These are a few tools that I just picked up, they are quick and are ready to go. You shouldn’t have to install, just unzip and click.

I’ve been reading for a long time about how good poll’s are on your blogs and forums. It’s a way to figure out who is reading your post, and finding out what are interest of your readers.

I recently added a poll option to our TransformTopeka blog and thought Imight as well add it here as well.

Here is my first attempt at a poll question, I can add a  widget to the side column, but I need to kill something else so it’s not a long page becuase of the column on the blog.

Please vote if anything to test things out. I’ll have some more interesting polls soon and may go and add one to a few of the older post.

What are some polling questions you would like asked to all the vBulletin owners that visit vBulletinSetup?

Just off the top of my head, I’m thinking about..

• Paid or Free vBulletin Styles/Hacks
• .com or other TDL
• Free forum or Paid
• Favorite Free Forum Script
• Fav vBulletin Mod/Style

I’m sure I’ll think of a few more, I’m open to suggestions.

Hosting your vBulletin forum can be a difficult decision if you don’t have the facts right. In my opinion, choosing your vBulletin host is one of the most important choices you can make. Getting a bad host for your vBulletin forum can cause several negatives from slow load time, to limiting your emails you can send, to shutting down if hitting a MySQL limit. I suggest everyone research any host you might be considering, at sites like webhostingtalk, as well as searching on google.

I’ll list off a few vBulletin Hosting companies that I’ve seen good recommendations for, but as I said above, you should do a background check on any host that you may be considering for your vBulletin forum.

When picking a vBulletin host, you should take into consideration the amount of disk space you’ll need, as well as how many databases you may want or domains that you may want to host. My hosting plan has unlimited domains, subdomains as well as email addresses. You can find hosting for your vBulletin forum from 5$ a month, all the way up to 200$ a month for your own server. We use a virtual private server for vBulletinSetup, but this isn’t necessary for new forums. Most vBulletin forums can get by on a shared hosting account for at least the first few months, then you might want to upgrade to a vps.

I hope I’ve been able to clear some things up on hosting your vBulletin forum, feel free to comment and ask any questions you may have.

Professional vBulletin SEO Services – Upgrades/Installs/Optimziation

Hello, my name is Brandon Sheley, (former) owner of vBulletinSetup.com

I’ve been offering Professional vBulletin Services since June of 2006 and had been running forums for a couple years before that. I made this site to offer free vBulletin help in the forums and a place to consolidate all the wonderful info on the web about vBulletin. I suggest you check out our SEO and our vBulletin Questions categories before going any further. I’ll list off what I can offer later in this post, but if I can’t do it, I know someone that is reliable and trustworthy, that can.

Within 10 days of buying this domain, we were able to get the top position on Google for 1 of our keywords.
In our first 4 months, we hit 30,000 in Alexa.

Along with on-site SEO, you must also do off-site SEO. This involves building relevant back-links to your site. Check out our latest accomplishment vBSetup hit 100,000 links.

I offer the following services:

vbSetup
- Installation and maintenance for vB Hacks
vbOptimize
- Full on-site SEO optimization
vbConsult
- Site evaluation and recommendations for increasing market share
vbBackLinks
- Locate back-link opportunities for your niche and make recommendations for Link Bait
vbRepair
- Fix any code or database errors on your vB Site
vbCustomize
- Hacks custom-programmed for your site

You can see a short list of our Past Clients; we also have several Testimonials listed on the forum. Email me and as much detail as you can give, I’ll then be able to estimate the amount of time for the job.

*I’ve picked up a full time job and will be sending job request to our vBulletin Services section on the forum*

Everyone knows that with good SEO you’ll have links coming in. What most people don’t know is that great SEO has links going out as well! Getting as many links coming in is good, but you’ll also want to show that you aren’t only getting in links, and you’re giving a little link love out yourself.

Building a good linking network can be beneficial for all the sites involved. Most the time you’ll exchange link A for Link B. This is fine and dandy but if you can make it more then that and get a little linking party going on you’re going to win. Give up a link or two on your site to link A and in return Link A links to link C and then link C returns your links back to you. This is known as a 3 way link trade and it works wonders for your link building networks.

