The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I have been testing a couple of WordPress plug-ins over the past few days. It is easy to get excited by the lofty claims made for these plug-ins by their creators. It is a bit disappointing when they aren’t really quite ready for prime time. Both of the plugs that I am looking at fall under this classification in my opinion. While I can see uses for each they don’t quite perform as claimed.

The Deep Link Engine is a plug-in that searches the web for related blog posts and inserts links to these posts at the bottom of your post. The download page states that you can choose which links to post but in practice this is not possible. I think that this is due to attempting to make it work with an auto-content plug-in that the developers have just released today. The plug-in appears to carry out a final search when the publish button is clicked and inserts the links that it finds at that time.

There are two advantages that this plug-in does give. There will be some direct traffic from the linked sites, and if they like what they see there would be a possibility of a better one way link in a future post. The WordPress software by default pings linked blogs and those blogs produce a trackback to your post. If the linked post is good the readers there may find their way back to your site. In any case Google is likely to note the link and this may help your page SERP.

The second plug that I have just discovered is an auto-blogging software. I put one instance of the plug-in up last evening and was able (by jumping through several hoops) to get it working. I have only looked at a couple of the articles produced so far. One had very little text to the post and that appeared to be somebodies affiliate text link with the link stripped out. The other article at which I looked had a little more content. The formatting on the articles was not too good, but I may be able to tweak that in the css file. The software pulls images, but does not produce a margin around the image so the text runs right up to the image.

The plug-in, WP-Article-Fetch, serves the articles from a server maintained by the developers of the plug. They admit that the articles are scrapped from the web. They have an article spin software on the server. The one article with content was not very human readable. I suspect that this is a shortcoming of their spin engine, but there is a lot of content that is written by non native English speakers that does not read so well either. If it is the spin engine one would have to rewrite the articles if you want a site to be proud of, but there would be some possible value if the main objective is just to attract traffic to expose to your ads. In fact people may click on an ad just to get out of there and go somewhere that makes sense.

I will continue to test these software packages to see if there can be significant value to either of them. Being free they are now worth the money spent.

This is the week for the annual spring BikeWeek in Daytona. I am working the event mixing sound at the Full Moon Saloon on Main Street in Daytona Beach. This is cutting into my time to fuss with the websites (in a moderately good way). I also worked a second gig on Sunday at the Freedom Rally held at the Volusia County Fairgrounds.

I am going to try to get an article or two posted. I have the free PDF on WebSite Basics available from my ‘Before You Buy a WebSite‘ site and I need to support the site a bit. I am also making a few blog posts, primarily about the event.

While going through some of my traffic today I noticed that my Buzzle article supporting the ‘Mixer in a Box‘ site was showing with a higher search position than my site, but they were both on page one of the search results. Traffic is building on several sites, and that is a good thing. With the number of sites that I have up there is always a list of things that need to be done. Most of my sites need more content, some basic content and some tweaked for on page SEO.

I will have more time next week to get to some of those things, but the season is cranking up and I need to tend to the business that pays the bills. I will continue to make steady progress.

If you check some of my sites and have any suggestions please leave a comment. Thanks!

If you are in Daytona for the rally stop in and say ‘hello’ at the Full Moon Saloon. I am there from 8:30 PM ’til.

Last evening I ran across an article directory script. I have downloaded the script and will be checking the possibility of integrating it with one of my sites. This will be an interesting challenge.

Article directories allow people to post articles to the site. Articles posted to the web are an important source of backlinks. Backlinks are important to a site because they help in placement in the search engine results pages presented to searchers. A page with more backlinks will usually be listed higher than other pages if they contain information relevant to the search terms.

I have a few articles posted to article directories. I have just had my fifth article accepted by Ezine Articles and I have articles posted on GoArticles and Buzzle.com. These articles have directed some traffic to my various sites. An article on a directory site like Ezine or GoArticles may be reprinted by webmasters around the world. At least one of my articles has been picked up for reprint.

The script that I found is part of an article directory network. There are over 150 instances of this script in use around the web. This means that an article submitted to any site running the script appears on all of the other sites, so the opportunity for exposure is at least fair. These sites are not likely to have the traffic that a site like Ezine has, but the articles may stay near the top of the list longer, too. If the script works as advertised I will probably support the site with a few articles on some of the major directories.

I will be checking this out over the next few days and post about the outcome. I had considered doing this a few months ago, but all the pieces of the puzzle were not available at the time. Perhaps this is the final puzzle piece that I have needed to complete this puzzle. Be sure to watch for my further post. If the script is good I will provide a link to the source and I will be providing a link to my instance of the script on my selected site.

Have you tried article marketing? What results have you seen? Leave a comment telling of your experience.

This blog is my champion comment spam magnet at the present time. I just posted an article a few minutes ago. I had cleaned about 10 spam comments our to the spam folder that came in overnight this morning. When I returned to post this evening there were 5 more waiting for me. I wrote the post and now before closing out I checked again and found two more in the folder. Those are down the road now but I need to get out of here in a hurry so that they don’t load me up again. I will check in the morning to delete their attempts.

