Category: PHP

4 Most Underused Projects We’ve Launched

4. MoneyShui.
The Idea: Find reviews for finance and investing books
The Problem: Not enough content yet.
The Solution: We need to get things going. I still haven’t copied all of the InvestorGeeks reviews over. Getting a fresh blogger there would help too. So would marketing it as an SEO scam… you need a review here. You need to link here. You need a link from here.

3. DietShui.
The Idea: Find reviews for diet books. a.k.a. MoneyShui for diet and health books.
The Problem: Same as MoneyShui. It needs content to be of use to people.
The Solution: Same as above.

2. NoteTrain.
The Idea: Take some prose writing and convert it into a “train” of sentences presented one line at a time.
The Probelm: Two fold here: (1) We haven’t been spreading the word on this one and (2) It’s kind of pointless.
The Solution: Let people know how fun this is and how useful it can be. I use it to send Kim love notes. It’s different.

1. SearchRascal.
The Idea: Keep track of search result rankings for keywords your tracking.
The Problem: Just launched and no one knows about it. We need some people using it to justify the server costs.
The Solution: Push on our SEO buddies to spread the word a bit. I’ve submitted the site to some blogs and stuff but no one is picking up on this. Perhaps the idea isn’t as awesome as I thought it was. Nah, I doubt that. We need a little bit of publicity to get this going. The site really is useful to SEO professionals and anyone who wants to track search rankings for a website or group of queries.

Making the Blog Part 1

I created this website to give myself an outlet for my creative urges. I imagined myself writing fictional masterpieces weekly and creating scores of compiled computer games, all of which I would upload to this site. Well, that’s only partially happening. I’m actually encouraged with my progress. However, as is common with a lot of blogs (I assume since I’m not really that big of a blog-o-file), I find myself mostly writing about my writing implement.

The situation may be special for me since I’ve written this blog “software” myself. I’m so proud of this accomplishment and each new feature that I add, that it is sometimes difficult to set those feelings aside and think of other “content” to put here.

I also started thinking about the random lack of focus this site empowers and how that it would be very difficult for me to create something here that will be consistently interesting to people other than myself. This is why I created different “topics”. I imagined people visiting my site because they were interested in me (my family) or interested in my poetry (sick minds) or interested in my games (the extremely bored). Overall though, I always really understood that this blog/site is more than anything self-fulfilling. I’m most interested in venting this stuff for my own good. As of now, whether or not anyone else takes notice is secondary.

Despite all that, and in an effort to produce some genuinely useful content, I’m going to start a series of posts entitled “Making the Blog”. The idea is to talk in detail about the various aspects of building this beast from the ground up. Even though there are numerous commercial products like those from six apart, books on blogging, and even open source options, I feel that if you are capable, building your own blog from scratch can be very satisfying. I feel much more ownership over this production and the words scrawled here than I would have otherwise. You can too.

So, if you’ve written some code before, dabbled in PHP and mySQL, or know a little html, you might be interested in this feature. I hope to provide anyone interested with the code and understanding necessary to make your own blog like mine (in PHP).

Undoubtedly, as I add new features to my site, I will expand on the “Making the Blog” series by bragging about and explaining the newest goodies. Excuse and ignore me if you must since blog software is already available. Excuse me if someone else has already created a feature like the one I describe here. You can, as always, consider this exercise another one of my masturbatory self-indulging mind dumps. But I truely hope I can produce something useful with this.

Thanks.

Making the Blog Part 2