Week of code

April 24th, 2007
By Noah (news)

This week, my wife will be out of state for about 4 days of training. Other than going to work each day and assuring the dogs and cat survive, I am pretty much only responsible for myself during that time. Because of this, I’m planning to spend all my extra time on some intensive web development projects that are always being put off for other things (not because of my wife, mind you, just stuff I never have time for).

So, I find myself digging through the good ol’ idea bucket looking for a few projects (old and new) I might want to either knock-out or put a big dent in. Here are a few of the ideas I’m considering working on next week:

blogINDIANA.com

blogINDIANA was originally created to be a directory of local bloggers as well as to compile recent posts and display them in interesting ways (by city/region, topic, etc.). It did that–for a while–so in a sense, it was successful. The site went through a couple redesigns and I eventually started playing with WordPress MU and offered people the ability to create their own blog on the site. A handful of bloggers eventually did so with only 3-4 posting regularly.

Unfortunately, spam blogs (or splogs) started growing at an intense rate. There are hundreds and hundreds of splogs on blogINDIANA right now–most from China for some reason. So, there is a lot of housecleaning that needs to be done.

I’m still trying to decide if I want to continue offering blog hosting. I thought it would be more popular than it was. At a minimum, I’d like to restore blogINDIANA’s directory of local bloggers since that always seemed to be a popular part of the site. This time, I want to include more meta information about each blog such as city and zip code, subject tags, etc.

SitePing.com

Here’s a fun idea that I had to create a web service that sent me an email if any of my websites went down. It’s definitely been done before. However, I just wanted a simple service (without tons of useless features) that would let me know about my client’s site being down before my client did.

It just so happens that I found an auction for the domain name SitePing.com at TDNAM.com (which I’m addicted to). I won the darn thing for $10 (plus 1-year’s registration @ ~$9) and felt warm and fuzzy all over. I’ve put a little bit of time into the site and it’s even “open” for business. It currently pings your website about once every 20 minutes and if it fails enough times to trip the threshold you’ve set, you get a friendly warning email.

I recently had the idea to track SEO-related stats for each website such as Google PageRank, backlinks, Alexa rank, etc. I don’t have this feature finished, although most of these stats are currently being recorded in the database on a daily basis for all sites (so when I add it, my dozen or so users will have some back-data to look at). I’ve even experimented with a teaser interface that lets you grab all that SEO data on the fly from the front page (check it out here–this link isn’t published anywhere else). I’ve had problems getting it to reliably work–I even thought I’d been blocked by Google for a time, but it seems to work most of the time as of now.

So… SitePing needs some major refinement and perhaps narrowing of focus (perhaps I should skip “site monitoring” and go for “seo monitoring” instead). Plenty of sites offer SEO stats, but I don’t know of any that let you track those stats over time like SitePing does/will.

IndyDads.com

This is actually quite an exciting prospect of a website. I can go into how I came to run this site another time, but it’s a big ball of potential. It’s basically an online community of local dads that provides interesting articles written by other local dads, resources, discussion, etc. It’s a small community now, but with some care I hope to grow it quite a bit.

Other than some regular advertising (which it badly needs), I have a laundry list of features and improvements to make. Some examples are a robust events calendar, possibly a classifieds system, and I have a few interesting ideas on mashing-up some publicly available data from the State of Indiana that local fathers might find interesting.

Right now, the best part of this slow-but-steadily growing site are the quality contributors I’ve managed to get on-board. Really, check out some of the writing on the site. There are some great articles and, so far, content is really king on IndyDads.

A surprise

If you’ve read this far, I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve already been working on another great idea and will be ready to make it public in the next couple days. All I’ll say is that it relates to WordPress and I’m hoping that the WordPress community will find it very useful. More on this very soon. Shoot me an email and I’ll give ya the scoop before I unveil it.

That’s all for now. Apart from some client work and perhaps another idea at the bottom of the bucket I’m too tired to think about right now, I should be quite busy this week. Hopefully, I’ll be very productive and actually finish some of these ideas I keep having.

One Response

Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Selling my domain names for a new laptop | wpstar.com

[...] Read this article for more information. Not in a hurry to part with this website. I have a few more feature ideas in the works. However, for the right price, I might part with it. [...]