The Hobby Webmaster Blog

The two new blogs may be found at: About Music Blog and WebPickUps Blog. The call for content has gone out, but I have not seen any articles slide in yet. I will check back later, and if there is anything waiting I will make the post.

I did update the default post on both of the new blogs. One of the links that came up on the music player site was for my main business site, AudioArt Sound. It took me a minute to figure that one out. I got a notification by email that someone had pinged with a link. When I looked at the email the ping had originated on my new blog. That was a bit confusing because I knew that I had not linked to my site yet.

The category that was available for the About Music Blog turned out to be entertainment. I will need to search for more music articles, I think. There are vast libraries of articles available on the web. I chose the humor and sexuality categories for the WebPickUps Blog. We will see if anything funny slides into place.

I put the DoFollow and KeyWordLuv plug-ins on these sites as well as the Deep Link Engine plug. I also invited guest bloggers for the About Music Blog. The DoFollow and KeyWordLuv plug-ins are designed to provide a bit more incentive for quality comments by producing a do follow anchor text link back to the poster’s site or blog.

Check out the new blogs and tell me what you think.

I now have three blogs with the KeywordLuv plug-in active. These blogs also have a do follow plug-in installed. That means that a commenter can have a keyword link to his site that is a do follow link. The search engines will follow the link and find the site. You will get credit for a backlink which may help in your search engine results position.

I have now had one comment by a user that understood how to work with a blog and the plug-in. The display does, in fact, work as it is advertised. There was not really any doubt, but I have now seen it in action on one of my blogs.

The Save a Penny blog on the Pennies for Wink site is where this action took place. The commenter left a relevant comment to the post to which it was attached. I approved the comment and it is now live. The commenter has a live do follow keyword link for his time. Thanks!

If you want to build some back links check out the blogs at Before You Buy a Website, Selling On Your Website, or Pennies for Wink. Those are the three that have the needed plug-ins installed. I ask that you leave a comment that is relevant to the post on which you comment. I don’t want comment spam or links to bad neighborhoods, but I will reward a thoughtful comment from one with a quality site with a backlink.

The aspirin that worked for the home page also worked for the info pages. It was an assigned width that gave IE the headache. Remove the assigned width and remove the headache. I had it in mind that IE wanted the width, but it turned out to be the other way around. Firefox doesn’t care either way, it can come up with the right answer without a problem and is just as happy without the assigned width and it all works. At this point The PC App Store looks the same in either browser. I like that.

I will be adding an introductory paragraph to the home page and to the directory pages, mainly for the benefit of the search engines. I may also adjust some of the page discriptions for the same reason. It would be nice if this site started paying its rent.

Just so you won’t think that I have been sitting around twiddling my thumbs, I am in the process of doing a major rebuild of one of my sites. I will make an announcement with a link when I complete the job.

This is a site that gets a small amount of search engine traffic because of the domain name. It emphasizes the importance of the domain name. I have several sites with which I was lucky in the choice of a domain name. I also have one site that gets many visitors who are looking for something entirely different than I offer because of the domain name. The lesson here is to search for a domain name that is descriptive of what you intend to offer on the site. Keyword research should be done and a domain name that incorporates your keywords will go a long way towards making your site a success.

I have the Advanced comment system installed on a couple of sites at this point. I will be adding it to some pages probably this evening. There is some merit to having an interactive element to the pages. This involves your site visitor. If they leave a comment they are more likely to return. Comments also add to your content and seem to be updates to the search engines, and the search engines like fresh content. I will put this on my higher traffic sites first, and then trickle down to other sites.

I plan to incorporate this into my picture pages eventually. I have many galleries up on the web and these may make them fun to visit. As I understand it, there can be a separate comment section for each page on a site. I will check that out this evening. As long as I am correct I may use a comment to describe the pictures in the galleries. I will first be putting them after the articles in Mixing Live Sound and on a few other sites.