Linking to relevant niche sites will also help your SEO. For example if you run a sports site, throwing a link to ESPN or CNNSports is a good idea, and you won’t lose anything from it!

Making A Ton of Money Online: The Various Methods

There is a ton of cash to be made online and there are several methods to choose from. From being an affiliate of a website to putting your money into an online bank?s money market account, there are tons of ways to make a good amount of cash online.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular methods of online revenue for millions of people. Simply defined, affiliate marketing is referring people to a certain website or store and receiving commission based on what they purchase at the given website. From selling travel packages to cell phone plans, affiliate marketing is taking the internet by storm. Many new and innovative players coming into the affiliate marketing world are creating eBay and Amazon affiliate store whereby they receive commission by selling others products on eBay or generally selling products that are listed on Amazon?s website. They simply put up a website, find their products they want to sell, and add some HTML code to their websites and being to sell products.

Another popular method to making money online is to create your own website and sell advertising space based on the number of webpages and visitors. These advertisements can be pop-up or banner ads, or even selling simple links on your website that help generate traffic to the link that was purchased. Many people start websites simply to make money off of advertising with banners and pop-up advertisements. Based on your website?s popularity, you can make upwards of a few thousand dollars per month selling advertisement space.

Would you like to work from home? Well you can! Many telemarketing companies hire work at home agents to take inbound or outbound calls from their main call center. You simply do your training and download their call software and being to work from home. Many television shopping networks outsource their sales department to work at home agents. You can expect to make anywhere from $0.15-0.45 per minute and extra commission for up-selling products along with the initial purchase. Also, some of the major airlines hire work at home agents who can take all sorts of reservations and travel information in a quick and timely manner.

Don?t be limited to just these few suggestions of how to make money online, there are a limitless amount of methods to make money and new ones are popping up every day. By simply searching the major search engines, you can find ways to get paid for phone calls, taking surveys, completing offers, testing our products and submitting your reviews, and others of methods. Some of the fun ways are to play poker, bingo, or backgammon for real cash if you?re a skilled and experienced player. Online poker is not available is some countries so be sure to check with your local province to see if it is allowed. There are free methods to play online poker and still receive cash and prizes for your winnings.

While some current Administrators and owners say that it’s too late to get into the world of forums, I don’t think it is any reason to stop people from starting a Forum at all.

There are plenty of forums out there that are matured and are behemoths creating tons of money for their owners as well as tons of new threads, posts, and registrations daily. Then there are the newer forums that don’t have quite the same strength in the search engines, pagerank or other positives that are some keys to success in the web world but have positives in their own right.

Many of the larger forum owners will say to “don’t bother”, “don’t waste your time, you wont get anywhere”, “all the markets for forums are flooded” comments or something similar. To that I say bullshit. I dove into one of the most saturated automotive niches with my F-Body site, but I did it because I wanted to and it has worked out so far. No; I haven’t made millions, haven’t made it to the top of Google (not completely true-I do have a few #1 Firebird Rankings), or anything of the sort. However, I am having fun and gaining a solid group of members on my site that I feel makes it a great place to be, even without the size and strength of an LS1tech or CamaroZ28 forum.

I?m sure there are some people who wonder why I’m stating my opinion when my largest site is a 600 member Camaro Forums and Firebird Forums. THAT is exactly why I do what I do. I plan on succeeding and don’t care if someone else is above me in Google. I’d love to be at the top of any search engine, but with my Forum being 1 year old that is a hard feat to conquer in any market, especially automotive.

It’s very true that one of the most important parts of a forum is its activity. I am constantly trying to find new ways to stir up more threads and posts for my current users, as well as add new registrations. That is where time comes in. I will not make a blog sitting here telling you the “Quick Fix” on how to get tons of registrations and posts on your forum because they are too good to be true. Time is a great asset to your forum, so sit back, enjoy your young days, let your forum grow older and wiser, and don’t let other people tell you otherwise.

If you’re a beginner in Forums, check our the Forums For Beginners series I’ve started.? I’ll be adding more of my insights I’ve just recently learned from building a new forum in a very competitive niche.

