I am beginning to dig into PHP scripting a bit more. I want a custom script and there is no money at this time of year to get it programmed. I have some interest in PHP anyway as all of the dynamic sites use PHP scripts, so it is time that I learn a bit more. This will be interesting.

I looked at the PHP manual on the php.net site, but it is written with the expectation that the reader has some programming knowledge in other common computer languages. I had an intro to computer programming course in college about 40 years ago, but haven’t looked at it since. That was in Fortran. The basic knowledge of programming flow will probably help, but I remember basically nothing from the course work and little of it would apply anyway. I am going to need to find some material that is more basic.

The W3C schools has some PHP tutorial content. I think that will be my next stop on this journey. I have seen another tutorial site to which I may return, as well. What I probably really need for the current project is a cookbook approach. I will probably be able to find specific tutorials for the parts that I need various places on the web, or I may find something close and modify it.

I may have to walk before I run. I might not be able to get all the features I would like until I learn more, but I think that I am close to a place where I could make something usable. I can build a basic version that will get things started and then update it later with additional features.

In writing this I have come up with some new ideas. I will try to remember to tell you how it all turned out.

Somewhere in my travels I saw a reference to an open source software package called Dolphin7. This is a CMS based community building software package. It was designed as a platform for dating sites, but has features, according to the website, that rival the web 2.0 social networking sites. A package like this starts me thinking about possibilities. There were three areas that immediately came to mind.

I have downloaded the software and will begin to investigate those possibilities in the near future. I have been interested in hosting an article site so I will see if the software can be adapted to that end. Along with that goes my live sound wiki site. I tried some wiki software but the security (maybe my settings) left something to be desired. I checked it one day to find over 3000 spam comments on the home page alone. The other thought that I had is a shopping community site.

This may also prove to be a solution for my music site. I had found a file upload software and installed it on the site. This software seems to draw a lot of attention from a bad element via the search engines. When someone tried to upload a .php file last week I took the upload software offline. (A php file could probably be used to take control of my server space.)

Expect a further post on this software package when I have had opportunity to check it out. Being open source the code is available to modify as desired. This may lead to some new knowledge and be a bunch of fun.

Check out the software package and tell me your thoughts in a comment. If the software spawns ideas that you think would work but have no interest in pursuing let me know!

I have installed DaDa Mail on my web server. This is a program that allows one to build mailing lists. List building is important for Internet Marketing. The list is double opt-in. You sign up for the list and then receive an email with a link that you must click to be included in the mailing list. There is also the option to opt out of the list at any time, and the software takes care of all this. With an add-on this software can also be used as an auto-responder with scheduled mailings. It will also do the work of mailing in a fashion that is friendly to the server.

I have also produced my first PDF. I downloaded (150MB) Open Office 3 and installed it yesterday. I needed a full word processor for some things that I need to do, not just a simple text editor. Open Office has the capability to export as PDF. I need to produce a couple more of these for other sites, but my first effort was to assemble a group of articles into an ebook in PDF format to offer as a reward for visiting one of my sites. I uploaded the PDF to the server and checked that it could be accessed. I made a download page with an optional sign-up for the email list. I just checked and the download page works and the mail opt-in form works. I have not gone live with the program at the present time. I will make an announcement here when I do go live with the program, so check back or subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up with the latest news.

I may break the PDF into two sections. The PDF is now 12 pages but it covers a fairly broad range of subjects. This could be broken down into Website Basics and Web Theory. If I do break it down I will probably add some content to the Web Theory PDF and require a sign-up for the list.

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 completed and tested the work on MC Rally today. Well, not really completed, but as far as I will go for a few days. I also added both sidebar and regular comment sections to the I Built My Computer site. I also wrote another article for I built. I think that I built and Mixing Live probably have my best commercial possibilities right now. I need to add some specific products to I built and then try to direct some traffic that way. I also need to get into the habit of writing more. Mixing Live suffers from lack of content.

I ran across a site that is the obvious product of an Internet Marketer. It was interesting to see one of those live and in person. I have probably seen many of them in the past but did not recognize what they were. I don’t think that many would see the planning behind the site as readily as I now do.

Most of the sites that I have have little commercial value now. There are several with potential, but only a few were put up with any thought about how they would be monetized, and those without the necessary planning and knowledge. I can see that a focused marketer that does his research would almost certainly be more successful than I. I hope that I am learning some things, but the sites that make money are never going to be as much fun as my pet projects. The pet projects could provide a trickle of income, but probably never a stream, let alone the river that I now need.

I discovered that I had uploaded a work-in-progress page to the PC App Store site. I had begun to rework the site some time back. When I started the work I renamed the original home page and the WIP page with the proper name. I recently added some Google code to most pages to gather some additional information for Google Analytics. I did this with a find and replace function of a text editor, so I did not actually view any of the pages. I then uploaded the modified pages, wholesale. When I selected the files for the PC App Store site, the WIP page had the right name, so it is the one that I selected for upload. This site has been getting a little search engine traffic recently, and I knew that it was not in the best format, so I stuck my nose in there today. I was amazed to see the wrong page displayed, and it took me a minute to realize why that could be. I renamed pages and uploaded my old home page to the site. It is not a good page, but it is much better than the work-in-progress page at this point. I have a lot to do on that site!!

