With the Symmetrical Backgrounds rebuild out of the way I am proceeding to the next project. I have begun working on the update/rebuild of I Built My Computer. ‘I Built’ is a computer as a hobby/information site.

I am rebuilding it to improve the navigation and highlight the advantages of the site. Most of my search traffic for this site comes from google images because of a cartoon that I have posted there. I want to make it known to my visitors that there is more to the site than the one cartoon.

I will be improving the navigation, adding some articles, and trying another trick or two to see if I can get a few of the visitors to stick a little bit. I think that the site has some potential, but most of it is not realized as yet. Since I am doing a major rebuild I will do it like the background site rebuild. I will prepare the new site and test on the local test server, and then upload the whole new site. I am changing the look of this one slightly as well.

Some of the changes that I am making to these sites are in the back office. They are not seen by the visitors and do not affect the way that the site operates. The sites are just more logically laid out internally as well as outwardly and I am trying to standardize things so that when I work on various sites the same tools will be available in the same places. I will probably continue this trend with the next update to the sites as I put more new procedures into practice. In the long run I suspect this will be a great help.

In web development the file path is very important. If the file path is not right the expected results will not appear. On a simple site this could mean that a picture does not appear on a webpage or a link is broken and returns a 404 error.

I may have mentioned that I have been putting up a few blogs. My hosting company makes a SimpleScripts one click install available, but each installation uses a separate database. My databases are limited to 100 with my hosting plan. So I put a copy of the master file  on the server so that I would not have to upload it each time. If I do the install I can use a shared database for several (unlimited??) instances of the blogging software. One just uses a unique prefix for each instance of the blog using the database.

Where this all leads is: The hosting company provides a file manager through the site cPanel. There is supposed to be a drag and drop function to copy files. I had no success in getting this to work. The alternative is to input the file path. I made several attempts in conjunction with a couple of blog installs yesterday. Because I did not have the file path clearly visualized I ended up with several instances of the blog software file in places that I did not expect on the server, including as a sub-directory in my master file. I can move files easily with drag and drop so this worked, if not as expected. This morning, when I reflected on the situation with a more or less clear head, the correct file path was apparent to me. I have one more blog that is needed (for now, probably several soon) so I went back and tested the theory. Sure enough, if you input the correct file path things happen as expected.

As an added benefit, copying on the server happens almost instantly. I have pretty good broadband service, 2Mb per second upstream advertised, and it still takes about 5 minutes to upload the 620 files for this software. I doubt that it takes 5 seconds to copy it on the server.

Well, the website development continues. I have added some advertisers and set up another RSS feed for the PC Application Store today. I have also instituted a program of putting up an information page about each advertiser. I intend to add site reviews and possibly some product reviews for these sites as well. I may email affiliate managers for more material to post on the individual pages. I am including some banners and a text link on these pages so that if someone looks at the about page they do not have to go back to the banner page to find the advertiser.