The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I am adding a number of pages to the Pennies for Wink site. It had needed some love, and now it is getting it. I have been specking Amazon store pages for addition to the site. Of course catalog pages particularly enclosed in Iframes do not add any value to the site in the way of content. I will be adding a content page for every catalog page at the very least. I am also putting up a directory page with a small blurb about each of the catalog pages so that there will be a little text connecting to each of the pages until I get the articles in order.

As I have mentioned (somewhere), I installed the KeywordLuv and Do Follow plug-ins on the Pennies for Wink Save a Penny Blog. These plug-ins allow commenters on the blog to get a keyword backlink for their site. This encourages thoughtful comments on the blog posts. Of course that means that I need to make some posts worthy of a comment so that they have something on which to hang a quality comment.

I now have three blogs with the KeywordLuv plug-in active. These blogs also have a do follow plug-in installed. That means that a commenter can have a keyword link to his site that is a do follow link. The search engines will follow the link and find the site. You will get credit for a backlink which may help in your search engine results position.

I have now had one comment by a user that understood how to work with a blog and the plug-in. The display does, in fact, work as it is advertised. There was not really any doubt, but I have now seen it in action on one of my blogs.

The Save a Penny blog on the Pennies for Wink site is where this action took place. The commenter left a relevant comment to the post to which it was attached. I approved the comment and it is now live. The commenter has a live do follow keyword link for his time. Thanks!

If you want to build some back links check out the blogs at Before You Buy a Website, Selling On Your Website, or Pennies for Wink. Those are the three that have the needed plug-ins installed. I ask that you leave a comment that is relevant to the post on which you comment. I don’t want comment spam or links to bad neighborhoods, but I will reward a thoughtful comment from one with a quality site with a backlink.

I have begun to lavish a bit of attention on the Pennies for Wink site. (I could certainly use a few pennies about now.) This site has only had a couple of pages and a couple of stores, but no real content. I will be trying to think of what I could do as far as content is concerned. I will add the usual suspects as far as auxiliary pages are concerned, but I need to provide the site with a focus and build some content around that focus.

I did add the KeywordLuv and Do Follow plug-ins to the blog earlier. I will try to provide a post worthy of comment from time to time so that people can reasonably take advantage of the opportunity. KeywordLuv alters the way that a name is displayed so that there is a natural appearing keyword link to the commenter’s site, and the do follow plug makes the link do follow so that the link may be considered a backlink by the search engines. I have seen it said that Google checks no follow links, but I would not depend on that as a fact. Other search engines probably do not count the links even if Google does, but Google does nearly own the market.

This blog is not set up with the plug-ins, but it is a regular stop on the comment spammers tour. I put up the scoreboard at the bottom of the right column so you can see how many attempts there have been.

I will post when the update is complete and live. Feel free to swing by and leave me a suggestion as to where you think that I should go with the site. There are comment boxes on the pages of the site, or you can go to the blog and get some KeywordLuv!!

I had thought that the update to Before You Buy a Website was complete, but in my travels this evening another topic was called to my attention. I had discussed navigation options in one of my articles but did not really discuss links and linking. I wrote an article and added another link in my website basics section this evening. I do expect to think of more topics but I would also like some suggestions.

If you check the page and think of a topic that should be discussed please leave a comment either in the BLOG or in the comment section on the main site. An advantage to leaving the comment in the blog on the site is that I have set that blog up for do follow links, so you can leave a comment and get a backlink to promote your own site. That blog is also set up with a plug-in called KeyWordLuv. If you leave a comment with the format of ‘name@your keyword’ in the appropriate box the display will read ‘name from keyword’ as the comment source.

I have been working on an update to my site Before You Buy a Website. I have added a section on website basics. This is a series of overview articles on many facets of owning and operation a website. They are designed to introduce a prospective webmaster to some of the common terms and concepts of the industry.

These articles cover many topics from the planning stage on through the development and uploading of a website. There are many things to think about. The articles introduce prospective website owners to concepts that they may not have thought about. How can you ask a question about something if you don’t know that something exists? This is phase one.

At some point, if there is a demand, I may go on to phase two. Phase two would examine some of these topics in greater detail and perhaps recommend some solutions to some of the problems. But there are other fish to fry, so I am not going to schedule a timetable for further expansion of the site. I will try to promote this site a bit and see if there appears to be interest.

I started out to do a few minor tweaks to the Before You Buy a Website site. I was going to add an about us page and a contact info page, and redo the site nav in light of the additions. The site only had a small amount of content and there was not much reason for people to visit. I decided that since I was there I should add a few pages of real content to the site.

The original intent of the site was to offer a warning about some of the more unsavory practices that go on on the web. I had a few pages on various subjects. I decided that those needing this advice would be people that are new to website ownership so some basic information about the web and site building and operation would be in order. I quickly thought of about five topics that would be good to discuss.

