I have noticed that one of the biggested issues that webmasters have, especially ones that have just gotten started, is maintenance of their websites. Scripts like VB, phpBB, phpDirectory, ZenCart, Wordpress, etc all update frequently. It is one of the most important things to keep up with the updates. I think that this should be right up there with adding new content frequently, and probably should be number one. There are a lot of webmasters out there that start up too many sites and then do not have the time to update all of them with scripts, content, links etc. And the one that is usually left out is the scripts. This is because there is no easy metric to show that spending time on the updating of the scripts will make you any more money. This is a huge mistake and I will explain why below.

Script writers update for a reason, normally the small updates between large releases are for security fixes. If you are not careful, then your website can be comprimised. If you are lucky, the only thing that will happen is the hacker would simply deface you site and leave it at that. Worst case would be they take all of your user data and delete the site. Neither of these make you look professional, and you WILL lose traffic, especially from those users who may have only started visiting your site regularly.

Now imagine if this happened while you were away from the computer for an extended period, everyone needs a vacation now and then, and your site was defaced. Well you could be looking at a site that will be offline for a long time, and the full extent of the damage may not be visable until longer term.

Even though I am harping on this, I am also a person that sometimes forgets to do this myself. I have one VB site that hasn’t been updated in a while, simply because it is not fun. I have a lot of templates to change and on top of that there are a lot fo hacks and addons that I will have to update at the same time. To make this process less painful I follow a simply stragety. Signup for the mailing lists of all of your major scripts, and every week ensure that you are updated. If you have more that half a dozen sites you may want to stretch that some, but make sure that you at least catch all of the major, well known bug fixes.

One of my sites is a forum.  I have been running the site for sometime now, but since it is basically a hobby site I haven’t really done any good business work to it.  This is something that I am going to change.  There are a number of things that I am going to do to double the traffic by April, and double it again by this time next year.

1. Create a new front page. Currently the site looks like a forum, I need the site to look like a news source WITH a forum.  To do that I am going to re-create the front page.  The front page is going to have a number of “news” stories that I will pull for different sources, or write myself.  It will also have the recent links that were added to our News Links engine.

2. Create more content.  The next thing that I am going to do is write better stories.  These will be picked depending on what keywords I want to target.  Usually the keywords will be something someone searched for already or something that i think that people who will want to write in the forum would be interested in.  I am going to strive to create at least 1 page every 2 weeks.  These pages will be huge, with LOTs of information.  I will also be searching for links to these pages with wild abandon.

3. Make site SE friendly  This is one that I am not sure if I am ready for yet.  Currently the siet is as friendly to the SEs as I can make it without adding MOD-Rewrite support.  I may actually have to do this in the near future, but the best way to do that costs a fortune (for a site that makes little to nothing).

4. Write more posts.  The only way for the forum to become active is if it looks active.  To do that I am going to have to do more posting myself.  I am planning on  10 posts a day till April, and by then I should have enough to cut back and work more on promotion.

5. New look.  In April I am going to give the entire site a NEW and IMPROVED look, from a PAID designer.  Currently I am using free styles that really don’t fit my site.  I am also going to be working on a new logo, name and brand.  In the coming months I am going to brand the site like branding is going out of style.  I am going to make cards to give to all my friends, I am going to get T-shirts made to wear to the gym, in public, etc.

6. Contests, I am going to be running monthly contests and guess what 1st prize is going to be….A T-Shirt and a spot on the winners board.  That’s right I am going to have the community create my content and promotion and then for a prize they will get some more promotional material

So that is my plan, I will give you an update in April to let you know how it went.  I am hoping that everything goes smoothly from here on out.

Well I have been thinking of ways to jump start TPL and I think that I may have found something. I have a number of friends that are less than tech savy, so I am thinking that is would be cool if I could just simply give these guys a blog. Somewhere they can speak there thoughts. It really wouldn’t be that hard to set up a WordPress server, however like I just said Ia m looking to jump start TPL - Canada. So why not kill 2 birds so to speak.

I have found a very cool add-on for Vbulletin that will give every user a blog that they would have a lot of control over. They will have a number of different blocks that they can put on the site, and they will have their own place to chat. Currently there isn’t an easy way for a “neat” URL, like something.thepartylive.com however I figure I could solve that with some htaccess redirects. That will give me the power to give a user a sub-domain like URL depending on the username, and then they will have a blog that they could show to all of their friends. Of course I will have the added benefit of having a bunch of NEW pages that will bring a bunch more people to the site through the SEs.

All of this will be happening before the end of the month, so keep your eyes open.

I decided that I wanted to add a RSS feed to my Vbulletin site.  I thought that iit would be a good way to psot RSS Press Releases using a “bot”.  So first thing I did was start looking over at vbulletin.org for a hack and to my suprise I couldn’t find anything of the sort, what the deuce!!

Then I asked the question on one of the VB forums that I frequent, and did I ever feel like a noob.  IT IS BUILT IN.  With VB you can add RSS feeds, pick the forum and the user and have it add the threads and is it ever simple. 

I am not sure if I have mentioned it before, but if you are looking to start a serious forum, or if you have a forum now that you started as a hobby and you want to start getting serious about it BUY VB.  You will not regret it.  Out of the box without any mods VB is by far the most comprehensive forum software that I have ever used, and the ease that you can add hacks via plugins makes customizing the forum simple.

Well that is my VB plug for the day.  Later.

Hey there everyone, as you have probably read before I have been working on my frist true VB mod/Hack, and it is now ready for BETA testing, so go and check it out, it is called TPL News.  Basically it is a site where registered users can submit links that they think are interesting.  A mod then reviews them to make sure that they fit the theme of the site, (this may be changed later) and then other users vote on them.

The ranking depends on the rate of positive votes, so the older the article the more votes it needs to stay on the top.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please let me know, this is both my first try at a VB hack and it is still in the very early stages.  I am hoping to get it stable and good enough to offer to the public, with a link of course.