If you’ve been using MySQL database to store your important data, it is imperative that you make a backup of your data to prevent any loss of data. This article shows you how to backup and restore data in your MySQL database. This process can also be used if you have to move your data to a new server.

Backing up your database

The quickest and easiest way to backup and restore your database would be to use MySQLDump. If you’ve got shell or telnet access to your server, you can backup MySQL data by issuing the mysqldump command. The syntax for the command is as follows.

mysqldump -u [uname] -p [pass] [dbname] > [backupfile.sql] [uname] – this is your database username [pass]- this is the password for your database [dbname] – the name of your database [backupfile.sql] – the filename for your database backup

To backup your database ‘Customers’ with the username ’sadmin’ and password ‘pass21′ to a file custback.sql, you would issue the command

mysqldump -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers > custback.sql

Issuing this command will backup the database to custback.sql. This file can be copied to a safe location or a backup media and stored. For more information on MySQLDump, you can check out : http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/mysqldump.html

Restoring your database

If you have to re-build your database from scratch, you can easily restore the mysqldump file by issuing the following command. This method will not work if the tables already exist in your database.

mysql – u sadmin -p pass21 Customers < custback.sql

If you need to restore existing databases, you’ll need to use MySQLImport. The syntax for mysqlimport is

mysqlimport [options] database textfile1

To restore your previously created custback.sql dump back to your Customers Database, you’d issue

mysqlimport -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers custback.sql

For more information on MySQLImport, you can check out : http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/mysqlimport.html

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Domain name Servers (DNS) are an important but invisible part of the internet, and form one of the largest databases on it. Each machine on an internet is assigned a unique address, called an IP address, which is 32 bit number and is expressed as 4 octets. The method user to represent these IP addresses is known as dotted decimal Notation”. A typical address looks like this: 199.249.150.4

It is very difficult to keep in mind the IP addresses of all the websites we visit daily, because it’s not easy to remember strings of numbers. However, we do remember words. This is where domain names come into the picture. If you want to connect to a particular site, you need to know its IP address but do need to know its URL. The DNS gets the mappings of the IP addresses and the corresponding names.

Names and numbers

DNS converts the machine names (such as www.xyz.com) to IP addresses (such as 199.249.150.9). Basically, it translates from a name to an address and from an address to a name.

The mapping from the IP address to the machine name is called reverse mapping .when you type http://www.xyz.com into your browser, the browser first needs to get the IP address of www.xyz.com. The machine uses a directory service to look up IP addresses and this service is called DNS. When you type www.xyz.com your machines firsts contacts a DNS server, asking it to find the IP address for www.xyz.com. This DNS server might then contact other DNS servers on the internet. DNS is therefore is considered as the global network of servers. The great advantage of DNS is that no organization is responsible for updating it. It is what is known as distributed database.

The three letter codes

A DNS server is just a computer that’s running the DNS software. The most popular DNS software is BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) DNS is hierarchical, tree-structured system. The top is donated by’.’. And is known as the root of the system. Below the root there are seven immediate sub domain nodes and these are ‘com’, ‘org’, ‘gov’, ‘mil’, ‘net’, ‘edu’, ‘Int’, etc.

DNS consists of two components

Nameserver
Resolver
Nameserver:

This performs the task of looking up the names. Usually, there is one nameserver for a cluster of machines. If the nameserver does not contain the requested information, it will contact another nameserver. But it is not required for every server to know how to contact every other server. Every nameserver will know how to contact the root nameserver, and this in turn will know the location of every authoritative nameserver for all the second level domains.

Resolver:

This runs on a client machine to initiate DNS lookups. It contains a list of nameservers to use. As we have read, the function of each of these nameservers is to resolve name queries. There are three types of nameservers-primary nameserver, secondary nameserver, and caching nameserver. The secondary nameservers are configured for backup purposes. Caching nameservers only resolve name queries but do not maintain any DNS database files. It is important to note here that any change to primary nameservers needs to be propagated to secondary nameservers. This is because primary nameservers own the database records. The changes are propagated via a ‘zone transfer’.

