While I am proceeding with the update to The Closet, I have other sites that demand a bit of attention. It is probably not set in stone, but I redesigned the info page format for the More Info pages of the Closet. I will be continuing my efforts with The Closet, but I can’t neglect some tweaks and updates to my sites that are now producing traffic.

My Viral Email Archive site is my highest traffic site at the moment. I need to keep adding content there to maintain its position. There are some other tweaks that I want to try to make the site more productive as well.

My Mixing Live Sound site probably has the greatest potential of my current crop of sites and does see a reasonable amount of traffic. I have several original articles as well as several reprint articles on this site. There are some minor layout tweaks to do and I need to add a good bit more content. I have a list of search terms that I have been saving from the daily analytics. I may also check in with WebMaster Tools to find the best order in which to provide additional content. This site is consistently my second highest traffic site and my site with the highest quality traffic.

There is a good deal of interest in my Mixer in a Box site as well. This is my site introducing the SoftWare Audio Console live mixing environment that I have been using for the last year and a half. I have several pages of content planned for the site. I also want to do some layout tweaks to this site. I had a little bump of traffic from Indonesia due to a mention on a local forum there. I get steady international traffic to this site as there is a good deal of interest in mixing live sound on a computer.

As I go through my analytics information I often have ideas of things that may work for the various sites. I mark these down in my ‘ideas’ list. I have a lot that can be done if I will only take the time to follow through on the ideas. Many of the ideas are brought to light by my current understanding of web design and web development. I do continue to read on the subjects. The trick is to balance the reading time with the doing time. One needs the knowledge to become more effective, but the new knowledge also needs to be put into practice for it to be of benefit.

I have been working on a major update to the Closet Online site. I have just completed what I am calling Phase One of the rebuild. This involved redoing the home page and the department pages.

The home page had six blocks for the various departments with rotating banners representative of the merchants listed in the department. This gave a fresh look to the site if a visitor returned. Most of the visitors hit the back button when they were confronted with all the banners.

The main page was a very friendly place compared to the department pages. The old department pages were banner farms. Phase One did away with all of the banners. The home page now tells about the objective of the site and invites the visitor to explore a bit further. The department pages have entries for my various merchant partners with a listing of the products and services they offer.

The second phase will see the ‘More Info’ pages actually providing more info. I am still working out the format for this presentation. I intend to add an interactive element to the info pages in the form of a comment box requesting feedback by users of the sites. I will integrate this at all levels and try to get some user generated content to go along with the content that I provide. I will also refine the appearance of the site and try to make it a happier place. When complete there will be few if any banners on the site.

The third phase will be on ongoing addition of content both on the main site and in the blog. This will be the key to the success of the site. If I do this right and do a little off site promotion there should be a return on the time that I have invested in this major rebuild to this site.

The update to The Closet Online has been started. At this point I have probably broken more than I have fixed!!  I am simplifying the css for the site as part of the update. I deleted some rules and may have been a bit premature in doing so.

The new home page is up along with a new look. Neither is set in stone at this time, but you have to start somewhere. I think that it looks a bit more inviting now but it deserves to be really special.

This will be a multi-phase project. First I will get most of the things I broke into some semblance of order. A very high priority is to flush the banner farm look in the departments. Then the content that I do have will need to be updated to add more value to the site. Then the department pages can be updated and things polished up so that visitors won’t hit the back button in a panic.

This site now gets a few visitors a week. Some of them may still have bookmarks from before I owned the site and some of them may be looking for a site that is actually in a .net domain. When I get things polished up I will need to promote the site a bit. I think that the site has potential, or I would not be putting in all this work.

I recently posted about a major site update that I plan. MeanWhile – back at the ranch – some distractions have appeared. There is the mater of new content for a few sites.

The Web PickUps site runs on having some fresh content and it is becoming my best site, so I need to keep it updated. But the major setback to the plan has been the Mixer in a Box site.

There has been an update release of the SAC software that is the focus of the site. The update (SAC Version 2.6) contains several new features. I felt that there should be a page or two discussing the new features. When I went to the site folder to make the new pages I saw that there were several planned pages that I had never completed. Traffic has been building to this site, so I decided that I should take care of some unfinished business there before I start on the major update.