The installation was relatively easy once I understood everything. I do have some experience with installing php scripts/programs on the server, but I don’t do it frequently enough so that it is automatic. I do think that the install instructions could give a little more information. WordPress will create the database for you with their install program as I recall. I had to create the database for the comment system to use before it would install. It does  create the table within the data base and, thanks to my several WordPress installs, I could see how to use one database for multiple installs of the comment system. I thought that I would only need one install, but it appears that I need one for each site. That is not a problem as long as I can use only one database. I only have 100 databases available with my hosting plan so I do not want to use one for each installation.

You can find the script at:  The Advanced Comment System Page. This is a freeware script. It has tools to reduce comment spam and a notification email when a comment is posted. I was thinking of trying to add a notification email to the guestbook that I have been using on various sites. I was also thinking of adapting it to use as a comment form. I do not know enough php at this point to do those things, so I went looking for an alternative. I found this script with an Internet search and it does look good. I will let you know how it works out after I have it in service for a while.

The renovation project is officially up on the web. I uploaded the new site last evening. I have used the random rotator script to change the background on the home page and included a link to reload the page. I also put all of the images into galleries and give direct access to the thumb pages from the home page.

The galleries provide several advantages. The old index pages were very long and took a lot of scrolling. The thumbnail pages are fairly short with minimal scrolling. They also load much faster that the old pages that used full size images. I have modifies my gallery software to produce the pages using the presented image as the page background. The gallery software generates the pages – pronto!!

There were almost two thousand files to upload with this rebuild. I deleted the old site completely and uploaded the new site. Even with the higher speed Internet connection it took several minutes. I did upload a folder needlessly that was much bigger than I needed to upload, so that took up a third to half of the total time spent in the upload.

Everything that I checked is working fine. I had done some testing on my local server installation, so I had most of the bugs squashed before I uploaded the site. If you can find something that doesn’t work right please let me know. You can find the site at: http://www.symmetricalbackgrounds.com/

I have just completed the installation of a blog on my Pennies For Wink site. I called it the Save a Penny blog. I put this one up myself so that I can put several blogs in one database. If I use the SimpleScripts installation I burn a database for each blog. WordPress is perfectly happy to share a database between several blogs.

This is more or less a commercial effort. There will probably be an affiliate text link in most of the posts on the site. I will probably look for coupons and special deals to include in the blog.

I did put up a couple of PepperJam affiliate stores last evening. PepperJam is an affiliate network that makes it easy to put up a store. The web is probably already littered with these, but no one can say that I am not doing my part. Now if I can just join with some advertisers that have products of interest to those visiting my higher traffic sites I may see some business in the stores that I put up there.

I did a minor update to the MC Rally site this evening. I had been accepted into another affiliate program and wanted to put their banner up. While I was there I made a ‘more info’ page. I made my css updates for the more info page and then had to go through the other pages and make some changes so that they work with the new css scheme. Luckily the galleries use a different css sheet than the main pages. I was able to make them work with only one small addition to the style sheet. This was a very good thing since there are three or four hundred gallery pages. I would  probably been able to devise a search and replace for the changes I needed to make, but just being able to change the one style sheet saved a lot of time.

The elements that I am using are evolving a bit as I go. I like the more recent pages better than the earlier ones, although I am not sure that the decorations are final at this point. The style sheets make this sort of thing quick and painless, so changes can be made easily.

I also played with a background image rotator for Symmetrical Backgrounds this afternoon. There is a major site reorganization due. I get a small but steady traffic to the site. The reorganization might help keep people on the site longer. A gimmick could not hurt, the rotator might make the place a bit more exciting.  I have a thing or two more to try to make it the best that it can be, but what I have now would work.

I did some cosmetic change to my site: The Closet Online this evening. I am preparing to dump some banners there and probably a Google search box. This site is undeveloped, but it does get some traffic from old bookmarks. I picked up the name a few months ago. The domain name was too good to pass up. I am collecting some banners for it now and will put up the revised page soon. The new ‘look’ is up on the web now. Check it out and tell me what you think of the design.

Last evening I updated my other blog to WP 2.6.5. I have not done the update to this blog yet. There was not really any problem with the update, but the process changed things a good deal. My mods and tracking were eliminated from the site. I had to reinsert the includes in the header and footer templates and re-upload my modified images. It seems that the automated update process is actually a reinstall connected to the existing database. I will probably do this one this evening. I now know what to expect with the update process.