Well, I haven't been around in awhile. I've been lurking around the dark corners of the boards, but I've been keeping my head down and getting work done.
Now that I have completed a bunch of tasks, I thought it would be a good time to launch my portal project. I'm not sure how many part's it will take to complete, but I will continue to answer questions in this thread until they stop
So why use a portal?
Well, this is my story... I'm a web guru who has been around since the late 80's playing on the internet (well, the early version of the net). I kinda bombed out on the first .com boom because I was more interested in college fun than work, and missed the boat.
I decided in 2003 to enter the adult market, but after about a year, I still was working way more than money going into my pocket. I decided it was time to diversify, so I started doing web design as a side business, and continued to play with internett marketing.
I've spent time on the phone with Sleazy Bear, I've talked to hundreds of other webmasters and I've learned just about everything I needed to know to make a living. I just wasn't interested in building 2 galleries and a free-site every day. My graphic design skills are pretty sharp for a hobby, but not really good enough to be an efficent professional, so by the time I did the building, submitting and emailing, I was burning out quick and not seeing much in return. I decided it was time to venture out on my own, and see where I end up doing business.
I started off selling bongs on the internet, and thats when I found XML feeds from sponsors. It was great, I just built a page utilizing an XML parser, did a quick php template and bang I had a store with 3000 items.
I loved it, I started to see almost instant profit and never had to worry about updating it. I just checked for hacking attempts, and stats.
I thought "Wow, my other sponsors are way behind the rest of the industry". So I made the decision to expand. I focused on the bong and smoking accessory market and continued to grow.
Just as it was looking like a descent part-time job fund, the Harper government was elected here in Kanuckistan (Canada for the rest of ya
). I knew crack downs on the retailers of pot related accessories would happen, so I shut down immediately.
I decided that it was better to sit back and wait for my other sponsors to catch up. In the meantime I started playing with content managment systems. XOOPS, PHPNuke, DruPal, WordPress and countless others were installed, tested, and dumped. None of them would allow me to mold a site. Instead they were designed for specific types of sites.
Finally I decided I would try the one with the weird ass name, Joomla. At first I was really confused. This wasn't just a CMS... it was a WOS! (Web Operating System)
I hated how other systems had either no SEF functionallity (Search Engine Friendly URL's), had no ability to mold a front end properly (XHTML, CSS, and W3C validity) and just wouldn't work.
Joomla allowed me to do all these things, in a matter of hours instead of weeks. I was really impressed so I put up a couple of portals, installed some addon SEF components and started adding content.
Boy, I missed those XML feeds. So I searched around and found that finally sponsors were offering somewhat functional XML feeds, so I found Joomla components to manipulate those feeds to get my links to my surfers.
Thats when I discovered that you could take that XML feed, import it directly into your database and make a page dedicated to it. I started adding in both feeds from sponsors and from news sources. Suddenly, I was adding 1000 pages to my network per day. All with the nice URL of
http://whatever.com/buy-my/trinkets/...endly_url.html
Ok, that done, lets see what google thinks.
Well, here a year later, as of today I have 12,000 from just one domain in google's index, and around 16,000 in Yahoo!'s index.
Now, I'm going to teach you all how to do the same thing. When we've finished it will take approximately 10 minutes per day to run each site. With-in 6 months of 10 minutes work per day you will have around 10,000 pages done. Give it a year, and add more RSS feeds in, and you can have even more.
Not to mention if you want to change sponsors, banner ads, link trades, etc, it only takes a minute to affect the change, site wide.
I've posted part 1 here:
http://paperjam.ca/news/notices/robs....html?Itemid=1
I would have posted the whole tutorial here, but the images were causing me stress.
Anyhow... questions?