I have begun to lavish a bit of attention on the Pennies for Wink site. (I could certainly use a few pennies about now.) This site has only had a couple of pages and a couple of stores, but no real content. I will be trying to think of what I could do as far as content is concerned. I will add the usual suspects as far as auxiliary pages are concerned, but I need to provide the site with a focus and build some content around that focus.

I did add the KeywordLuv and Do Follow plug-ins to the blog earlier. I will try to provide a post worthy of comment from time to time so that people can reasonably take advantage of the opportunity. KeywordLuv alters the way that a name is displayed so that there is a natural appearing keyword link to the commenter’s site, and the do follow plug makes the link do follow so that the link may be considered a backlink by the search engines. I have seen it said that Google checks no follow links, but I would not depend on that as a fact. Other search engines probably do not count the links even if Google does, but Google does nearly own the market.

This blog is not set up with the plug-ins, but it is a regular stop on the comment spammers tour. I put up the scoreboard at the bottom of the right column so you can see how many attempts there have been.

I will post when the update is complete and live. Feel free to swing by and leave me a suggestion as to where you think that I should go with the site. There are comment boxes on the pages of the site, or you can go to the blog and get some KeywordLuv!!

The experience with the player on Mixing Live Sound got me to thinking about the players at the AudioArt MusicPlayer site. I think that I know how to get them to perform as I wish now.

I went to my folder and opened the pages. They have not been updated for some time and I know how to make them better as well as bringing the format in line with my current designs. I got a start on that this evening. This is a small site with but a few pages. I will be adding a few more pages in this update cycle, but it is not a big job. I will also be adding the comment system to the pages, trying to make the site more interesting.

Feel free to stop by and check it out. If you look now you will see the original site. I will post here when the update is live.

I did a minor update to Mixing Live Sound. This was just cleaning up the code a bit on the existing pages. I do have some new pages in the planning stage and I want to redo the home page.

I am thinking of adding a YouTube music related videos page. I have a couple of my own videos and can find many that are much better. These might make the pages a bit more sticky. I am also thinking of adding a music player page to the site since it is about sound. I have considered adding a blog to the site to post quick tips and blurbs that are too short to make a real article page. A blog is quick and easy and one can post from anywhere that there is a computer and an Internet connection.

I have several article ideas on my to do list as well. I do have many visitors that read the articles, so more content for the site will make it a more interesting place to visit.

Mixing Live Sound is a niche site for the live sound mixing business. There is a good deal of interest in the subject matter from the local band level. People that do their own sound and want to do a better job are the primary audience at the present time, I suspect. For the specialized terms I get first or second page position in the search engines. I have even seen a #1 in Yahoo search results. I get visitors to this site from around the globe.

The update for Event Staff Online is coming along. I have brought the existing pages up to the current state of my art. I have added a few new administrative pages. I am redoing some of the nav. I will be adding comment facilities on some of the pages.

The physical work takes time, but there is also time involved in thinking the changes out. The planning is important because I intend to promote the site a bit and visitors must be able to find their way around if there is to be value to the site.

I will be adding sidebar banners to this site. I need to choose banners that will complement the site, things in which my visitors may be interested. I have the code for the banner rotators in place, but I have to populate the banner pool.

With all the changes I will want to do some testing before I actually go live with the update. I have been doing that more recently, but I am also likely to make more radical changes with a site rebuild than I formerly would have done. I expect to complete the job tomorrow. I will play a bugle blast when it comes out of the gate. Stay tuned for the big excitement.

The update to the site that I am working on is coming along slowly. This has turned into a major rebuild. I am making some changes to each of the files that were already in the folder as well as adding many new pages. The site was really a link farm, and I am trying to turn it into a friendly place. Watch for the unveiling in the near future. My goal is to complete the rebuild by the end of the weekend.

I have been tempted to put up the completed portion and then add the rest as I finish the work, but it will be much less confusing if I just do the complete job and then test it before it goes live. There are usually some small details that I miss in a rebuild of this type. It is better to test and catch the errors before the public has a chance to see them.

I will keep you informed of my progress.

The last few days have been an interesting run. There have been many search engine hits to this blog. The hits are primarily from international visitors who have searched for the /advanced_comment_system/. For this search the blog is coming up in the number one position of the Google search results. If this were a more popular keyword there would be huge traffic to the site. As it is, I have seen around 50 visitors within the last 3 or 4 days.

It would be interesting to know what has triggered the interest. Interesting indeed, a web search shows that there is a published exploit for my comment system. Further investigation indicates that I have been compromised, although this appears to be primarily an act of vandalism. I had tried to install a comment system earlier and had problems. I now find that none of the comment boxes on the sites that I have checked are working. It appears that the software can not make connection with the database. I will have to investigate further.

This was not an act of vandalism, after all. In fact, I don’t have any idea what all of the visitors are doing. The database seems to be in good order. The problem was that I had inadvertently changed a password for the database, so the software could not access the database. I had run across an article script that used a database. I had reused a user name and given it a different password, which evidently overwrote the original password. So, It was me shooting myself in the foot, rather than Kurdish bad guys or their adherents.