The major site update has been delayed for a few days because of this. This will be a big project because there is so far to go with the site. I had little idea about how to go about this at the time that I bought the domain name. I have put some time into reading available materials and have some idea of the route that I intend to take.

There is a trickle of traffic now, but it needs to be a river. I will see if I can apply some of my recently acquired knowledge to improve things. A stream would be better than a trickle and streams usually find their way to a river, so we will be shooting for a stream of traffic first. Then we will hope for rain to grow the stream into a river.

I will keep you posted!

I have been doing a bunch of reading these past couple of weeks. I do keep up with several newsletters and a couple of blogs regularly. This has been a more concentrated study.

I am about to implement some of the information that I have been gathering in the rebuild of a site. I want to make the site perform a bit better (well really a lot better). If it makes a difference on this site I will have a lot of work to do on several other sites as well.

I am a bit hesitant to mention the site because it is little more than a glorified banner farm at the present time. It is a name that I acquired some time back. The current site is actually an update of the original site. The original site was an unglorified banner farm. So that you can follow the progress if you are interested the site is The Closet Online. Fair warning: the site may be a bit frightening right now. Almost every visitor that has landed there has bounced. In the last month there have been 28 visits and 46 page views. Probably some of the 46 page views came from people that were so frightened by the home page that they missed the back button and hit the page refresh instead.

I have recommended Site Build It as one of the best long term programs for success on the Internet. I have found that they have many guides that are available as free downloads. They do sell the Site Build It program fairly hard through out the free material, but they also deliver a lot of good information. They also offer several free tools without some of the advanced functions available to their customers that can aid in site planning. This is some of the material that I have been going through.

I have also sat in on a few webinars recently.  These webinars are designed to sell products, but a lot of good information is provided without charge. The most recent was about link cloaking for affiliate links. I really wanted to buy the tool, but the information on how to do most of what the tool does manually was freely given. With the current state of my finances I will have to invest the time to do it manually for awhile. I will be incorporating some of this knowledge as well.

I’ll keep you posted as to the progress. If you have any suggestions leave a comment.

I am an assistant admin on one forum and admin on a forum on one of my sites. Some time back I was directed to the Stop Forum Spam Service as an aid in checking registrants to the forums. I have found it to be an invaluable tool in weeding out spammers before they have opportunity to leave their graffiti on these forums.

I have made some observations about the use of the tool and about forum spammers in general that I will share with you. The service maintains a database including IP addresses, email addresses, and user names of people (or bots) that have been reported to the service by forum admin teams. This list is quite useful in identifying at least the more prolific forum spammers.

Some Thoughts about Forum Spammers

In my experience forum spammers are mostly creatures of  habit. Probably part of this is due to being in a hurry to sign up for membership in as many forums as possible. They tend to reuse the user names and email addresses. They do not have control of the IP addresses. Some are on dynamic addresses that change frequently within a block of addresses but many are on high speed connections that tend to change less frequently. In the past many used Yahoo or Hotmail email addresses, but the current most common email service is Gmail. (I don’t believe that new Hotmail addresses are being issued.)

Telling the Good Guys from the Bad Guys

Aside from using the service there are some clues that raise red flags for me when I am going through new applications. If the country listed is different than the country from which the applicant registered I have to wonder if they are being honest or sneaky. Some registrants living in other countries will list their home country, so this is  not a firm clue, but it does raise a red flag.

Usually if the email address contains a sensible name, particularly if the email address and the user name show some relationship, you have a good candidate. The major ISPs do a fairly good job of policing spammers, so if the email is from a major ISP and the IP address agrees you probably have a good guy.

I try to always check the IP address to confirm location. PhpBB contains a database of IP addresses and in most cases some information can be found by clicking on the IP address in the admin panel. In cases where the database has no information I usually turn to DNSstuff.com or GeekTools for whois lookup. There are many whois tools available and any will do the job. This is useful in determining if they registered from their claimed country of origin and sometimes will indicate their ISP as well.

The bad guys often use a throw away email address. There will often be no visible or sensible connection between the email address and user name. This lack of connection is much more prevalent among the bad guys, but is only an indicator that the applicant should be checked a bit more closely.

