I did battle with the article directory script last evening. It was only a skirmish but it did take a while. There is an external CSS file that is editable, you just have to find your way around in it. The location that I have the script in its current state is:  Articles Directory at Articles – Here’s The Site. It does work ok in FireFox but still needs some tweaks for IE-6. I have not checked with the newer versions of IE.

There are pluses and minuses with this script. The script is encrypted so you cannot edit the output aside from the CSS file. I wanted to add a nav bar at the top since the directory is only a part of the site. There is hope of doing this, but not in the normal way. I did trick it into displaying a couple of links, and I later thought of a way to do this better, but having access to the script would make things easier.

An other minus with the script is that there are built-in affiliate links. You can get a reasonable affiliate payout on these links, but they may not be your first choice of things to display on your site. You can add ads in three places in the script, and it is through creative use of this option that I was able to display my own links.

The other drawback to the script is that only the site owner can post articles to the site. There is a library of articles and all articles submitted by other participants are immediately displayed on all of the more than 200 directory sites. If you are looking for a script to start a real article directory site, where people can sign up and submit articles this is not the script for you.

On the plus side, with over 200 of these scripts in operation you do get exposure around the net. With the major article directories you will only get the one backlink unless the article is picked up for publication. There will probably be more individual surfers that are exposed to your article on a high page rank article site, but the link love may not be any better than with this article service. The owner of the script states that he does spot checks on articles posted to the directory and will block further posts if he catches someone not complying with his terms of service, but every article is not necessarily checked by a human editor.

The experience has been interesting and I will be submitting some articles through my site. I will post at some future date if I have positive or negative opinions on this service. In the mean time check out the first instance of my article directory and leave me a comment here if you have thoughts or questions.

The major upgrade/rebuild of my Number One Pictures site is on the server. I poked a round a bit and fixed the things that I found wrong. If you have time to look around a little see if you can find what I missed. If you do find something strange there, beside the pictures, come back here and leave a comment please.

The rebuild was basically from the ground up. The site looks the same as far as the backgrounds and outline are concerned, but all of the pages and a good bit of the back office stuff have been changed. I am displaying a photoblog feed on the front page that has some very nice pics. There are also five other feeds in the News and Reviews section of the site. The galleries have all been redone. The picture size has been slightly reduced, but there is direct nav to other galleries from every page.

The overall objectives of this round of rebuilds of my sites are to make the sites more interesting and easier to navigate. I have learned a lot since these sites were built and I am applying some of that education into the rebuilds. Much of what I am doing is to make updating the sites easier. Maybe the next round will change some design functions.

There is still a lot to be done on this  site and I have some ideas for other additions for the site. These things can be done more easily because they are not major projects. With the site rebuild out of the way I can take care of these other things as time permits. I do have several more sites that beg for attention, and there is a fairly good list of top level domain names that I could develop, and more bother me on a regular basis. I may do one or two when I am finished with my spring cleaning. I have a nearly complete concept for one of them on my local server.

Stay Tuned!!

I am still working on the rebuild of I Built My Computer. It is not really that big of a task, I just was distracted by earning a living last week. Most of my real business for the month of January took place last week. The first week in February will also be a busy one.

In addition, I learned how to call an XML feed and display it on a web page using a php script last evening. Using the php script brings dynamic content to your page. It is searchable and indexable by the search engine spiders. This means that you have new content on the page whenever the spider, or a visitor, stops by. From the search engine standpoint, there is more and new content to index. It is suspected that the spiders will visit the page more frequently because of the frequent change. If they visit more frequently they are likely to tell more people to come and visit.

I think that I will put a feed box from this blog on the personal home page. I found a good motorcycle related feed for the Rally site. Tech feeds are no problem for the computer and software related sites. I will look for a feed, preferably a review feed, for the Gallery site. I have several ideas of what I would like to find for the various sites.

I have learned already that I have to check for the quality of the feed before putting a page on a site. I established a directory on my web space to use for that purpose. The address for the feed goes in an include file, so upload is minimal. I copied the page a couple of times with other names and a different include file, so I can test three feeds at a time. I was hoping to have multiple feeds on a page, but the script that I am using complains about that, so I will probably use a page per feed for now. It is easy to do, because the pages can be copies with only one small change for the name of the include file. The include files can also be copies with the exception of the feed url.

I did find a site that was selling a script to do this. The customer reviews indicated that the search traffic to their sites doubled or tripled when they added the dynamic content. That software may have some bells and whistles that my barebones script does not have, but the major benefit comes from having the dynamic content.

In other news, the preliminary indication is that the rebuild to Symmetrical Backgrounds and Web Pickups are having an effect on the number of pages viewed per visit. There is really not sufficient data yet to call it a trend, but there are some indications that what I have done is helping.