How Can I Put My Website Out There ?
Posted on September 24, 2008
Brion, a teenager that runs http://www.youngbusinessnation.com sent me an email asking:
…I just would like to know how can i put my website out there, so people can know about it and so that it can be as successful as yours? I also have a blog but need more people to view it. Why should i blog if no one is going to it…
Hi Brion, welcome to the internet!
Getting your website “out there” isn’t easy. A lot of people seem to think that all you need to do is barf-out a website, and the world will come running - but as you’re probably seeing, this just isnt the case. Building a successful website takes a lot of time and effort and building a successful forum/community such as yours is even more difficult and sometimes (ok, always) frustrating
There are a lot of things you can do (some of which I will list here), but you are already doing one of them: Let others know about your site. By you simply sending me an email, I am now posting a link to your forum for the world (and Google) to see. Getting links from other websites is one of the foundations of “SEO” and one of, if not the most important thing you can do for your website. You actually have the advantage of being a teenager, which is unique and will probably get you a better ‘hit’ rate for getting mentioned in someone’s blog or getting a link to your website/forum. Although there are other teenage webmasters already ahead of you like Stanley who runs eMillionsBlog.com (15 years old) and Ashley who runs WhateverLife.com (i think she was 16 when she started the site, but she’s probably an old lady by now). I even heard a rumor that buff-arm-exercises.com is run by a 14-year old. Sometimes just writing to another webmaster/blogger and saying “I’m xx years old and am building my website/blog about yyy, can I interview you?” is an automatic IN - look at this post at eMillionsBlog.com - that kid scored an interview with Jeremy Schoemaker - shit, i cant even do that, and Jeremy knows me !
Making posts in other blogs that are the same subject-matter as your forum is another way to get ‘free’ links and drive people to it . If you make those posts on “doFollow” blogs, Google and other search engines will also follow those links, helping your site to get indexed in the search engines and eventually helping with your “ranking” when someone searches for something like “jobs for teenagers“. That does not mean you should go around and start spamming yourself in every blog that you can. If you did that to my blog I would throw you into Aksimet-hell, but if you make meaningful and helpful comments on blogs or even other fourms about jobs in general, teenagers in general, or better yet helping teenagers find jobs, it’s sure to drive some traffic - and most webmasters won’t mind.
Remember though, before you start driving people to your forum, there needs to be something there for them to see. Nobody wants to click onto an empty forum - that’s like going to a restuarant at lunch time with no other customers - “what’s wrong with the food here?” you ask yourself.. “Screw it, I’m going do ‘donalds” .. You don’t want that happening at your forum, so you need to get some posts in there and give people a reason to read, and better yet a reason to come back. You might ask some of your friends to sign up and make a few posts, or maybe throw in a bunch of new threads yourself to get things started. There are even forums dedicated to new-forum owners building posts in each other’s forums. When I first opened the forums at GrownUpGeek.com I allowed ANYONE to make posts anonymously - no sign up or anything - just type and click. This made it very easy for anyone to create a new thread or post a comment without having to bother with that whole ’sign up’ thing, and really got things rolling. It also very quickly became a haven for trolls and spammers meaning more work for me to keep things under control - but it was worth it because it netted me all sorts of good, free, unique content (forum topics and comments).
Another thing that I learned very quickly when I first started is that I didnt know anything (not that i do now), and since the internet changes all the time, as soon as I did learn something I had to re-learn it a week later. That’s why I think it’s important to interact with other webmasters at sites like WebMasterWorld, the DigitalPoint Forums, and maybe even WickedFire (if you fit in with that sort of crowd). And read a few “make money online” blogs like ShoeMoney, Garry Conn, and Nickey Cakes (Nickey pretends to be a badd-ass, but he’s really a sweetheart.. Don’t let him scare you). You’ll have to sift through a lot of BS and wasted space in the forums and some of the blogs, but there is a lot to be learned there. When I first started GrownUpGeek.com I spent almost as much time reading (and posting in) forums and blogs as I did working on the website.
Re: Your Blog.. Blogging and building blog-readership isn’t any easier than starting a forum - and at the beginning you have a bit of a chicken or egg thing. People wont come if you dont have anything posted, but why post anything if nobody is coming to read it? The only way around this is to just preach to an empty room - It’s kinda like talking to yourself, but you get used to it after a while. Keep doing those same things to build links to your forum, for your blog and eventually people will start to show up and the search engines will start to send traffic. A few people will like what you have to say and keep coming back.
Well about that’s all i have for now because my head hurts from eating too many cookies and drinking diet-cokes for the last few hours - and I think i’ve exceeded my A.D.D. limit for one session. Good luck to you in your internet-empire building adventure.. Please dont forget me when you get rich and famous.
–Rb
Filed Under Site Development | 9 CommentsMozilla Shows Some Love For The Firefox Referral King
Posted on September 22, 2008
Look what I got in the mail today:
Mozilla sent me a cool Firefox computer bag, a Firefox/Mozilla mousepad, a Mozilla coffee mug, some Firefox/Mozilla stickers (maybe i’ll put the bumper-sticker on the Toyota, it’s not getting near the Jag) and a great army-green Firefox T-shirt (which will now get more belly-time than my ShoeMoney T-shirt).
I guess Mozilla noticed that I had previously been the Google Adsense Firefox Referral King and they want to keep me happy :-) .. Thanks David!
If you want to be part of the non-commercial Spread Firefox Affiliate program, go to www.spreadfirefox.com.
Filed Under Mozilla | 7 CommentsI Was Wrong! Google Checkout DOES Have Support!
Posted on September 18, 2008
…and it still sucks…
You may recall my rant about Google Checkout’s support (or lack of) that was thinly disgusied as a comparison between PayPal and Google Checkout.