Oh, I do still have the itch to put up some new sites. Good, available domain names keep coming to me. It would be easy to get distracted from the maintenance and updating that needs to be done on the current crop of sites. Then there is the matter of site promotion that needs to be addressed if all of the work that I put in on the sites is to pay off.

I am updating a site and building some catalog pages. I thought that it would be a good use of the space below the sidebar nav section to add a comment section. This proved to be a bit of an adventure. I needed to make changes in both the css file and the index file to accomplish this. In other places on the site I want the standard format for the comment section. I now have two stylesheets and two index pages in this comment section. The linking is not a problem (I don’t think) because the call code is easy to edit. I got the sidebar comments working on my test page so all should be in order when I go live with the site. I will have to check and see if it all works as planned.

I may also get fancy with the catalog nav section. I am thinking of a css drop up or down jump menu. There will be several pages in this catalog. I will have previous and next buttons on the pages, but I am thinking of also having a jump menu to get to other sections and pages in the catalog. If I get this going it will be another tool in my bag of tricks. Be assured that I will post to let you know how this all turns out. I will link to the new pages so that you can look them over.

A site that is interactive is more interesting to surfers. Taking a cue from blogs and many other sites, a comment section is one  way to make a site interactive. A visitor that posts a comment is more likely to return to the site to see other comments. Comments also add content to the site. Frequently updated sites are favored by some search engine algorithms.

I have been using a simple guestbook script, but this is a separate page and has not been as effective as it could be. I ran into a site called HotScripts in my travels around the ‘Net. Last evening I searched the site for a php based comment system. I found one, a freeware script, that looks good and I plan to implement it on a few of my sites. I will let you know how it goes and post a link if this works as advertised.

One of the advantages to this system is that it is global. It appears that I will be able to install the script one time and use it on all of my sites that share the hosting account. The guestbook that I have been using requires a separate installation for each instance of the guestbook. While I could do what I want to do in this way, it would take a great deal of extra work and would also add unnecessary bulk to the site. The script will also send a notification email when there is a comment posted. It has an anti-spam plan and an admin panel that allows admins to delete inappropriate posts. I was thinking of trying to add an email notifier to the guestbook script that I use.

So now I am off on another adventure in Web Development. I will let you know how this all turns out. Subscribe to the RSS feed so that you will know when the site is updated. What ways are you making your sites interactive? Do you use comments or poles? Leave a comment here to let me know what you are doing!!

Work has been interfering with my web play time, and it is only going to get more in the way for the near future. I do and will have things to post to the AudioArtSound blog though. I did write an article for my site Selling on Your WebSite this evening. The article is titled ‘Traffic is not Enough!‘ It talks a bit about the importance of targeting the traffic that you draw to your website. The title is a link to the article, if you are interested.

While I was paying attention to that site I also did some minor updates to reflect my most recent site configurations. I had brought the site up to spec last month, but as I go I think of some small things and learn some new tricks. I took care of some back office tasks, tweaking the code and css, and made minor cosmetic changes. I have been adding my navbar background to the left nav box recently, color coding all the nav areas the same. I have also been putting a background in my right column ad box because I use both 12o and 160 pixel skyscraper banners there with a frame. The narrow banners look better, I think, with a background color to fill the frame.

Last evening I was looking over a guestbook post page and noticed that my footer information was missing from the page. I investigated the problem but could not put my finger on the specific difficulty. I went to the site from which I had downloaded the script to see if there was any information there. I found that there is a new guestbook script available.

The new script was written to improve the security in the script. It will have to replace the old guestbooks as there is not an upgrade path except by replacement. I will investigate the possibility of data import, but that is not a serious problem as I only have one or two of the old ones up with any data. Worst case would be some copy and paste work with those one or two old books.

The layout of the new script is much easier to work with over-all. There were a couple of gotchas with the installation, but nothing that was not easy to overcome with my current knowledge of web design. Last month it may have been different, but I keep learning.

One problem was that there is a div with an id of wrapper in the script. An id can only be used once on a page so the second occurrence of the id blew the page layout. I changed the id and took care of the problem. The other problem was the use of floats and clearing in the script. To integrate this into my page meant that the guestbook needed to be enclosed in a floated div, a fact that I just picked up in my reading sometime last week. Floating the div meant changing the order of containers on the page, also a recent addition to my knowledge base. I made the necessary changes and uploaded a test page (not necessarily in that order).

I like the new script and would recommend it to anyone looking for a php based guestbook for their site. I look forward to working with it and will be replacing the several instances of the old script that I now have on my sites. The script is free to use and is available from myPHPscripts. It uses a captcha so guestbook spam is minimized. There are several other useful scripts available from the site. Check it out!!