While I am proceeding with the update to The Closet, I have other sites that demand a bit of attention. It is probably not set in stone, but I redesigned the info page format for the More Info pages of the Closet. I will be continuing my efforts with The Closet, but I can’t neglect some tweaks and updates to my sites that are now producing traffic.

My Viral Email Archive site is my highest traffic site at the moment. I need to keep adding content there to maintain its position. There are some other tweaks that I want to try to make the site more productive as well.

My Mixing Live Sound site probably has the greatest potential of my current crop of sites and does see a reasonable amount of traffic. I have several original articles as well as several reprint articles on this site. There are some minor layout tweaks to do and I need to add a good bit more content. I have a list of search terms that I have been saving from the daily analytics. I may also check in with WebMaster Tools to find the best order in which to provide additional content. This site is consistently my second highest traffic site and my site with the highest quality traffic.

There is a good deal of interest in my Mixer in a Box site as well. This is my site introducing the SoftWare Audio Console live mixing environment that I have been using for the last year and a half. I have several pages of content planned for the site. I also want to do some layout tweaks to this site. I had a little bump of traffic from Indonesia due to a mention on a local forum there. I get steady international traffic to this site as there is a good deal of interest in mixing live sound on a computer.

As I go through my analytics information I often have ideas of things that may work for the various sites. I mark these down in my ‘ideas’ list. I have a lot that can be done if I will only take the time to follow through on the ideas. Many of the ideas are brought to light by my current understanding of web design and web development. I do continue to read on the subjects. The trick is to balance the reading time with the doing time. One needs the knowledge to become more effective, but the new knowledge also needs to be put into practice for it to be of benefit.

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.

In my ongoing update to Web Pickups I ran into an unusual problem with Internet Explorer. I was hindered a small amount because the problem seemed to be associated with an ‘overflow: auto;’ styling that I had used in an index box, and IE is known to go its own way with the overflow auto implementation. I did some research on the web but the research raised more questions than it answered. I found no instance where my specific problem was addressed. The information that I found also indicated that the problem was alleviated in IE-7, but I was seeing the problem in both 6 and 7.

The problem was that everything on the page was dumped into my auto-scrolling list box, even though it displayed as intended in FireFox. Furthermore, the same code worked on other pages where the index file was not used. This list is a very long list with around 120 links to other pages. I had found that if I removed the overflow auto the page would display more or less correctly. Finally I isolated the problem to my list.

I had just converted it to an unordered list and have not used that in the past, even though it is more correct than the way that I have done it in the past. I though that perhaps it was something to do with IE’s handling of unordered lists, so I was going to convert it pack to a simple series with <p> tags. I deleted the opening <ul> tag and then went to delete the closing ul tag. When I got there, something didn’t look right. FireFox forgave the error, but IE in both flavors became extremely confused. When I looked at the tag I saw </ul – I had forgotten the closing caret (>). The tag should have looked like </ul>.

I added the missing caret to the code and IE said, “Oh, That’s what you mean!!”. When I uploaded the file with the missing caret IE got so happy that it did its best to render the page in the way that I wanted. I spent several hours chasing the problem of the missing caret!!

For all you readers that are following this adventure, you can now see the progress of the update live at the Web Pickups site. I still have more Ideas and more work to do, but what I have done so far is up and running. I know that there are a few of the video display pages that have a problem. If you run across one of them please let me know either through email or leaving a comment here. Thanks!!

I am working on a major update to my site Web Pickups. I have the new home page up but not all modules are working (no content). The new home page will be much cleaner and present some real content instead of my mission statement that has greeted visitors up until this time. I will relegate that to an About Web Pickups page. Anyone that is interested in that sort of thing can go digging for it.

I am also moving the latest additions to a nav box on the left. I have ‘a thought for you’ quotations in a rotator in the box below the latest additions. On the right I have an advertising banner (along with my Google AdSense in the header). Center page has a picture (random rotator) and below that is a random movie.

I will keep my laundry list indexes for the sections, but I will also put the list into a nav box. On the movie pages it will be in a box to the left in my standard layout. On the pictures pages I may put it and the commercial message below the images. I am serving some fairly large images so I don’t want to limit my options as to image size.

The new home page is up on the site if you want to check it out. It will be there until I post the announcement here that it has gone live. You can follow the progress as I add the various rotator targets. I suspect that this layout will work much better than the old one.

Today I purchased another domain name. It is livesoundwiki.com. It is intended as a community site for those interested in the live sound reinforcement field. I am inviting experienced engineers to post articles on the subject of live sound production.

Of course, I want to integrate the wiki into my site format. This is where the battle begins. I have tried a couple of approaches, so far without success. I have only begun to fight!! I am sure that there is a way to do what I want, but it may involve reading the documentation or locating some assistance.  I will keep after it.