The Hobby Webmaster Blog

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.

This blog is my champion comment spam magnet at the present time. I just posted an article a few minutes ago. I had cleaned about 10 spam comments our to the spam folder that came in overnight this morning. When I returned to post this evening there were 5 more waiting for me. I wrote the post and now before closing out I checked again and found two more in the folder. Those are down the road now but I need to get out of here in a hurry so that they don’t load me up again. I will check in the morning to delete their attempts.

As I was going through the blogs last evening, having found why my background image was not displaying in my footers, I had one site that stubbornly refused to co-operate. The footer image did show up as expected but I was also adding a white background behind some text in the body below the footer. I had written the rule for the background to be just wide enough to contain the text, but it was stretching across the page. I checked and rechecked the punctuation and syntax and it all seemed right. I had finally left it to proceed with the other blogs.

Today I revisited the site. I finally located the problem. I had added a rule long ago when I was having a problem with this and had forgotten what I had done. I finally opened my include file and found that I had something there that was causing a conflict. (Checking here I found the same code in the include file, but I had never added the css code, so there was no conflict here.) I removed the offending code and deleted the spare rule from the css and the problem went away. Now everything is beautiful, mostly.

On to the plus. I have just added a blog, Live Sound Mixing Tips, to the Mixing Live Sound site. I made a second post in the blog today. The post was long enough and seems to me to be useful information, so I just finished submitting a slightly adapted version to EZine Articles. It will take a few days for the article to be accepted as EZine does manually check all submissions. Two editors look over each article, checking for different things. Article approval has been quite fast but they have warned that approval time may increase. They have added a number of editors as the article volume has increased to try to keep the approval times reasonable. I have a number of other articles that I need to submit in support of some of my other sites.

I have had reasonable response (click through to the site) to a couple of articles and no response to the other two. One of the articles that has not produced clicks directly was picked up for reprint on another site. I have not been able to track any response to it with my analytics though. Maybe people on that site are checking the article but not clicking on the links in the resource box.

The resource box seems to be the key to these things. The word ‘free’ in the resource box will improve the click through rate. I keep forgetting this when I put together a resource box. I did have it in one box and that box has brought the most click throughs. The other key to getting people to visit the site is to offer some quality information. That is the case with the other article that has brought visitors and with the latest article, I think. I do need to remember about the word ‘free’ though.

Css code is very picky. Leave out a curly bracket and the browser will not read the rest of the code. Place a colon where a semi-colon should go and things get crazy.

I have had some display issues with the footer in my blogs. I had built a skin.css file and added it to the folder. I got the file path right and the skin was working except for the footer. I never could figure out why it didn’t work, but it was only the footer image that I could not get to display, so I passed it off as unimportant. I just shrugged as thought that was the way it was going to work. There are several levels of folders to a WordPress blog. I thought maybe it was something in one of the other folders that was causing the problem.

I just set up the new Live Sound Mixing Tips blog. While setting it up I was making some tweaks and adjustments. I was looking in my skin.css file that I had copied to the folder and noticed that there was a closing curly brace missing on my nav rule. I put in the missing brace and updated the file. When I checked the site I had my footer background image as I had often wished.

Somewhere along the line (a few times, I am sure) I typed a colon where the code calls for a semi-colon. That does not work, I promise.

I have been going through my other blogs making the correction and a few other tweaks this evening. I am beginning to be quite comfortable with the untheme theme. I will copy the fresh css files to my blog master copy, the one that I copy to a new location when I set up a new blog. That will save a lot of time the next time that I set up a blog.

I went a little further than I have with my other blogs on the Mixing Tips blog. Check it out and tell me what you think.

I have established a new blog for my Mixing Live Sound site. The Blog title is ‘Live Sound Mixing Tips‘. This is a long tail search term that I see occasionally in my analytics reports, so I should rank well for the term with the blog. This might draw a few additional visitors to the site.

I will be posting tips to help with mixing live sound. I hope to post at least once a week to the blog. I will try to end the posts on an interrogative note to elicit comments. Good comments are free original content for the blog, and the more content the better.

I have also given an invitation for guest posts on the topic of live sound for the blog. I hope that some will take me up on the offer. That is an other way to add content and value to a blog.

I spent a bit of time this evening setting this one up. I had deleted the old blog folder on the server after the break-in to my site. It was an earlier version and required immediate update  anyway. But I had most of the tweaks done to that one. I keep a base file on the server and copy it to any site where I want to place a blog. WordPress is a major piece of software so it takes a bit of time to upload. Copying on the server is very fast, so it saves a good bit of time to upload once and then copy where needed. There is a one click install option available from my host, but with the one click install a new database is created for each blog. By installing the blog myself I can share a database between several blogs. There are 100 databases available to me with my hosting account, but why use them needlessly?

If you are interested in sound check out the new blog. You are, of course, welcome to check it out even if the subject matter is out of your field of expertise. Tell me what you think about it.

I have been working for a couple of days on a face lift for the old Pennies for Wink site. I have just uploaded and tested the first phase of this face lift. There is a new look, I hope a bit more interesting, to the home page. I added several catalog pages and a directory to those pages, as well as left nav access to the pages. I redid my top and bottom navigation bars as well and added some pages that are long overdue.

I still need a ton of content for this site. I have an articles section that is completely unpopulated. I will write some articles and look for some good, relevant ones to reprint. I do see search engine traffic to some of the reprint articles on the Mixing Live Sound site. Original content is much to be preferred, but I am not always inspired to write. Of course, the site will need some promotion as well as content if there is to be any significant amount of traffic.

The domain name is not one that will be easy to promote. There needs to be some focus for a website and it is best if the domain name contains a keyword that is related to the site theme. I purchased this domain name before I became aware of how things work. I do have a few good domain names, more by accident than design. It would be nice if I could get this site to work well enough to pay its rent, at least. The education is worth something.

So, stop by the site and check out the changes. Leave me a comment or a suggestion as to the progress or direction that the site should go. There are comment boxes on the pages and there is a blog associated with the site. I have installed the KeywordLuv plug-in along with a do follow plug-in. There is a post about the update there. You could leave your comment on the main site or go to the blog to leave your comment.