The Hobby Webmaster Blog

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.

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 am adding a number of pages to the Pennies for Wink site. It had needed some love, and now it is getting it. I have been specking Amazon store pages for addition to the site. Of course catalog pages particularly enclosed in Iframes do not add any value to the site in the way of content. I will be adding a content page for every catalog page at the very least. I am also putting up a directory page with a small blurb about each of the catalog pages so that there will be a little text connecting to each of the pages until I get the articles in order.

As I have mentioned (somewhere), I installed the KeywordLuv and Do Follow plug-ins on the Pennies for Wink Save a Penny Blog. These plug-ins allow commenters on the blog to get a keyword backlink for their site. This encourages thoughtful comments on the blog posts. Of course that means that I need to make some posts worthy of a comment so that they have something on which to hang a quality comment.

I had thought that the update to Before You Buy a Website was complete, but in my travels this evening another topic was called to my attention. I had discussed navigation options in one of my articles but did not really discuss links and linking. I wrote an article and added another link in my website basics section this evening. I do expect to think of more topics but I would also like some suggestions.

If you check the page and think of a topic that should be discussed please leave a comment either in the BLOG or in the comment section on the main site. An advantage to leaving the comment in the blog on the site is that I have set that blog up for do follow links, so you can leave a comment and get a backlink to promote your own site. That blog is also set up with a plug-in called KeyWordLuv. If you leave a comment with the format of ‘name@your keyword’ in the appropriate box the display will read ‘name from keyword’ as the comment source.

I have been working on an update to my site Before You Buy a Website. I have added a section on website basics. This is a series of overview articles on many facets of owning and operation a website. They are designed to introduce a prospective webmaster to some of the common terms and concepts of the industry.

These articles cover many topics from the planning stage on through the development and uploading of a website. There are many things to think about. The articles introduce prospective website owners to concepts that they may not have thought about. How can you ask a question about something if you don’t know that something exists? This is phase one.

At some point, if there is a demand, I may go on to phase two. Phase two would examine some of these topics in greater detail and perhaps recommend some solutions to some of the problems. But there are other fish to fry, so I am not going to schedule a timetable for further expansion of the site. I will try to promote this site a bit and see if there appears to be interest.

I started out to do a few minor tweaks to the Before You Buy a Website site. I was going to add an about us page and a contact info page, and redo the site nav in light of the additions. The site only had a small amount of content and there was not much reason for people to visit. I decided that since I was there I should add a few pages of real content to the site.

The original intent of the site was to offer a warning about some of the more unsavory practices that go on on the web. I had a few pages on various subjects. I decided that those needing this advice would be people that are new to website ownership so some basic information about the web and site building and operation would be in order. I quickly thought of about five topics that would be good to discuss.

As they say, ‘one thing leads to another’, and by now I have a dozen new pages under construction and the list will probably get a few more titles before this is all over. I have been uploading new pages to the site daily for the last couple of days, so the amount of content available is already well advanced from just a few days ago.

I also installed a couple of plug-ins to encourage commenting on the site. One of the plugs makes the links ‘do follow’ and the other allows for a name with a keyword text link. These links will eventually show up as backlinks in the search engines so they can help with the search engine ranking for contributors pages. I do have the blog set for manual approval of all comments, so I should be able to keep spam comments to a minimum.

Stop by and see the new pages and watch the site grow!

I looked in on my site, Before You Buy a Website, and decided that there were a few tweaks that could help out there. Things snowballed and I am ending up making some major additions to the site. Since this site is aimed at new would-be webmasters I am adding several articles in a new section called Website Basics. I posted several of these to the web last evening and have written a couple more today.

At the present time I have seven articles planned for the section, but as I go I keep getting ideas for new topics so the section will probably grow. (Make that eight, I just thought of another subject and added it to the list.) These articles will cover topics from ‘What is a website’ to getting the site set up on the web. It is an opportunity to share some of the knowledge that I have gained over the past couple of years.

I located and downloaded the ‘Do Follow’ and ‘KeywordLuv’ plug-ins for WordPress. I will be implementing these on the Before You Buy and Selling on Your Website blogs. These plug-ins will encourage comments and may even build some traffic to these sites. I do have these, and all of my blogs, set to manually approve comments, so we will see how much problem there is with administering the ‘flood’ of comments. You can check the blogs or check back here as I will make an announcement when the plug-ins are live.

I have added a new page to the Mixer in a Box site, the Z-Mixer page. There is a screen shot of the whole Z Mixer strip. I put the photo in a scroll box to give a visual representation of the Z Mixer in the SAC GUI.

To create the image I took screen shots of the various sections of the Z Mixer and used my photo editor, IrfanView, to stitch the screen shots together into one continuous image. IfranView has a panorama routine that will do this. If you look closely you can see some of the seams, but the representation is pretty good.

I intend to add a few more pages to this site in the near future.

While I was fussing with the site I did a few minor tweaks to the code and found that I had not activated the comment system. I have added quick links at the top of the pages to the comment box, so it was important to discover that the system was not active, and correct that situation.

I have done a few things around the hosting space that I have not documented here. I added a comment box and reformatted the FreeBird Leather Sewing site. I also added blogs to three sites that are tied to an article distribution service. There are supposed to be articles added on a regular basis. The service does not work as well as I had hoped. There were a few articles added initially, but the follow up is slow to non-existent.

Yesterday I thought of using Gem Stones as a basis for web page backgrounds. I found several pictures of various Gems that were usable for the purpose. I made my usual symmetrical images. I finished the job this evening and uploaded the results to the Symmetrical Backgrounds site. Some of the backgrounds are very bright and happy and some of them are more subdued. All in all, the new gallery is a nice addition to the site. There are some backgrounds that would take very special pages and some that could be used more generally.