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.

Yesterday I did a minor update to Selling on your WebSite. I added the Advanced Comment System to the pages and also wrote one new article for the site. The new article emphasizes the need for traffic and talks about traffic quality. In order to monetize a website you must have traffic. The Site Build It system uses the acrostic CTPM as a success formula for building sites that pay. The letters stand for Content, Traffic, Pre-sell, and Monetize. Of these, in a way, traffic is the most important and usually the hardest part of the formula. There are other pages that discuss some of the other aspects of this formula. As The Hobby Webmaster building the sites is the fun part for me, but one must remember that getting people to those sites is the real purpose for putting the sites up in the first place.

I have initiated a new blog in conjunction with the Mixer in a Box site. The blog details the gigs that I do with the Software Audio Console. I have one more show to log to bring the blog up to date. Adding the blog creates an RSS feed in conjunction with the site, and blog posts are indexed by the search engines. I just added the nav links to the Mixer in a Box site today. I also worked on the blog page to give it the Mixer in a Box family look. I have a bit more to do to complete that project as I am using a white background for the title section of the header block that I have not yet incorporated into the design. Working with the blog template is not as straight forward as working with a straight page.

I selected four feeds and put them up on The Closet Online site last evening. I put one feed on the front page and repeat it along with three other feeds in a new ‘Fashion News’ section of the site. While I was there I tweaked some things about the site a bit.

I think that the color scheme that I used for the site probably does not really work as well as it might, considering the direction that the site has taken. I will probably change that to something more appropriate. I like the way that it looks, but I went to another of my sites last evening and thought that I may have the backgrounds reversed between the sites. The other site is the PC Application Store site, check it out and see what you think. Just leave a comment here with your opinion. Thanks.

I have also added a feed from this blog to my personal site homepage. (And in the process noticed that I had screwed things up with the blog, so I am off to see if I can figure out what I have done here!)

So, I found the problem with this blog and it is now displaying properly. I had grabbed a logo for something that I mentioned in the post and got a bunch of extra code. I deleted the spare parts from the post. Luckily I now have enough experience to recognize what the problem was at the code level. If I didn’t know a little about the code I would have had no idea why things were screwed up.

I also added a good news feed to the homepage of MC Rally. I had found this feed the other evening when I first started checking into the possibilities. When I checked the site, after uploading the modified page and associated files, I noticed that all the articles listed in the feed had the current date. The content is timely!

As I work with these things a bit I am learning some things. Some of the feeds are not updated on a regular basis. A lot of the feeds will not display in my RSS reader. I load them into a test site that I have set up to check. I tried on my local server, but they do not display here. Probably the software lacks a feature that would allow that to happen.

I have had family in town for the holidays, so some time was cut from the pursuit of my hobby. I did put up one more marketing blog on The Closet Online site. This will announce sales and promotions for the advertisers represented on that site. You can view the ‘What’s in the Closet‘ blog by clicking on the title link.

I have one or two freeware apps that I have modified for my personal use. I am planning to offer those modifications through pages on this blog space. There is the gallery software that comes bundled with IrfranView photo editor software. I have set it up with css styling and I plan to make those modifications available through a page.

I also am using a php random rotator that I found on the web. The instructions that are available there are more suited to experienced developers. I plan on producing a users manual for this script. I found this script while searching for a banner rotator for some of my niche sites, but I am also using it to provide random tips (text files) and random pictures in various places. Watch the pages category in the left column for these pages to show up. I will post an announcement when I put these pages up, so subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with my latest news.

The pace has got to slow soon, but I put up one more blog today (it is still early). The latest addition to the blog stable (or litter) is in connection with the Before You Buy a Website site. I am calling this one Money from the Web – The Reality Show. I am going to look at a few sales pages and promotions for money making ideas available on the web. I will offer opinions as to weather the promoted program will work.

I invite you to stop by and check out the new installation.

My webspace is becoming littered with blogs. I put one up on The World SoapBox and then I put one up on Selling on your Website. I may put a couple more up before it is all over, but I now have a total of 5 including this blog.

I really need to get on to other things for a while though. I keep adding things to my ideas list. I have explored a few of those things a little further and I think that most of the ideas are good. But there are a lot of mechanical things that need to be done. In addition to the blogs I started another site upgrade. You can’t see that one yet, though, because it is not on the server, only on my local disk. All in good time . . .

I did not put up any more store windows for the window shoppers to look into. When I checked CJ today there had been a couple of clicks.  If I get a few more clicks I could have double the AdSense income than I have in any previous month. Amazon had a good Christmas selling season, why shouldn’t I??

I added a footwear department to The Closet Online this evening. I also got a start on the left column nav box and put some thought into the home page. Right now you land in a banner farm. The page probably takes too long to load because of all the remote images that are called on load. I am thinking of a home page that has dynamic content through the use of the php script that I have been playing with. I am also going to include a flower box on the front page using some of my flower pictures.

All in All it was a fairly good day for a hobby webmaster. I have an experiment in design in mind. I will let you know how it turns out.