDF is now 12 pages but it covers a fairly broad range of subjects. This could be broken down into Website Basics and Web Theory. If I do break it down I will probably add some content to the Web Theory PDF and require a sign-up for the list.