In that post I stated that Google Checkout had virtually NO customer support because they had ignored 5 emails that I had sent to them over the course of a few weeks regarding a charge back. Because the emails went ignored, they treated my case as if I did nothing, did a refund, and stuck me for the fees..
Well Google Checkout has redeemed itself.. Today, nearly 30 days after their initial request for information from me, and 2-weeks after THEIR deadline and ignoring my fifth & final email begging them to fix their system, they finally did respond to me. The two-sentence eMail I received from them today states that they will try to reverse my chargeback, and I should watch for more emails from them “in the next several weeks” ..I’m not really sure they read it or not because the response didn’t really make sense based on what I sent them the five previous times, but hey, someone found the reply-button - hurray!
I guess that’s better than seizing my money for no reason…
Filed Under Google Checkout | 2 CommentsUpgrading Your Drupal
Posted on September 14, 2008
I’m taking a break from the non-stop fine-tuning & fixing things after the upgrade to Drupal 5.0 to write a quick post on the steps I took for the upgrade. Even though the upgrade went pretty well, there are still a LOT of little glitches and customizations that need to be done - enough to have kept me busy pretty much all day/night since the upgrade (but all worth it!)
Step One: Decide what version of Drupal to upgrade to
Being on Drupal 4.7 I had to decide if I was going to upgrade to Drupal 5 or Drupal 6. The biggest determining factor was module support - if there were any important/critical modules not supported in either, I couldn’t use that version. I made a list of all of my important/critical modules, then checked what versions were available at Drupal.org. It turns out that several of my favorite/important modules are not yet supported in Drupal 6 so I decided to upgrade to Drupal 5. NOTE: Even if you decided that you want to upgrade to D6, you must first upgrade to D5 - there is no direct upgrade path from Drupal 4.x to Drupal 6.x.
Step Two: Build a test-site to see what breaks
I didn’t want to experiment with the live site so I built a test-environment that I could do the upgrade on and work-out any issues. I could also remove all those old, unused tables in the database without fear of breaking the site. Most webmasters probably already have a test environment but since I’m a maverick (and never really knew how to make a test-site) I didn’t have one. Creating a test-site is pretty easy and boils down to three basic steps:
- Create a duplicate database
- Copy all your files to a new subfolder
- Change your SETTINGS.PHP file to reflect the changes
There is a great post at the Drupal website with all the details for creating a test environment. Even though the instructions in the link above describe doing the steps from the command-line, I was able to use cPanel to create the ‘test’ subdomain, phpMyAdmin for creating and copying the database, my GUI FTP client for copying all of the files to the subdomain, and my GUI FTP client and the text-editor on my PC for modifying the SETTINGS.PHP file. So don’t let that command-line stuff scare you.
Step Three: Once you have your test environment up and running, you are ready to start the upgrade.
Download the new version of Drupal and be sure to read through the install/upgrade steps. Some of the important ones to remember are:
- Log in as “user 1″ (site administrator) and keep that browser-window open before you start the update process
- Disable all non-core and unused modules
- Disable the cache
- MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP OF EVERYTHING - FILES AND DATABASE (this wont apply as much since it’s a test environment, but you better be damn-sure you have backups before you touch the real site)
- Make sure you removed ALL of your previous Drupal files/directories and copy the new files ‘fresh’
Now you’re ready to go through the update/upgrade process. There is also a great step-by-step video by Lullabot that’s worth the few minutes it takes to watch that will give you a great understanding of the process.
Step Four: You’re done!
Actually, step-4 is fixing all the things that go wrong. In my case, the very first thing I saw after the update processes completed were these errors:
Warning: _drupal_cache_init(modules/fastpath_fscache/cache.fs.inc) [function.-drupal-cache-init]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/.../includes/bootstrap.inc on line 932
Fatal error: _drupal_cache_init() [function.require]: Failed opening required 'modules/fastpath_fscache/cache.fs.inc' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/.../includes/bootstrap.inc on line 932
I panicked at first, but after spending just a few minutes with my friend Google, I found that these errors had to do with the old Drupal 4.7 cache. I was able to fix it by removing the “cache_inc” record from the Drupal Variable table:
DELETE FROM drupal_variable WHERE name = 'cache_inc';
Of course, since I am sql commenline ‘tarded, I used phpMyAdmin to delete the record.
I also got some errors that referred to tables that I had deleted and were no longer in use. Unlike the errors above that stopped me from doing anything, the site was still working so no further action was required.
After the upgrade completed it was just a matter of testing everything - viewing different pages, making posts, etc, to see what did and did not work. Most errors that I saw referred to .PHP file customizations that I had made or modules that had not yet been updated/reactivated. After downloading the new module versions and activating them, most of these errors were resolved. Remember that when installing new versions of modules you need to run UPDATE.PHP to upgrade their database tables.
Once I was confident that most everything was working I invited the moderators and some trusted members into the test-site to give things a run-thru. Once it looked like everything was working I was confident to go through the same process on the live-site.
It’s been two days since I upgraded the site and I have found dozens (if not more than 100) minor things that need to be fixed/updated. So far nothing major, but there have been enough to keep me busy from the time I wake up until midnight or so when I fall asleep at the keyboard.
Like I posted the other day, the upgrade to Drupal 5 is well worth it based on the features alone and if you’re still hobbling along on a pre 5 version, you really should upgrade. One of the main reasons I upgraded was because of the “Duplicate entry .. for key 1 query: INSERT INTO sessions” errors that were bring the site to a standstill or crashing the site all together. The bad news about these errors is that since the upgrade to Drupal 5 we’re seeing more of these errors than ever before. The great news is that Drupal skips over these errors without missing a beat - so no more crashing/lagging site (so far) !
Filed Under Drupal | Leave a Comment
