Over the last few weeks, I've been doing a lot of work testing blogs and RSS feeds. As part of that research, I've been building some test websites to see how the tools work together.
At 21st Century Small Business, I've been experimenting with the Webmax Studio site builder and I like it a lot. Even on this old slow Macintosh, it works great. I believe that even a beginner can put together a great website using their services. You can get a free 10-day trial (information on the bottom of every page of the site).
I've been working on that site to integrate RSS feeds from PRweb.com and other sites. I'll be adding integrated feeds from some of my blogs, blogs I recommend, news feeds, and other resources in the near future.
On 21st Century Webhosting, I've been working with the new version of WordPress (1.5) that can create both blog entries and stand-alone pages out of the blog chronological structure. I've been creating a number of pages targeted at specific subjects related to modern webhosting and I'm bringing in information from Amazon.com, Yahoo!, About.com, WikiPedia, and other sites. Most of the pages have a lot of dynamic content built using PHP and various feed processors. It's been an interesting experiment and I'm looking forward to building this site with more information as I have time.
On 21st Century Marketing Tools, I've been experimenting with using WordPress and a links program I licensed to store links to sites that I recommend and use in my marketing efforts. I'm not interested in exchanging links on this site -- the directory will be hand-built to point to sites I want to use myself and which may be useful to you, too.
Over the last half-year, or so, I've been working with PHP-Nuke on A Portal for Cherokee County, NC and on Dilbeck Communications. Because of all the time I've been devoting to experimenting with the new tools, I've fallen behind on updating all the sites -- and being sick for a few days and having to get my taxes together last week didn't help, either.
I like PHP-Nuke, but it can be intimidating to beginners and even experienced webmasters. It helps if you have a very good grounding in both HTML and PHP before customizing and extending PHP-Nuke, but I like the sites and the tools they offer and look forward to extending them in the future.
I've added an RSS newsfeed to my Forum on JohnDilbeck.com and I'll be syndicating it over several sites in the coming weeks. You can see an example of this syndication on the home page of JohnDilbeck.com. I'm looking forward to more conversations there and hope this will help introduce new visitors to the forum.
As much as I like PHP-Nuke, it doesn't do everything I want to do, so I've started a new site at Residual Income Gazette where I'll be talking only about creating residual income through online marketing. I've yet to finish customizing the installation, but I'm getting close. I look forward to adding content to the site over the coming months and I invite you to drop in and take a look around.
Between illness, thunderstorms, and probably too much experimentation on new websites for my own good, I've gotten behind on some of my correspondence, and I'm looking forward to catching up on all of that soon.
One of my primary goals for May and June is to add a considerable amount of content to A Year From Now -- Act on Your Dreams!. I have some good ideas on expanding the site in a new direction and I've been talking to an experienced editor and writer to take over the newsletter duties so we can participate more with our valued visitors. Even though the site has been neglected for a couple of months, it's attracting hundreds of new visitors every month and I look forward to working with Dennis to make the site grow into what we've been imagining and discussing.
In the meantime, I've signed up for over a dozen new blogging services and I like some of them and don't like others. When I have some time, I'm going to talk about them and then I'll discontinue the ones I don't like.
I've started at least two dozen blogs over the last few months so I could quickly get some experience with them, and more and more I'm liking WordPress over all the others. I'll probably be cancelling all but a half-dozen or so blogs so I can concentrate on writing about what I'm learning rather than spreading out so wide and learning as much as I can in a short period.
While I like WordPress more than the others I've tried, I also like Blogger and I'll continue developing several blogs there. Some, such as John Dilbeck Musings are hosted on Google's site, blogspot.com. Some, such as MurphyNC28906.com are managed by blogger, but the actual pages are FTPed to one of the servers I use for several of my other sites so that it's actually hosted on one of my domains. I'm doing this for several reasons, one of which is to see whether I get better natural search results using my own domain or letting Google host them for me for free. The jury's still out on this at this time.
One thing I've already noticed is that I get better search results on Yahoo and MSN than I do on Google when searching for keywords I use a lot on my blogs, such as "Murphy NC" (without the quotes in the search). I'm getting first page results on Yahoo, MSN, and Ixquick, but not always on Google. I'm not sure why, but I am very happy to see Yahoo and MSN giving Google come competition.
If you have any comments on any of this, I'd love to hear from you.
Context Tag: websites
7:41:09 AM 
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