I have added one more instance of the ArticleMS script to my collection. I established the Sound Articles section on the Mixing Live Sound site. So far there is a link in the top nav bar to get to that area of the site. I will add an RSS feed of the article summaries to the homepage of the MLS site soon.

I found a few articles that are in the ballpark and posted them to the site. I intend to move some of the existing reprinted articles from the main section of the site to the new directory section. I have a list of topics for more articles for the main site and for blog posts to the Live Sound Mixing Tips blog associated with the site. I may add a forum to the domain as a fourth major section, as well.

I rearranged some of the elements from the defaults and like the resulting presentation better. I moved the search box up into the header section and the quick nav down to the nav bar to the left. I put the welcome xxx that was on the left over to the right end of the bar. I had added a couple of links and the header was looking crowded, plus this format maintains the look and feel of the various sections of the site better.

There is a bit of work to set up one of these scripts. I have not found a way to make the modifications once. It appears that much of this is built on the spot by the installer script. Most of this resides in the database. I have not been able to find files that correspond to much of what I do to upgrade the sites in the script directory that I downloaded. Perhaps a better understanding of php would help there. Unless the script pulls files from the ArticleMS server at the time of installation the data should be in there somewhere, but knowing where to look is the problem.

I have used php extensively in the form of includes and scripts, but I really know nothing about php coding. This script is teaching me a few new things as far as using php, but I am still mostly in the dark. I may have to break down and learn a bit more.

Check out the new installation at Sound Articles and tell me what you think.

I played with my new article script enough that I got fairly comfortable with its use. I went ahead and installed it on two of my domains. There is still a lot of work to do, but the script is installed and working.

I had an instance of the article exchange script on The World SoapBox site. While it gave me lots of content I was not enthused about all of the affiliate links that came with the script. I may not have as much content for a while, but I won’t be adding to someone’s empire either. I do need authors, so stop by The World SoapBox with your latest rants and articles on the way things are today.

The second instance went into my Live Sound Wiki domain. This domain is intended to be a knowledge base about sound. I am seeking authors to post articles there as well. I hope to get some support from the industry.

This is just a quick post to mention that the test bed installation of the ArticleMS article directory is now officially open for business. I added a link to the site nav on my articles.heresthesite.com home page. Primarily this is to let the bots find the installation.

I am continuing testing and tweaking the design there, but I expect to set the script in motion on at least two other sites soon. I am also making a list of other of my sites that may benefit from an installation.

This has also caused me to think of another possible ebook to offer either through Before You Buy or Selling. That will depend on how the script works out in practice.

Stop by the test location and see how the script is working for me. Leave me a comment there under the ‘Initial Impressions‘ article.

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.

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 embarking on a rebuild of the website directory page. The time could probably be better spent, but some things you just need to do. There have been several additions to the stable and a few domain names that have fallen along the wayside.

I intend to add a bit of color to the directory in the form of thumbnails for the sites. Since the list is getting long and the thumbs will take up additional space I am breaking the directory into site categories. I have begun the rebuild but am still thinking of the best ways to present the information.

I will probably upload the changes in waves. First wave will be to break the list into the categories and make the other site tweaks that I intend to make. Then I will add the thumbs a category at a time and upload the necessary files.

I don’t expect the rebuild to draw any more traffic to the site, but it should make for a better user experience for my visitors and may result in more click throughs to my other sites.

Stay tuned for further developments.

I put up one more blog today. It has but the one initial post which I did edit quite extensively. I also edited the byline so it does not actually say ‘just another wordpress blog’. I have run across blogs or WordPress sites that still have the defaults in several places, the byline, the initial post, the default about page, and the default comment. I did leave the default comment but will probably delete it if I ever get a real comment.

This blog will be a place to promote electronics deals. I have a couple of blogs that are set up as purely promotional blogs. The posts have been almost exclusively coupon deals or product shouts. I see an occasional visitor, but not enough to have any effect on things. I have been studying this thing for a while now and have come up with what I hope is a better plan for this type of site. If the plan works I will share it with you if I don’t decide to go into the guru business. Without any content it is a bit too early to draw any conclusions as far as this site is concerned.

I put the new blog up on a sub-domain space that has been around for most of a year. The primary domain has been active for over two years, so there is a bit of history. The main sub-domain site was an early attempt at affiliate marketing. I started to put the site together and then got distracted so it has remained an unattractive banner farm site. I did not even complete the info pages that I was building with that style of site when I was working on the strategy.

I have a couple of other sites that I built as well. One has a front page and the banner farm divided into categories. It has attracted few visitors. The other has one of my best accidental domain names. The front page lists categories but also has direct links to the info pages. The category link is to a category directory with a blurb about each advertiser. This one has worked a bit better, but still does not pay the rent. All part of the learning curve.

The new blog can be found under the name Electronic Deals Blog. Go check it out and tell me what you think. I will be going to put up a couple more pages and something in the way of a near real post as soon as I finish here.

I have been testing a couple of WordPress plug-ins on a few of my sites. One of these plug-ins retrieves articles from the iSnare article directory. I have several sites that are receiving articles on a regular basis, but two or three have not seen any new content.

I have looked at the server logs and the iSnare bot does stop by those sites and there does not appear to be a problem as it finds the download script. The categories that I chose for those sites must have little content available.

One of the sites is my old humor site, WebPickups. It has been some time since I posted things to the site on a regular basis. I had hoped to generate some additional traffic. I put up a blog with an initial post explaining the plan and have waited for about a week for the content to start rolling in. Nothing has showed up. The site displays email comedy. Today I added three posts of material that showed up in my inbox. Posting this type of material may take more time in WordPress than to just build an additional page on the main site, but with WordPress there is the RSS shout and the other plug that I am working with adds some other blogs links to the post. This then precipitates a ping to the other blog and, with luck, a trackback to the post.

You can check outs the new posts on the WebPickups Blog if you have any interest. I will be watching my traffic numbers to see if I achieve a boost. The display is slick in WordPress.

What do you think, will this help?

In my travels I ran across a site called Scribd. This site will publish your ebooks and presentations on their site. They do have a store section if you wish to sell your info products but the primary mode of operation is as an online reading room. They have an online ebook reader and the things posted to the site can be read on the site or are available for download. This is an interesting business model.

I have prepared my first ebook recently. I have offered it as a free download on my Before You Buy a Website site. The ebook is titled ‘Website Basics’ and incorporates an overview of terms that someone thinking of a web presence would need to know. I designed a basic cover page to add to the ebook and uploaded it to Scribd last evening. As I write this there are 14 views listed for the ebook, although at least one of those is mine. You can find my ebook on Scribd by clicking this sentence.

Do you like the Idea of this site? What are your thoughts on Scribd? Please leave a comment.

I have copied my WordPress master folder to two of my domains today. I keep a copy of the WordPress blogging software on the server in the root directory and when I want to set up a new blog I copy it on the server instead of uploading the whole thing from my desktop. To copy a folder on the server only takes a couple of shakes of a lambs tail, much faster than uploading a major software package like WordPress.

I copy the folder to my destination directory and then make a few adjustments for the new blog. The config file has a few settings that need to be adjusted and my background images need to be properly named and uploaded. There are a couple of site specific include files that need to be changed and the WordPress set-up procedure to run. Then the blogs will be operational.

I will be back to post urls to the new blogs later.