The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I am beginning to pick up some comment spam on this blog. It does not automatically post, so my visitors never see it, but I do have to delete the comments. There is something a bit strange with the situation. I don’t ever see the spammers as visitors to the site. I suspect that it is some sort of automation that makes the spam comments almost instantly and is gone before analytics notices that they are there. I should go look at the server log and see if they show up there. I am sure that I would see that they were there for a second at least.

MeanWhile, Back at the Ranch, I have been installing the updated guestbooks replacing my old guestbooks. I found that I can transfer the data from the old guestbook, although it does not work perfectly. I do have to modify the file slightly and it still does not display 100%, the poster information is all scrambled but the post is intact. There are not many posts on any of the old guestbooks so it is not a big problem.

The reason for the change to the new guestbook is improved security. The data file was fairly exposed in the older version, and there was no encryption of the data. The new file has the important personal data encrypted.

I have updated/upgraded five of the eight instances of the guestbook that I have sprinkled around my sites. I tackled the easy ones first. The remaining three all have some posts, so will take a bit more work. There is only one with a significant volume of data. The other two are just on the order of three or four posts.

Last evening I was looking over a guestbook post page and noticed that my footer information was missing from the page. I investigated the problem but could not put my finger on the specific difficulty. I went to the site from which I had downloaded the script to see if there was any information there. I found that there is a new guestbook script available.

The new script was written to improve the security in the script. It will have to replace the old guestbooks as there is not an upgrade path except by replacement. I will investigate the possibility of data import, but that is not a serious problem as I only have one or two of the old ones up with any data. Worst case would be some copy and paste work with those one or two old books.

The layout of the new script is much easier to work with over-all. There were a couple of gotchas with the installation, but nothing that was not easy to overcome with my current knowledge of web design. Last month it may have been different, but I keep learning.

One problem was that there is a div with an id of wrapper in the script. An id can only be used once on a page so the second occurrence of the id blew the page layout. I changed the id and took care of the problem. The other problem was the use of floats and clearing in the script. To integrate this into my page meant that the guestbook needed to be enclosed in a floated div, a fact that I just picked up in my reading sometime last week. Floating the div meant changing the order of containers on the page, also a recent addition to my knowledge base. I made the necessary changes and uploaded a test page (not necessarily in that order).

I like the new script and would recommend it to anyone looking for a php based guestbook for their site. I look forward to working with it and will be replacing the several instances of the old script that I now have on my sites. The script is free to use and is available from myPHPscripts. It uses a captcha so guestbook spam is minimized. There are several other useful scripts available from the site. Check it out!!

I had done some preliminary work on the Mixing Live Sound site, primarily to the home page. I had put it into the new format and gotten some of my ramblings off of the page a couple of weeks ago. Now I have gone through the rest of the site and brought it up to the current spec.

I removed more ramblings from the front page and inserted a news feed from Pro Sound Web with industry news. I also found five other news feeds related to the industry and built the industry news area. I redid the nav top, bottom, and left column. I added the RSS feed meta tag so that the smarter browsers will display the RSS icon in the address bar. I added a links page and a site news page.

I will upload it this evening and test to see if I can find the things that I broke while fixing the site. I need more eyes for the testing, so stop on over and see if you can find something that does not work as expected.  Just leave a note in the Message Center or come back here and post a comment. Thanks!

The major upgrade/rebuild of my Number One Pictures site is on the server. I poked a round a bit and fixed the things that I found wrong. If you have time to look around a little see if you can find what I missed. If you do find something strange there, beside the pictures, come back here and leave a comment please.

The rebuild was basically from the ground up. The site looks the same as far as the backgrounds and outline are concerned, but all of the pages and a good bit of the back office stuff have been changed. I am displaying a photoblog feed on the front page that has some very nice pics. There are also five other feeds in the News and Reviews section of the site. The galleries have all been redone. The picture size has been slightly reduced, but there is direct nav to other galleries from every page.

