The first site had received a few articles from one of the delivery services, but when I went to sign up for my second directory I noticed that the service had been paused. I think that this happened when I changed a preference on the site.

The two latest article sites have not yet begun to receive articles. That is why it is toe tapping time, waiting for the flow of articles to begin in two cases and resume in the third. One of the new article pages is in a very active category, so I expect to have a good bit of content when the site is approved.

I am not expecting a whole lot from the one article distribution system. I have seen several complaints of slow or no delivery from them. That’s ok though because the articles that I have seen on their site are not of the highest quality. I will keep my eyes open for other delivery services and hand pick some articles from the major directories as well.

The site that has delivered a few articles does have very high standards so the quality of the articles is good. I do care about the quality of the content, not just the quantity.

The new directories are Computer Articles, dealing with computer hardware, software, and games and Internet Marketing Articles, dealing with Internet Marketing, Online Business, and Self-Improvement. Check them out if you get a chance.

I found some images and made a few backgrounds from which to choose. Some of the designs were interesting so I thought that I could add some more soups and put up a gallery. I did this last evening.

The process that I use builds a symmetrical image from a part of a larger image. The result is an image tile that can provide a seamless background image for a page. The process produces some interesting geometrics. Often the subject picture is not recognizable as such but the background produced can have intricate designs.

Check out the new gallery at The Soup Kitchen Gallery.

I wanted some happy stuff, so I decided to make a gallery of colorful backgrounds. Some of them may be too colorful to ever find an application but they are available as options, anyway. To find images on which to base my backgrounds for this gallery I did a Google search for Colorful Pictures and hit the images link. There was a good selection from which to choose.

To make the symmetrical tiles I take a small area of the image and make a cut. Then I flip and stitch a couple of times to make the final image. My photo editor has a panoramic function that I use to stitch the parts of the images. If there is a design in the portion of the image that I choose there can be some interesting geometrics in the tiled background. Check out the Colorful Cuts Gallery.

I use Irfanview for an image editor. There is a built in function to produce html pages. I have modified the templates for use on my sites. The gallery pages that are produced use the subject image as the background image for the page.

I just noticed this evening that Irfanview can be used as a color picker. If you open a file in the window and click on a color that color is displayed as an RGB and html number. This is a feature that I will use from time to time in my design work. I wonder what other wonders lurk within the program, or many of the programs that I probably don’t use to their fullest potential.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!