HOW ‘CACHING”WORKS

DNS uses principle of ‘caching’ for its operation. When a nameservers receives Information about a mapping, it caches this information .further queries for the same mapping will use this cached result, thereby reducing the search cost. The nameservers don’t cache forever. The caching has a component called time to live (TTL) and the TTL determines how long a server will cache a piece of information. So when the nameservers caches receive an IP address, it receives the TTL with it. The nameserver caches the IP address for the period of time then discards it.

When a process needs to determine an IP address given a DNS address, it calls upon the local host to resolve the address. This can be done in variety of ways:

Table look up. On UNIX hosts, the table is /etc/hosts.

The process communicates with a local nameservers. This is named on a UNIX system.

By sending a massage to the remote system that is identified from the information in the file/etc/resolve.conf.

When a nameserver receives a query for a domain that is does not serve, it may send back a referral to the client by specifying better nameservers. Typically operate in the recursive manner wherein any DNS server passes requests it cannot handle to higher level server and so on, until either the request can be handled or until the root of the DNS name space is reached.

The nameservers contain pointers to other nameserver with the help of which it is possible to traverse the entire domain naming hierarchy. A host with the initial nameserver addresses has to be configured. After this, it is able to use DNS protocols to locate the nameserver responsible for any part or the DNS naming hierarchy.

Thus when a nameserver receives a request, it can do one of the following:

It can answer the request with an IP address. This method is called iterative. In this, the client simply asks the server to resolve a domain name. The server accesses its database, finds its IP address and sends that back. If the server does not find the address, it sends back an error ;DNS not found’). Contact another nameserver and try to find the IP address for the requested name. Send back a referral to the client specifying the IP address of better nameservers.

A popular user interface, called ‘nslookup’is available on the UNIX system. With this, you can perform any DNS function. This program also displays the result to the user. Using is nslookup, you can obtain a listing of all the hosts in a zone. In order to do this, you first need to identify the nameserver for the zone.

The threats that are associated with the DNS are due to the lack of integrity and authenticity checking of the data held within the DNS. Also, other protocols can use host names as an access control mechanism. The internet engineering task force (IETF) has come up with DNS security (DNSSEC) extensions to DNS protocol. The main objective to DNSSEC is to provide authentication and integrity to the DNS. These are provided through the use of cryptographic’

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Sending out link requests is a time-consuming business. So wouldn’t it be wonderful if other sites linked to you without being asked?

Sound impossible? Well, it can be done and here are ten strategies to prove it. Why not start 2006 by making sure you use them?

In a link building campaign, you have to find target Web sites in the first place, review them to decide if asking for a link is worthwhile, identify the contact person and send them a customized link request. If you can do all that in 15 minutes per request, you’ll be doing very well. On that timing, you’ll be able to send out 160 requests in a 40 hour week and with a success rate of say 10%, you’ll get 16 links for your efforts.

Perhaps there is a better way to spend those 40 hours.

Sometimes the best way to get links is not to ask for them. That doesn’t mean you should sit back, do nothing and wait for links to appear. Spend time creating content and making your site as attractive and easy to link to as possible. There are lots of things you can do to build your link popularity without sending out link requests.

Here are some suggestions:

• Make it clear on your own Web site that you want links – ask for them directly and make it easy for people to link by writing the linking code for them (using keyword phrases in linking text of course). Explain why it will help: ?If you’ve found this site useful, please link to us so that others can benefit.?
• Play an active part in online discussion groups and forums. Not only will you learn, but you’ll become known and will spot the movers and shakers – and if your people post good opinions and helpful advice, people will link to you.
• Publish a regular newsletter and republish the content on your Web site. Encourage people to link by asking, ?if you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, you can link to the permanent version at (insert URL).?
• Publish articles on other Web sites – ezines, information sites, media sites, even article banks. This works well. You can find sites to submit articles to by doing a Google search, e.g. – intitle:?submit an article? business – this produces over 1,000 results. Spend time looking for niche ezines and newsletters that serve your market, scan the type of content they publish and adapt your writing to their style.
• Create an interactive tool. My favourite of old was ‘The longevity text’. You answered about 20 questions and the tool predicted at what age you would be likely to die. Irresistible – I still remember that my prediction was 83. The test was designed and published by an insurance company – could they have been trying to sell me a pension? A little bit of creativity in thinking about such tools will be time well spent and a good programmer will be able to create a tool in just a few hours.
• Create great content. (OK, it’s an old trick, but it still works.) Just keep publishing great stuff. One of the best at this is search engine marketer and prolific writer Jill Whalen. Her weekly newsletter from http://www.high rankings.com is a model of consistency and genuine value to her many thousands of readers.
• Submit your Web site to legitimate award sites. Mike Corso’s Cool Site of the Day, http://www.coolsiteoftheday.com is a must together with any others you can find. You’d be surprised at how high your chances of success are.
• Praise and link. When you find genuinely useful resources, write a short, complementary review together with a link. Then publish on your Web site and click on it just to make sure it ends up in your target’s referrer logs. Larry Chase of Web Digest for Marketers publishers a monthly newsletter that reviews about 10 Web Site Resources – you’ll find it at http://www.wdfm.com. A few days later he writes to each reviewed site and allows them to quote his comments in return for a link.
• Become a source of quotes. Provide sharp, useful, timely quotes for the media. You can get yourself known and you’ll find journalists will seek you out. Sign up for services such as http://www.prleads.com ($99 per month) or the premium priced http://www.sourcewire.com (?1,200 per annum).
• Volunteer to become an editor for several directories. You’ll be able to submit reviews of your own sites and you’ll have opportunities to get to know your market better – that inevitably leads to more linking opportunities. Go beyond the obvious – as well as http://www.dmoz.org, try http://www.joeant.com, http://www.skaffe.com, and http://www.web-beacon.com.

Sometimes we can get too wrapped up in sending out link requests. Stepping back and thinking of some creative ways to get people to link without being asked will be time well spent. Following these simple steps could increase your SERPs dramatically and get more traffic flowing to your sites

Updating vBulletin Skins

This is the part of updating a vBulletin forum that I never look forward too. I seen a tool posted in the forums called WinMerge, I can see how it would be helpful updating skins if I had another monitor of just more desktop space.

I’ll quickly go over what I do to update a vBulletin skin and the templates, maybe it well help a few out who don’t have a clue what’s involved in updating their skins. If anyone has a better way to update a style, or maybe some tips using WinMerge or another application, please share with us.

Okay, here goes…

The first step would be going to your admin panel. This will be the admin link in your footer, or go to yoursite.com/forums/admincp/index.php… If you have changed the name of your admin panel, you’ll go to the appropriate URL. From the admin panel main page, you’ll see something in the right section that says “Out-of-Date Custom Templates Found!” with a link under this text.

After you click this link you will see all the templates and the skins that need updated. For this example I’m going to update the footer template on a test skin that we have up for testing. You’ll want to navigate to the right of the template that you want to update. Click on “[View History]“

The History of Template shows the template if you clicked revert, and your current template.

Clicking on Compare Version will get you a screen like this.

At this point, I’ve already made a copy of the whole skins XML file in case I mess up the styles.

I’ll also open up notepad and make a copy of the old style, lease this ^ window open and I’ll open up the styles manager again so I can edit the old style added the bits of code from the new one. It’ll usually take me a time of two to get everything added and working, but that’s the basics on updating a vBulletin Skins..

Tips on Writing an Effective Newsletter

I saw a request in the forums for a little tutorial on writing an effective newsletter, so I thought I would give it a shot.

I’ll spend a day or two writing and putting together the pieces our vBulletinSetup Newsletter. Articles and written and rewritten after thought of the whole layout may change with some event or special that we have to get out in the newsletter. I try to remove all spelling and grammatical errors and usually try to get a staff member or two to look over it before posting it live. Our newsletter page is a little out of alignment at the moment, but in the emails they look great. I guess I’ll just start listing off some tips and we’ll see how this goes.