The overall objectives of this round of rebuilds of my sites are to make the sites more interesting and easier to navigate. I have learned a lot since these sites were built and I am applying some of that education into the rebuilds. Much of what I am doing is to make updating the sites easier. Maybe the next round will change some design functions.

There is still a lot to be done on this  site and I have some ideas for other additions for the site. These things can be done more easily because they are not major projects. With the site rebuild out of the way I can take care of these other things as time permits. I do have several more sites that beg for attention, and there is a fairly good list of top level domain names that I could develop, and more bother me on a regular basis. I may do one or two when I am finished with my spring cleaning. I have a nearly complete concept for one of them on my local server.

Stay Tuned!!

I have been working more on the site upgrade for Number One Pictures. I had put my gallery index with thumbnails into the left column nav and used a php include so that updating would be minimal. But there was still the galleries index page with the same data in a different format. Wouldn’t it be nice to use one data set and include it in both places?

It turns out that just this sort of thing is possible with css. I have been aware of special rules in css for several months (I have only used css in web design for a bit over a year). I had used them for a couple of minor things. Since I am doing a major rebuild of the site it seemed that it was time to delve into the matter a bit deeper.

I set up a test page on which I have the two areas side by side. I placed and named my test containers. I then proceeded to apply the special rules, and sure enough, the same data set can be formatted so that it works in both locations without any problem. This means that I can have one file that can be included in either place and display the way that I want it to in either format. It will save time when I add more galleries to the site.

I am following my plan for the rebuilds on these sites. I am taking my long winded ramblings off the home page. They are still there if anybody cares to go looking for them, but the new home pages are getting right to business. I will have an introductory paragraph and a news feed on the home page. There will be (and I had done this a few weeks ago) a scrollable galleries index with thumbnails in the left nav column as well as the articles index. There is more advertising on all the sites in the form of affiliate banners mostly in a right column.

There is still a good bit of work to do on this one before I upload it to the server. I have to rebuild all of the galleries to match the new format. Luckily, the gallery software and some auxiliary software do most of this. I do have to re-edit the html templates that the software uses. There will be a bit of time involved, but I will keep you informed.

When I looked at my AdSense page view information this morning I had 24 views on the I Built site that I just finished updating. I went to the server and checked my recent visitors for more info. I have had three visitors, and one of them checked out one of the new galleries. That fulfilled the purpose of the update/upgrade. I held that visitor on the site much longer than I have in the past. It is much too early to call it a trend, but it is rewarding that within the first six hours that the update has been live my hope has been met. It would have been better if the visitor had gone on to other pages beside the cartoons, but the increased time on the site helps my numbers. I am off to place a shout on the RSS feed for the site.

I have noticed that my visitor graph for Symmetrical Backgrounds has seen an improvement in page views since the upgrade there, maybe it will be the same for the I Built My Computer site. I really can’t say the same about the Web Pickups site so far, but there has been a steady stream of visitors since the update. I may change my color scheme there and see if that changes things any. I will also try to find a good news feed or comedy feed or three for that site.

The rebuild of I Built My Computer is up on the server. There are nine news feeds available including one on the homepage. There are two new galleries of cartoons. There is a joke of a joke page. There is left nav on each page. There are some new banners to look at in various places.

My hope is that some of the people that come to the site via Google image search will look around a bit more. We shall see, it could happen. Of course, the site could use a lot more articles. Those will come as the spirit moves me.

Check out what I have done and see if you can find something that doesn’t work. I did a fairly thorough test run this evening and I think that I caught everything, but more eyes are better for that sort of thing. If you find a problem just come back here and leave me a comment. Thanks.

I got distracted from my rebuild of the I Built My Computer site. There were two things that distracted me in addition to my real business. The first was learning how to display a news feed on my sites. The second, also a result of the first, was that I worked on the Number One Pictures site rebuild to include several camera news and reviews feeds.

I mentioned the feeds that I have put up in the previous post, so I don’t need to reiterate here. For most of the feeds locating appropriate material takes a bit of time. There are many feeds available. The all have to be checked to see if they will display with my online reader. I also need to check the content to see if it is right for the site on which I am placing the reader. The content for the I Built site was the easiest. I have a folder full of Tech News sites because I have long been interested in computer tech. Nearly all of them have a feed, and all but one of the feeds that I tried worked in the reader.

