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 forums and other articles on this site 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 sites by hand. Where they spend 3 hours a day updating portions of their site, I may spend 30 minutes or less. My content posting 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 content that I like. I can either change what the poster entered or leave their information on the page. My script rotates the page at the same time everyday, I even have a countdown to when it will be updated, along with the number of updates coming. The script checks all the content throughout the day for bad links and will remove them automatically. All the variables are customizable, from the number of submissions to display on the page to how many submissions one person can make.

A very common script that was developed several years ago is a traffic trade script. In the old days of running free 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 traffic 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, traffic trade scripts are very useful and should always compliment a webmaster's site.

Top-list scripts are quickly falling out of sight. Rightfully so, since the traffic trade scripts allow a webmaster to do more customization on a site. Some useful top lists display the top 10 trades a site has to entice other webmasters to trade with you. Some traffic 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 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" sections 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 who 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, but also help 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. Use this with a good content rotation system and your site will appear to be constantly updated.