The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I have the Advanced comment system installed on a couple of sites at this point. I will be adding it to some pages probably this evening. There is some merit to having an interactive element to the pages. This involves your site visitor. If they leave a comment they are more likely to return. Comments also add to your content and seem to be updates to the search engines, and the search engines like fresh content. I will put this on my higher traffic sites first, and then trickle down to other sites.

I plan to incorporate this into my picture pages eventually. I have many galleries up on the web and these may make them fun to visit. As I understand it, there can be a separate comment section for each page on a site. I will check that out this evening. As long as I am correct I may use a comment to describe the pictures in the galleries. I will first be putting them after the articles in Mixing Live Sound and on a few other sites.

The installation was relatively easy once I understood everything. I do have some experience with installing php scripts/programs on the server, but I don’t do it frequently enough so that it is automatic. I do think that the install instructions could give a little more information. WordPress will create the database for you with their install program as I recall. I had to create the database for the comment system to use before it would install. It does  create the table within the data base and, thanks to my several WordPress installs, I could see how to use one database for multiple installs of the comment system. I thought that I would only need one install, but it appears that I need one for each site. That is not a problem as long as I can use only one database. I only have 100 databases available with my hosting plan so I do not want to use one for each installation.

You can find the script at:  The Advanced Comment System Page. This is a freeware script. It has tools to reduce comment spam and a notification email when a comment is posted. I was thinking of trying to add a notification email to the guestbook that I have been using on various sites. I was also thinking of adapting it to use as a comment form. I do not know enough php at this point to do those things, so I went looking for an alternative. I found this script with an Internet search and it does look good. I will let you know how it works out after I have it in service for a while.

I published my second Squidoo Lens this evening. I would call it a work in progress rather than a completed project. This lens is a ‘How To’ lens on using KompoZer, my normal web editor, to modify the code for inclusion in a Squidoo module. The things that can be done in the code are limited by the Squidoo editor, but KompoZer can be used to enhance the appearance of a lens project.

I learned some things about Squidoo along the way. I added an extra guestbook module to serve as an ask the editor space. I am offering to help others use KompoZer to do the things that they want to do with their lenses. I will need to fuss with this one a bit more, but I think that it has the potential to become a high traffic lens. Only time will tell. If you want to check it out go to see KompoZer for Squidoo.

A site that is interactive is more interesting to surfers. Taking a cue from blogs and many other sites, a comment section is one  way to make a site interactive. A visitor that posts a comment is more likely to return to the site to see other comments. Comments also add content to the site. Frequently updated sites are favored by some search engine algorithms.

I have been using a simple guestbook script, but this is a separate page and has not been as effective as it could be. I ran into a site called HotScripts in my travels around the ‘Net. Last evening I searched the site for a php based comment system. I found one, a freeware script, that looks good and I plan to implement it on a few of my sites. I will let you know how it goes and post a link if this works as advertised.

One of the advantages to this system is that it is global. It appears that I will be able to install the script one time and use it on all of my sites that share the hosting account. The guestbook that I have been using requires a separate installation for each instance of the guestbook. While I could do what I want to do in this way, it would take a great deal of extra work and would also add unnecessary bulk to the site. The script will also send a notification email when there is a comment posted. It has an anti-spam plan and an admin panel that allows admins to delete inappropriate posts. I was thinking of trying to add an email notifier to the guestbook script that I use.

So now I am off on another adventure in Web Development. I will let you know how this all turns out. Subscribe to the RSS feed so that you will know when the site is updated. What ways are you making your sites interactive? Do you use comments or poles? Leave a comment here to let me know what you are doing!!

I had heard about Squidoo lenses several times but did not really know what they were. I investigated Squidoo last week. I discovered that Squidoo Lenses are a cross between a wiki and a blog.

The Squidoo Lens is a page about a specific subject. Authors are free to write about nearly any subject that is not on the SquidDon’t list. That is the part that is like a wiki, but there can be any number of pages on any given subject like a blog.

My first lens is about the Software Audio Console. I talk a little about mixing in general and a little about SAC. I posted a few pictures that I have taken and have a comment section asking if my readers are ready to give up their hardware mixers. I also posted the youtube video about SAC live at Harrah’s in Los Vegas. The link to the page is http://www.squidoo.com/mixerinabox if you would care to check it out.

The site has a very interesting business model. The put advertising on the pages and distribute half of the proceeds to the publishers using the site. This allows them to have a great deal of content on the site that draws significant traffic and produces an income stream. Of their half they donate a percentage to charity off the top and pay the bills with the remainder. The half that they return to the publishers is devided according to a formula that they have devised that rewards the publishers with the most popular lenses. I am thinking of incorporating a similar system with my Here’s Our Site free site offers. They also pay for referrals so if you think that you might be interested in joining in the fun please click on my affiliate link embedded in this sentence.

I finished work on my new background image gallery. It is one of the larger galleries on the site with 96 images. These are processed from images of fabrics that I found on the web. There is a wide diversity of fabrics represented in the gallery from lace to upholstery fabric. Some are quite happy and others are rather sedate.

I modified my gallery generating software for this site so that it produces pages using the background image for the page background. This duplicates the original pages that I built by hand in an instant. The only time consuming part of the process is preparing the images. Once the images are prepared, page generation and final processing and uploading is very fast.

It is always interesting to me to see the images in use as a background. Just seeing the image does not tell the whole story. When the images join to form a continuous background there is often quite an impact. Check out the new gallery on my Symmetrical Backgrounds site.

The Update for MC-Rally is still in process, but I have gotten sidetracked with an idea for a new gallery for Symmetrical Backgrounds. I am processing images for a fabric background gallery. Some of these will be lightly textured and some will be heavily patterned. It is always interesting to see how an image comes out. The look will often change completely when the image is processed.

I use my photo editor and the built in panorama image function to produce symmetrical images. I have reduced the steps so that making the images is now faster than it was for the first images that I produced. I figured out that I did not need to make two of the components that I had been making. Each image used six components but I was duplicating work and only really needed four components to produce the same end product. By looking over the process I eliminated about half of the steps, so I can now produce the images in about half the time. I found a lot of samples for this gallery, so processing will take some time.

I modified the gallery software so that it produces a page with the image as a background some time back. Seeing the image does not really indicate what the page will look like, you need to see the image in a live situation to see how it will come across. The modified gallery software does this as it builds the pages.

I was out on the road with my business and had a noteworthy adventure. I decided to post this to my Motorcycle Rally site as the adventure took place on the way to the Laconia Rally. I opened the Road Stories page in my website editor and discovered that it was not displaying properly due to changes that I had made to the stylesheet. I have only done some minor updates to the site this year.

I have the road story and at least two galleries of pictures to post, so it is time for a major update to this site. I will be working on it this week. Watch for an announcement when the updated site is uploaded.