As they say, ‘one thing leads to another’, and by now I have a dozen new pages under construction and the list will probably get a few more titles before this is all over. I have been uploading new pages to the site daily for the last couple of days, so the amount of content available is already well advanced from just a few days ago.

I also installed a couple of plug-ins to encourage commenting on the site. One of the plugs makes the links ‘do follow’ and the other allows for a name with a keyword text link. These links will eventually show up as backlinks in the search engines so they can help with the search engine ranking for contributors pages. I do have the blog set for manual approval of all comments, so I should be able to keep spam comments to a minimum.

Stop by and see the new pages and watch the site grow!

I looked in on my site, Before You Buy a Website, and decided that there were a few tweaks that could help out there. Things snowballed and I am ending up making some major additions to the site. Since this site is aimed at new would-be webmasters I am adding several articles in a new section called Website Basics. I posted several of these to the web last evening and have written a couple more today.

At the present time I have seven articles planned for the section, but as I go I keep getting ideas for new topics so the section will probably grow. (Make that eight, I just thought of another subject and added it to the list.) These articles will cover topics from ‘What is a website’ to getting the site set up on the web. It is an opportunity to share some of the knowledge that I have gained over the past couple of years.

I located and downloaded the ‘Do Follow’ and ‘KeywordLuv’ plug-ins for WordPress. I will be implementing these on the Before You Buy and Selling on Your Website blogs. These plug-ins will encourage comments and may even build some traffic to these sites. I do have these, and all of my blogs, set to manually approve comments, so we will see how much problem there is with administering the ‘flood’ of comments. You can check the blogs or check back here as I will make an announcement when the plug-ins are live.

This phase of the update to the AudioArt MusicPlayer site is on the server. I am listening to Magda Hiller as I write this post.

The music player, when opened in this way, opens in a pop-up window. I had to allow pop-ups for it to open automatically when opening the page. I have an emergency link on the page so that the player can be opened with a click if the pop-up is blocked.

Since the player is in a new window outside the normal browser it is possible to stop by the site and get the player and then go on to other things, either surfing the web or even another application. The player will continue to play until you close the pop-up window or the library is exhausted.

This update is a big step forward as far as usability for this site. I do have some further ideas to make the site more interesting to visit, but it does work much better than the original. Stop by and check it out!

I submitted a new article to Ezine @rticles this evening in support of my site MC Rally.com. I had received a communication from them stating that approval times are now short. The article may be live within a couple of days. I will probably place an article with GoArticles with a similar topic soon (I started an article).

Ezine has a double manual approval process. Each article is perused by two editors as well as software scans that check for duplicate content and other standards. The Ezine site is visited by more than a million visitors a day, so the exposure can be great. If the article is picked up by a publication that can lead to even more exposure. The approval process can take up to a week but the email stated that there is currently no backlog. My last article took about two days as I recall.

GoArticles does not have as stringent of editorial standards. If I place an article with them it will be live within a few hours. They do have a good deal of traffic, and I have seen some visitors resulting from some of the articles that I have placed with them. Alexa ranks them at about 1100th in the US as far as traffic is concerned. Ezine is at number 55 in the states.

The article directories are one of the ways to support a site. They will generally drive some traffic to your site. There are good stats with Ezine. I have one article that has been viewed a few times but not driven any traffic. The other two have about 12 and 16 percent click through rates.

One builds traffic incrementally. The more paths that lead to your site the more likely there will be visitors show up. Each article is a pathway to the site that it promotes. In addition the search engines look at how many roads are headed your way when they are determining your position in the results page for a search.

I located some information about multiple onLoad events for javascripts with a web search. The music player that I have used on several sites came set up with an onClick event to start the player. The comment system uses an onLoad event in the body tag to initialize the comment script.

When I set up the AudioArt MusicPlayer site I had wanted the music player to start through a link but had to have a second play button on the landing page from the link that still had to be clicked. I became aware of the possibility of using the onLoad event in the place of the onClick event to start the player. I adapted the code and tried it out, and it worked. I also wanted the comment system on this landing page to take specific comments on the music.

I did the web search and found the information about the formatting for multiple onLoad events, so I tried that out. It does work. The player loads and begins to play when the page is opened. The comment system will accept input and function properly as well. The only problem with the solution is that the page reloads if there is a comment posted and that restarts the player. I will just add a note that explains the situation. There may be a better solution but this is workable. Only a small percentage of people will leave a comment anyway, so it should not be too much of a problem.

I do need to make a few more pages for this site and I have a bit of other housekeeping to take care of with this update. The major technical hurdle is behind me, so the rest of the update is downhill. The new features are now active so you can check them out at The AudioArt MusicPlayer Site.