Yesterday I wrote and submitted an article titled ‘The Humorous Or Sexy Viral Email – An Internet Tradition’ in support of my site Web Pickups. It may be live on Ezine Articles tomorrow. I just checked and they are processing it now, 4 of 5 steps complete. (I will try to come back and link to the article when/if it goes live.)

While researching the history of viral email I ran across the name of an early website that posted these emails called ViralBank.com. (For obvious reasons I will not make that link live, but you can easily chase it if you wish. ) I did a Google search and came up with the listing for the site. I clicked on the link but the page did not load. I got a server time out message from FireFox. I checked with the Internet Archive (also very slow yesterday) and found some past pages filed there. I checked with Who-Is and found that the site was first registered toward the end of 2000 and that the registration is still current.

Today I tried to visit the site again. This time the page loaded, more or less. There were several database errors listed. What did load looked the same as the last updated page from the year 2007 that I saw on the Way Back Machine. It appears that the site is no longer being maintained. The Internet Archive showed that the peak year for number of indexed pages was 2005. It makes you wonder, did the owners get bored with maintaining the site or did they move on to other things? The viral emails on which the site was based did not slow down at that time to the best of my recollection, and are in fact still going strong today.

The research for the article turned up some interesting facts. The Internet as we know it got off the ground in about 1995 when the last of the commercial restrictions were lifted and Yahoo was born. Email actually predates the Internet by many years. Email was originally conceived as a method for different users of time shared main frame computers to communicate with one another. Most of these installations were not networked as we know it today. There may have been terminals in various places, but they all hooked back in to the mainframe in a star pattern. When the Internet as we know it came into being email was carried over and has been called the killer application of the Internet. Email became one of the driving factors of the Internet as people perceived the necessity of having an email address.

I have been testing a couple of WordPress plug-ins on a few of my sites. One of these plug-ins retrieves articles from the iSnare article directory. I have several sites that are receiving articles on a regular basis, but two or three have not seen any new content.

I have looked at the server logs and the iSnare bot does stop by those sites and there does not appear to be a problem as it finds the download script. The categories that I chose for those sites must have little content available.

One of the sites is my old humor site, WebPickups. It has been some time since I posted things to the site on a regular basis. I had hoped to generate some additional traffic. I put up a blog with an initial post explaining the plan and have waited for about a week for the content to start rolling in. Nothing has showed up. The site displays email comedy. Today I added three posts of material that showed up in my inbox. Posting this type of material may take more time in WordPress than to just build an additional page on the main site, but with WordPress there is the RSS shout and the other plug that I am working with adds some other blogs links to the post. This then precipitates a ping to the other blog and, with luck, a trackback to the post.

You can check outs the new posts on the WebPickups Blog if you have any interest. I will be watching my traffic numbers to see if I achieve a boost. The display is slick in WordPress.

What do you think, will this help?