Things have been busy on the article directory script front! I am having fun with the ArticleMS script and I got feed up with the Article Exchange madness.

I had put up two installations of the Article Exchange directory. The developer was hosting the articles on his server but I suspect that he ran into bandwidth problems as the installed base for his package grew. There were a couple of outages and updates to correct the problem. Somehow the first worked, possibly through a change in servers or hosting accounts. The recent update was a change in operating procedure. The files were shipped out to the installations.

When the script was rewritten I only installed it on one of the webspaces that I was using. I was not happy that while I had three spaces to display ads the promoter of the script had 20 or more of his affiliate links on each page. Then the full impact dawned on me. The articles are stored in flat files instead of a database. This makes the installation very easy as no one has to set up a database to which the script can connect.

The down side is that each article adds at least one file to the count on your server. With a CMS and database solution very few additional files are stored on the server. My hosting service is not concerned about file size, but they are concerned about the number of files in an account. They complain that too many files can slow down the server. This article directory script was about to cross the twenty thousand file threshold. Had I set up both installations that would have meant nearly forty thousand files and growing.

I had begun to work with the ArticleMS script and liked the results. I decided that the Article Exchange script had too many negatives so I choose to delete my remaining installation. It took the server several minutes to delete all of those files. I wish that I had put a clock on it, but I played a couple of games of solitaire while I was waiting for the job to finish. I have added a few more instances of the ArticleMS script and still expect my file count to be down by over nineteen thousand when the new numbers come out on Sunday.

I am finding the ArticleMS script to be reasonably easy to work with. My WordPress experience probably helps to some extent, but there are some major differences as well. The admin panel is much more basic than in WordPress, but I have found most of what I need. I have adapted the script to several purposes.

I am using it as wiki software on one site. It has a ‘trusted author’ setting in the privileges section that allows for editing other’s articles. Using that setting can make this very similar to wiki software. Since it has a file uploader I have set it up as a photo sharing section on a couple of sites. I can match the look and feel of my static pages and WordPress blogs to a great extent and can add cross linking between the sections of the sites. I am also using the built in RSS feed to place summaries of the recent articles on the home page of a couple of sites.

All in all this script is a nice addition to the tool chest.

Tags: adapting ArticleMS, Article Exchange Rant, ArticleMS, The Article Exchange Scam

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Extranious Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.