I got the basic site for Here’s The Blog up last evening. It will have to be revisited soon. I just threw something together in a short time because I would rather folks did not reach a parking page. I will have to put a blog up there for a sample. (Which reminds me that I need to make a post to the AudioArt Sound Blog after yesterday’s Toys for Tots benefit.)

I have also been continueing with the development of the banner sites (directory sites is the proper name). The format is evolving a little as I go along. I am adding a basic information page for each advertisement. This may make the sites more viable. It also makes putting up the sites more work. (If more work means some sales it is worth while.)

Well, back to the grind!!

I now have another domain name – Here’s The Blog. I will begin developing this name this evening. I will link to the site in this post and in the side bar when there is something to see.

Mean while, back at the ranch, I did add a bunch of content to the PC Application Store last evening. It is all helter skelter at the present time, but I have had a few hits on the name, so I need to have something on the page beside ‘Coming Soon’.

I have a job today (for money), so it is going to cut into my web development time. But, remember, ‘There must be bacon and there must be beans (or at least rice)’.

Well, the website development continues. I have added some advertisers and set up another RSS feed for the PC Application Store today. I have also instituted a program of putting up an information page about each advertiser. I intend to add site reviews and possibly some product reviews for these sites as well. I may email affiliate managers for more material to post on the individual pages. I am including some banners and a text link on these pages so that if someone looks at the about page they do not have to go back to the banner page to find the advertiser.

I went to the Amazon affiliate site to get some banners for the banner sites that I have put up. While I was there I saw a tab marked aStore. I clicked on the tab and found that you can set up an Amazon Store on your site quite easily. I have my Pennies For Wink site that has been begging for some development. So I set up a ‘Pennies For Wink aStore‘. I was able to get the iframe site to behave fairly well. Check it out and see what you think.

I got a local installation of WordPress up and running on my computer. There is a server software available called xampp. This freeware sets up a server on your local machine complete with all the bells and whistles. Web developers using php us this software so that they can test their pages without putting them on the web server live.

I used the untheme theme as a basis for this installation and was able to duplicate one of my live sites to a great extent. The next part of the adventure will be transferring this local installation to the live environment. I will have to set up a database on the server and change the config file to reflect the location on the server. I may not tackle that this evening. I am taking a break from this right now, but I may want to do some further tweaking on the new blog before I actually go live with it. I also may see about setting up another instance of WordPress that shares the database before I make the transfer.

Stay tuned!

At this point I am confronted with a small dilemma. Do I knock out another banner page sub-domain site or do I build some content for sites that I already have online. There is also the problem of adding a few blogs in various places. I, of course, should proceed with the content creation. But, being a hobby webmaster, I may proceed in the easier and more fun direction of adding a site or two to my list.

I did set up a basic site folder that contains the sub-folders and basic contents that I usually use to put up a site. I can copy the folder and set up a site more easily with this. There is still the external jobs of tracking and analytics and obtaining links for a site. But this is more fun for a hobbyist than the creation of content. On the other hand the content creation is my best chance to drive traffic to the site without spending some money.

That is my current dilemma. Watch this space to follow the outcome of this situation.

I have spent the last couple of hours collecting some banners with which to decorate the Closet. ‘The Closet Online‘ was a domain name that was too good to pass up. It was even better than I thought as it is a pre-owned name that gets some direct bookmark traffic. I am afraid that  the returning traffic has been somewhere between disappointed and frightened. They may still be disappointed, but at least there is something other than green skulls to view. At the present time there is a laundry list of banners on the site. I hope to enlist the help of my daughter in adding some useful content to the site.

Along the line of additions to sites, some more advertisers approved the Shopping for Electronics and their banners are duly installed there. I will be adding comments about the various stores advertised on this site.

There are a raft of banners up on the Shopping for Electronics site. There was a window of several hours during which time you could have viewed the hosting companies parking page. That time is past and a nasty banner site is up. Now all I need is a few thousand visitors. Tell everybody you know to go check it out. They have probably never seen so many banners in one place. We have lots of content on the site!! (It’s just that all of that content is banners.) I even have an RSS feed so that you can know when the next raft of banners can be viewed.

I was getting tempted to buy another domain name, but I haven’t thought of a name that is available recently. I keep putting ideas into the search box, but they have all come back in red instead of black. (Taken names show in red and available names in black in my registrar’s search results.) They always suggest a few alternates, but I don’t need alternates to good domain names. The domain name can be very important in the search results. If the domain name contains keywords used in search terms the site will get some hits. I noticed the other day that this includes sub-domain names. I looked into a visitor to this site and they had come via search engine. The search term was ‘hobby webmaster’, and this blog was the first entry in the search results.

My web host allows me unlimited sub-domains and it is a simple matter to create them through the cpanel. I have several domain names that I found specifically to use in sub-domains. One of them I have used to establish the site for this blog. It has occurred to me that this space can also be used for other sub-domains that I may wish to establish.

I am placing some affiliate links and banners on some of my sites. There are other affiliate programs available that do not seem to fit with any of my existing sites. I have decided to put up some sub-domains to promote other areas. The cost is only a few minutes of my time, so I might as well take advantage of the resources available to me. If I get a few hits from these sites it will help the bottom line. If you want to check out this latest (ad)venture the first of these is: http://www.shoppingforelectronics.heresthesite.com/. If you hurry you may even get to see the web hosting companies parking page.

Last spring the Biker Community lost one of its stars. Samantha Morgan was a rider on the Wall of Death. For the Sturgis Rally the Sturgis County Line had commissioned a large wall hanging in tribute to Sam. I took a picture of the wall hanging and posted a tribute page to Sam on my MC Rally site. Today, as I was checking my site traffic, I noticed that there was a referral from Jay Lightin’s site. I checked out his Tribute to Sam page and followed some of the links. I found a YouTube Video of an interview with Sam done by US Rider News. There are some good shots of Sam on the Wall and it is an interesting insite into the life of my friend Sam. I embedded the video on my tribute to Sam.