• Always keep your audience in mind: For obvious reasons, all the content in the newsletter is directly related to vBulletin news, vBulletinSetup news. This can work with any niche, if your site is about ford mustangs, then post the latest news in regards to that car.
• Email newsletters should be simple: If you are pushing out an email newsletter, you should try to keep it as simple as possible. Don’t put many images in the email and use all text. Your content should speak for itself, when I do add images, I try to make them very small in compared to the text.
• Take your time composing the newsletter: As I started above, it takes me a few days to actually put together the newsletter.
• Only publish the best: This is where I’m lacking a bit. I’m lucky enough to have a wife in advertising and plenty of members that will look over our newsletter. This really should be the #1 goal in a newsletter.
• The newsletter must be readable: Don’t stuff 20 full stories in your newsletters, no one will read past the first sentence before deleting the email. I will post a snippet then link to the full story in the forums.
• Choose the lead stories carefully: This is your “front page” if you are thinking like it’s a newspaper. You only want to post the stores that will be attractive to the largest number of people.
• Build up the newsletter: In the beginning a newsletter will most likely be very simple, a few lead stories , some short news, and then a message from the admin. As your publication grows, you can add some featured stores, banners or columns to split the page up, rss feeds even for other news sites in regards to your niche.
• Include the source: Our newsletter is full of links back to the stories in the forums.
• Use catchy captains in the title: This is something I don’t take advantage of, but I need to start. This is your first impression on the member reading your newsletter. If the title is boring, it will most likely be deleted.
• Ask your readers what they think: Ask your readers what they think of your newsletter. They are the reason you post them aren’t they? This is a great way to find bugs that you may not see.
• Offer incentives for newsletter writers: I tossed this in here because this is something we have been doing on our blog. You may have noticed a few more authors other then myself lately. bdude, David and Blake have been helping out with the blog post. This would also work for newsletter, to get a collaborative process for a better product.
• Don’t sacrifice look for readability: You don’t want so many banners, tables and columns on the newsletter that it makes it hard to read. Keep it simple.
• Enjoy the praise: Once we started getting threads of users saying “great newsletter” and “thanks for sending” I knew I was up to something good.

A well written newsletter can generate a great deal of traffic, always try to improve your issues and don’t forget to ask for user feedback. I’m trying to think of a few more tips, I’m a bit stumped right now. This should be a good start.

If you have a news letter, I’d love to see a link to it. Seeing what’s working for other people would really be appreciated.

cheers

-Brandon @ vBulletin Setup

Hello all again. I thought today I would write about how one can use Google Analytics to make more money with your advertising.

If you don,t know by now, Analytics is a free traffic tracking service from Google. It gives you loads of information on where you traffic is coming from, and where it is going. But, it is the best tool for increasing advertising revenue I have ever seen.

But, before we get into that you must learn two terms. The first being bounce rate. The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page. In contrast, the Bounce Rate for a website is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a website per session divided by the total number of website visits. Basically it tells you which pages on your site keep your traffic flowing. The lower the bounce rate, the better the page is at keeping people’s interest in your site.

The second term which I am sure everyone knows is Unique Visits. A Unique Visit presents a single, unique viewer who has visited a web site within a specified time period. Now that you know what they are, lets explain how they can help you make more money.

I mean it is rather simple, using this information you can target the pages on your site that get the most traffic. And because Analytics keeps such nice stats, it is very easy to figure out which pages do this. Though, some people think the most viewed page is the best place for ads, but that is not always true. This is where these two terms come into play. Many times your most viewed page is not your most Uniquely viewed page. You may get 1000 views on your index page, but then Analytics tells you they were only 25 unique views. But, on another page on your site your getting 400 views and they are 220 unique views. Which means this other page is getting more people than the index. And then their me be other pages with very low bounce rates, that keep your visitors viewing. I am not saying this is an exact science, but it can help you make money. After targeting the pages with the most views and best bounce rates, I have seen about a 65% increase in revenue from advertising.

So, in closing if you don’t have Analytics, get it. Also, before I go I know a vast majority of you out there use Vbulletin. If you do and are wondering where to stick your Analytics code, just edit your footer template and place it at the very bottom. This is the optimal place to put it, as it will not increase page load. Also, if you are looking for more helpful vbulletin information, please check out Vbulletin Setup. Well, as always I hope in some way I have helped the masses. So have a good day and take care.

