Webmaster Tips & Tricks - The Webmaster’s Blog

I had some issues with Talking about Movies, my movie discussion forums. I was .. let’s say .. lazy … for some time and got the forums into quite a spammers heaven. Till I just said to myself .. we need to do something about this. And that I did.

As I already mentioned on this topic Prevent SPAM on phpBB … excellent topic in the main forums here .. there are some mods to be installed to keep the bots and human spammers away. I installed some, cleaned the member base and censored some words, plus banned some email extensions: .biz, .info, .org, .ws and some others. I know it’s a bit too “tough” on some legit members, but most of my normal members use gmail or a .com email address. And most my spammers used the extensions I banned, so in the end it’s not that bad.

I am working now on the header links (as you can see now, as I write this) there are some weird looking buttons, but they are in work and will change. I am pretty pleased with the way the forums look now and I will keep on adding new topics on a daily basis. And I also started posting some more into some related forums to get some more traffic.

Few days ago I bragged about how many things I’ll do and how organized I’ll be. The good thing is that list of “to do” stuff is really useful since I can see where I need to work more and I can write down what I need to change and my ideas. When you’re having as many sites as I do, you tend to forget a lot of things.

Bad thing is that I didn’t follow that list as I wanted to. It looks like it’s a bit too “hard” for me to do this while also going to my regular job and sleeping. But weekends are the time I can catch up with a lot of “not done yet’ things.

My latest distraction from the work itself are the 2 blogs I created on blogspot. I have one, a personal blog if you want to call it, named My (daily?) rants and one for the game I play online, Travian, called Travian Tips & Tricks.

For the last 2 days I neglected anything just to write in them. It’s quite nice doing this, but I think I need to take back that list and do the things I have too, while also keeping my readers happy with the blogs

Well, we made it to 2007. Time to recover from the parties (those who attended them) and start planning for the future. I had a good 2006, I have to admit it and I hope 2007 will be as good as the previous year, if not better

Yesterday the new webmasters project was “officially launched”. Invatam Net brings a lot of the Wtricks.com information and resources to the Romanian web developers who might find it hard to read all these articles in English. The site is running flawlessly so far and we started translating some of the articles posted in here. I had 2 members help with the translations already, so maybe in few weeks we can have them all.

Yesterday and the day before yesterday I celebrated the New Year by working. I lost the domain linksforwebdesign.com few days ago and re-newed it. But I lost the site (well I have it on the computer, but wanted to work more on the layout). So I recreated the layout and placed a new script on it. Works OK now. I have to index a lot of links into it and also promote it.

Plans for 2007?

Maybe if I could be more organized. I want to have a “schedule” for web design work, and try to fit it in my normal job schedule. My plans would be something like this:

1. 5 new posts/day on each forum (I have 10, so it’s gonna take some time)

2. 20 links/day on Martial Art Links and Links for Web Design

3. 5 sub-quests/day written for Morrowind.ro

4. 1 article translated every 2 days from Wtricks to Invatam Net

5. 1 article/week posted on wtricks (then translated)

6. 1 article/month posted on Dojo

7. All the administrative chores: upgrades, theme redesigns, programs done when I can (that’s gonna be tough)

If I was able to keep on this schedule I think I might have better results than before… but it takes a lot of work and in the end … it’s not my full time job. I’ll keep you posted