| In
this segment, Jeff explains how to use CGI
scripts to automate the updating process,
freeing up your time to do something more
useful and less tedious. |
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Pre-article
Note: In the hosting business and in my own site enterprises,
I've run across hundreds of scripts that make life easier
for webmasters. Unfortunately, all the scripts on my own
sites have usually been programmed by myself and currently
are not for sale. This article will reference to scripts
that have certain uses on sites but will not name them
specifically as I don't know where to find most of them.
Please refer to the discussion on this article for help
finding them. I'll help you with the ones I'm familiar
with and I'm sure someone else can help you find all the
others.
To this day, I still have some friends that update
their thumbnail gallery posts by hand. Where they spend
3 hours a day updating just the gallery portion of their
site, I usually spend about 30 minutes. My tgp script
allows the posters to enter all the relevant information.
It automatically takes out all the duds and then I just
go through and approve the galleries that I like. I
can either change what the poster entered or leave their
information on the gallery (usually I end up changing
it). My script rotates the page at the same time everyday,
I even have a countdown to when it will be updated and
with how many galleries. The script checks all the galleries
throughout the day for bad links and will remove them
automatically. All the variables are customizable, from
the number of galleries to display on the page to how
many galleries one person can submit. All tgp owners
should have a quality script so they can stay busy on
other things.
A very common and rather new script is a traffic trade
script. In the old days of running free adult sites,
everyone had to watch their trades very carefully. If
not, someone could end up sending you about a quarter
of the hits you were sending them. This amounted to
a lot of time and plenty of wasted traffic. With a trade
script, the script will watch your trades for you and
make sure your hits are going where they should. Some
trades scripts have gotten a bad reputation because
of circle-jerking, but all-in-all, trade scripts are
very useful and should always compliment a webmaster's
site.
Top-list scripts are quickly falling out of site. Rightfully
so, since the trade scripts allows a webmaster to do
more customization on a site. Some useful top lists
are to display the top 10 trades a site has to entice
other webmasters to trade with you. Some trade scripts
come with this feature and it can be useful.
Content rotation scripts are not quite as common among
sites as many would think. A majority of the webmasters
out there today still do their content updates by hand.
I believe that forcing yourself into this routine of
waking up and immediately looking at porn and putting
it online can burn you out quickly. I prefer scripts
that allow me to upload an entire month of updates.
Then I can customize the script to rotate the content
out daily and even display "coming soon" galleries
and other nifty features. Since it usually takes me
about 12 hours to setup a month's updates, this can
be a one or two day job every month and then I don't
have to worry about it until next month. That is plenty
of time to have a vacation without sacrificing the quality
of the site.
Another extremely useful script to run on free sites
is a banner rotation/tracking program. There are plenty
of these available for free download. These scripts
track the productivity of certain banners based on the
amount of people that click on them. With a more-sophisticated
script, you can change out galleries and links on your
pages without having to edit the actual page. I like
using these scripts, they not only cut down the amount
of banner juggling I have to do with my html program,
it also helps give me a more accurate knowledge of which
banners perform.
Finally, some very easy additions to your site can
make last-updated dates post automatically. With almost
every web server, you can use SSI to show the last modified
date of any file on your site. Last modified dates are
very important on a site, surfers like to see that the
site is updated regularly. Using this with a good gallery
rotation and content rotation system and your site will
appear to be constantly updated.
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Jeff has been in the business since 1997. He is the President of Pulse Web Ventures, which owns many sites catering to both surfers and webmasters. These include Webmaster Joint, as well as XXX Storage, one of the Net's top web hosts. Feel free to Contact Him if you have any questions. |
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