Observations on the Tool

The IP address search is straight forward, but you must keep in mind that many IP addresses are dynamically assigned, so a good registration could come from an IP address that had previously been assigned to a spammer. If there is a return on the IP address I look over the results to see if the same user name or email address has been used. If the registrants claimed national origin does not agree with the location of the IP address this is a further red flag.

The user name and email searches are simple string searched. They will find and return a sequence of characters in both email adresses and user names. If there is a common series of characters in the email address and user name only one search will locate all instances of that string in the database. Knowing this allows you to make one search instead of two in some instances.

Because it is a simple string search short or common strings are likely to produce many hits from the database. I like to see longer user names or a mixture of letters and numbers because these will produce fewer false positives. If I do get a list of returns from the database I first look to the flags in the right column to find returns from the same country. These lists can be up to 500 lines, so manually checking each return could be time consuming. I also give more weight to the top of the list as these will be the most recent reports.

Other Hints

I look at the email addresses. If the email address is not from one of the webmail providers or from a major ISP I often copy just the part to the right of the @ symbol and use that in the search box. I then open a new tab and paste the address in the address bar to check on the site. Sometimes I will end up at a regional ISP’s home page and sometimes I will find a website. In either case I will have a bit more information about my applicant.

There are a couple of types of forum spammers. Some are sellers of link building services. Some are users that are attempting Internet Marketing. The second group has seen that forums are a good place to plant links but have not paid close attention to the advice. In nearly all cases that I have come across where forum posting is recommended the advice has also included that you need to take part in the conversation on the forum and not merely produce a spam post to get your link seen.

Keeping your forum free of spam posts is a service to your forum users. The Stop Forum Spam Service is a great aid to identifying known forum spammers and preventing them from desecrating your forum. It is free to use and will save you time in checking registrants if you wish to run a clean ship.

This evening I deleted my Squidoo account. I had three active lenses and one for which I had requested review. This will be my Squidoo rant post.

I had recently tried to add a fourth lens on WordPress Posting Tips. When I hit the publish button there was a message that the lens was considered a spam lens and referred to several pages including the Squidoo Terms of Service. I spent a good deal of time reading the linked pages and could not see anything that applied to my new lens. I had linked to one of my sites in the introduction as credit for the image that I had used. I thought maybe the link in the introduction was a problem, so after removing the link I hit the button again and got the same message. I then submitted the lens for review since I saw nothing in any of the links that seemed to apply. Later I remembered that I had used a screen shot that I had on file from another lens and thought maybe that was the reason. I will probably never know.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was finding an email stating that my most popular lens had been locked as spam and referring to the same pages that I had poured over recently. I could see no reason listed for the old lens just as for the new one. My lenses had earned 38 cents to date, so they were not of critical importance to me. That money will now go to a charity of Squidoo’s choice.

When a lens is submitted for review they state that the review may take up to 30 days. It would probably be less if they did not have so many false positives from their software. In all fairness, perhaps there was something with the parallel lenses that flagged them as spam. It would be nice if the pages to which they referred me would have held some mention of anything related to the lenses.

Squidoo was never very important to me. I had hoped to drive some traffic to some of my other sites with the lenses, but traffic was never significant to any of the lenses. The one article that I have up on Buzzle.com has produced much more traffic than the lens on the same subject. I decided to delete the account. I logged in and deleted the four lenses and then looked for a way to delete the account. I could not find a likely prospect, even when looking right at it.

I then signed in to the forum. I looked for the best category in which to ask the question, but decided that I should do a search because I was fairly sure that others had wanted to delete their accounts. I looked for the typical search box and there was none anywhere to be seen. I then opened a help category thinking that I would have to post the question since I saw no search box. One of the stickies was about searching before posting. They came off of the information that the search feature could be found by clicking on a menu tab that was handily named SEARCH. Why they choose to hide the function and then complain that people don’t use it is beyond me.

It was on my third try with the keyword search that I finally hit pay dirt. There were concise instructions on how to delete the account, if you could find them. I followed the instructions and am no longer a published Squidoo author.

If you are considering signing up for Squidoo you may guess that my advice would be ‘don’t waste your time’. The idea was nice and the platform was hot for a while. I think that it is past its prime by now. As far as I can see, Squidoo is a social club. If you want to be part of the club, and deal with the unstated rules, Squidoo may be for you. I believe that it is not for me.