I had checked for Camera and Photography News and Reviews to put up on the gallery site. There were several good options readily available. I had done some preliminary improvement to the site, but incorporating the news feeds means that the full rebuild should take priority. This is a much bigger undertaking than the rebuild of I Built because of all the galleries presented there. I spent much more time working on it than the rest of the rebuild on I Built will take, and it is still not finished.

I will now complete the rebuild of I Built and then get back to the work on Number One. I hope to upload the new I Built site this evening and the new Number One site by the weekend. Of course, I will trumpet these events here, so subscribe to the posts RSS feed to keep up with my latest adventures!!

I selected four feeds and put them up on The Closet Online site last evening. I put one feed on the front page and repeat it along with three other feeds in a new ‘Fashion News’ section of the site. While I was there I tweaked some things about the site a bit.

I think that the color scheme that I used for the site probably does not really work as well as it might, considering the direction that the site has taken. I will probably change that to something more appropriate. I like the way that it looks, but I went to another of my sites last evening and thought that I may have the backgrounds reversed between the sites. The other site is the PC Application Store site, check it out and see what you think. Just leave a comment here with your opinion. Thanks.

I have also added a feed from this blog to my personal site homepage. (And in the process noticed that I had screwed things up with the blog, so I am off to see if I can figure out what I have done here!)

So, I found the problem with this blog and it is now displaying properly. I had grabbed a logo for something that I mentioned in the post and got a bunch of extra code. I deleted the spare parts from the post. Luckily I now have enough experience to recognize what the problem was at the code level. If I didn’t know a little about the code I would have had no idea why things were screwed up.

I also added a good news feed to the homepage of MC Rally. I had found this feed the other evening when I first started checking into the possibilities. When I checked the site, after uploading the modified page and associated files, I noticed that all the articles listed in the feed had the current date. The content is timely!

As I work with these things a bit I am learning some things. Some of the feeds are not updated on a regular basis. A lot of the feeds will not display in my RSS reader. I load them into a test site that I have set up to check. I tried on my local server, but they do not display here. Probably the software lacks a feature that would allow that to happen.

I am still working on the rebuild of I Built My Computer. It is not really that big of a task, I just was distracted by earning a living last week. Most of my real business for the month of January took place last week. The first week in February will also be a busy one.

In addition, I learned how to call an XML feed and display it on a web page using a php script last evening. Using the php script brings dynamic content to your page. It is searchable and indexable by the search engine spiders. This means that you have new content on the page whenever the spider, or a visitor, stops by. From the search engine standpoint, there is more and new content to index. It is suspected that the spiders will visit the page more frequently because of the frequent change. If they visit more frequently they are likely to tell more people to come and visit.

I think that I will put a feed box from this blog on the personal home page. I found a good motorcycle related feed for the Rally site. Tech feeds are no problem for the computer and software related sites. I will look for a feed, preferably a review feed, for the Gallery site. I have several ideas of what I would like to find for the various sites.

I have learned already that I have to check for the quality of the feed before putting a page on a site. I established a directory on my web space to use for that purpose. The address for the feed goes in an include file, so upload is minimal. I copied the page a couple of times with other names and a different include file, so I can test three feeds at a time. I was hoping to have multiple feeds on a page, but the script that I am using complains about that, so I will probably use a page per feed for now. It is easy to do, because the pages can be copies with only one small change for the name of the include file. The include files can also be copies with the exception of the feed url.

I did find a site that was selling a script to do this. The customer reviews indicated that the search traffic to their sites doubled or tripled when they added the dynamic content. That software may have some bells and whistles that my barebones script does not have, but the major benefit comes from having the dynamic content.

In other news, the preliminary indication is that the rebuild to Symmetrical Backgrounds and Web Pickups are having an effect on the number of pages viewed per visit. There is really not sufficient data yet to call it a trend, but there are some indications that what I have done is helping.