Blake2181
Cooking Junkies

I spotted a new site on the wire today, Cross Browser Testing; it is a site that helps you test your website across a variety of different operating systems and browsers.

Whilst there are services like Browsershots that let you take screenshots of your site in different browsers, Cross Browser Testing provides you with full interactivity, allowing you to test things like AJAX and JavaScript that you can’t do with a screenshot.

Cross Browser Testing provides a very wide variety of servers to choose from, from Windows 98(!) to Vista and Linux; and many browsers including Internet Explorer, Opera and Netscape.

I played around with the free 5 minute trial session available, and it seems like a really good option for those who need to test their sites in many different environments.

Here’s a screenshot of the vBS blog in Opera:

Hello, I thought I would write today about keeping your website happy. A website is just like a person. And if it is a happy website, then everyone who visits will be happy. I know this doesnt make much since but allow me to explain. There are things that make a website happy, at least in my eyes:

1. No Downtime
2. Lots of new content
3. Making money
4. Friendly people who understand this is someone’s baby

No Downtime

The most important thing is your hosting. Because if your site is not up, then its not happy. You spend all these hours putting together this nice new site you can be proud of, but then you surf to it and its down. This can be a very frustrating thing. So, what do you do? You contact your host, but they don’t seem to care as much as you do. Then, you have to take all this time trying to find a new host. It’s just a big headache.

So how do you know whats a good host?

Well here are a couple things you should look at:

1. Support(Google them and check out all the reviews on sites like Vbulletin Setup )
2. The price(You always get what you pay for)
3. The word Unlimited(If they use this for bandwidth or space, find a better host)
4. Their uptime(Use online tools such as Host Tracker)

New Content

Well this is fairly straight forward. You must have new content. Content is what keeps everyone coming. Its what brings those precious little bots. So how do you get it? Well it takes effort. Now some people use feeds, but that content is not very original are genuine is it? I would think not. So you have to get people to the site and get them to post or the dreaded do it yourself method. But, If you want to keep your site happy. You have to do what it takes.

1. Good staff(don’t pick lazy people)
2. Time and Effort(You have to keep that baby happy and feed it)
3. Anything goes(Come up with original ideas and ways to put new stuff on your site)

Making Money

So you have a happy site, but its costing you money. Now you are not a happy owner. Time to make some money. Most people go to adsense way as its very effective and can easily pay for the hosting. But what if your site is too big? Well you have to get sponsors. So bust that hump and hustle. Thats the best way to make money Hustle Hustle and Hustle some more.

1. Advertise(Adsense, adbrite, clicksor, …etc)
2. Sell a service(This is a little more time consuming and takes some upkeep, but good idea)
3. Sell space(Sell some space on your site and get them sponsors)
4. Contests(Raffle something off, or come up with a prize or something)
5. Anything goes(Think outside the box, come up with ideas, maybe the next big idea)

Friendly Good People

I know this sounds silly, but its important. Advertise to people who agree with your views and ideals of your site. The more people with the same interest, the less chance of conflict. So if your niche is Apples, advertise to apple people not orange people. I know most people will sell all advertising is good advertising, but thats not true. If you advertise to 500,000 people who like oranges, how does that help your apple site? It doesn’t. So take the time to target you audience and not waste time and effort. Also, never ever play favorites with your members. This creates conflict and factions within your happy site. This is not gang warfare. Its your happy site and you are God. You created it. So nurture your creation and protect it from everyone and everything, including itself. Be a good parent and you will go far. And your site will be happy.

1. Advertise to right people(Don’t waste money on wrong people)
2. Keep everyone in check(Don’t let them disobey and break rules)
3. Make sure your a good parent(Feed your site and keep it happy)

In closing I hope you understand my cute yet informative post on a happy site. I know its silly, but sometimes you can have a little fun while your being serious. Anyway, I hope I least made enough sense for you want to read it all and learn. Well time for me to hit the dusty trail. And to all a good site.

Blake2181

Cooking Junkies