Hosting Company Plaudits

Logoadz is hosted by AventureHost.com and I consider them one of the cheapest and best hosting companes around. Yes this is an unashamed plug. I thought that £190 a year ($300) giving me 7Gb of disk storage and 150GB of traffic per year was pretty good. Its a Linux server reseller account- with php, mysql, ftp access the works. I've just renewed and its now 20Gb of disk space, and 500GB of traffic a month. And their customer service is damn good. Chaps I think your service is brilliant. Richard and Ben- Respect! < / cringy stuff >

True story. I registered nocpz.org at 9.00 am one morning and using the reseller control panel added it to the server. The domain was live within 10 minutes and served its first page (just a holding page) by 9.10 am the same day The dns for .org domains seems to update fast. That also happened with another .org domain.

Fast ADSL and improved Alexa rating.

Its all change- a new ADSL provider and a new PC (coming). My Bulldog ADSL experience wasn't too bad in 2 years of service but Be (bethere.co.uk ) was a no brainer- they offered 12 x speed (from 2Mb to 24Mb!) and cheaper as well. I'm very impressed with Be- their router was preconfigured so little configuration as needed- just setting up a static IP.

The box from Be was very attractive as well- three cables (ADSL, USB and Ethernet) , microfilter etc. The speed the router is reporting is 20.5 Mb down and 1.3Mb up. So 10 x speed download improvement and 5 times up. Of course I suspect the rest of the internet doesn't really support this yet. It feels a bit snappier but not whizzy fast and late at night seems slower than the previous ADSL.

I have the firefox extension which shows Google Pagerank and Alexa rating for websites. I'm certain that it is this that has lowered my Alexa rating from 450,000 to 284,484 in two weeks. Another website I maintain is adamsandassocs.com and its Alexa rating has halved from 2 million + to 1 million plus over the same period.

I've been submitting LogoAdz.com to Google Site maps and after a week, it still hasn't returned any stats- I'd guess the script runs and craps outwith some kind of exception. One of the forms had problem validating with the W3c Validator- if I remove the form close tag it validates!Even there is only one opening form tag- very odd. I searched their errors and I think the validator is getting confused by the PHPSESSIONID rewriting that happens automatically- there are bugs relating to that which seem suggestive.

I haven't switched over to Boastology's Blog scripts yet- I think my rewrites for LogoAdz.com are messing up theirs. I've still not decided whether to revert to php with Get params like index.php?tag=Fred or stay my friendly rewrites /tag/fred/ From googles POV they apparently make no difference, though the rewrite I believe does a 301. Can anyone confirm this?

The mystery

So far as I know, no one has signed up yet Yet the Alexa score continues to drop (this is good). It was 542,850 at the weekend and is now 348,050. Clearly a long way to go but... its moving in the right direction.

A clarification. Originally I wanted link tracking to be transparent- if you did view source you'd see a href="xxxx">website on the view pages, with Ed Eliots javascript dynamically hooking in the onclick events behind the scene and running php increment counter script.

However I wimped out and went to a simple php redirection instead. Why? Well it depends on Javascript, and I had problems with IE 6.0. On some pcs it worked, on other it didn't. I couldn't find the enable/disable javascript checkbox anyway in the settings. And it occurred to me that that many offsite links might get my site classified as some kind of spam (I suppose it is- but its quite like link farms and FFA sites). Having t.php?u=http://xxx is less 'offsite linky'.

I'm not saying this is the final word- any comments welcome on this score. I can reinstate the javascript link tracking/clean urls in 15 mins - It uses the excellent code from both yahoo's javascript library and Ed Eliots link tracker btw.

And on and on it goes

I seem to be in the "last 10% takes 90%" of the effort. I've been adding Friendly URLs, (virtually every link on the site is now one of three formats

/tag/stuff - takes you to the image for the tag stuff
/view/stuff - shows you a page of links (in text format) for stuff.
/r/file - this runs file.php

Apache's .htaccess is quite pernickity. This is what I used for these.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/$ /r/main [PT,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/(.*)$ /index.php?tag=$1 [PT,L]
RewriteRule ^view/(.*)$ /index.php?view=$1 [PT,L]
RewriteRule ^r/(.*)$ /$1.php [PT,L]

I'm not sure about the first RewriteRule- it was an attempt to overcome when you go to logoadz.com - it shows logoadz.com/index.php in the address line.

Also added is sophisticated link tracking. Thanks to Ed Eliot for his code (BTW his brother is raising money for Bowel Cancer Research so if you feel like sponsoring- theres a link on Ed's site.)

The idea is that everytime someone clicks an external link, it increments a counter in the database table. Now the unsophisticated way is to have links look something like this

track.php?url=http://externallink.com and do a redirect to this url after updating the database.
The sophisticated way is to have the link as a normal link to http://externallink.com and when the page is loaded, javascript adds an onclick handler. When the link is clicked the javascript calls a php script (which returns a blank image which is never seen) then jumps to the url. It works great for html links but I'm trying to get it to work for html client side maps using area href="" and struggling a bit- I hate javascript!

Also now working is the automatic generation of google sitemap and yahoo urllist.txt files. These allow the site pages to be submitted to these two search engines in one easy go.

Almost There

Programmers rule of thumb- when it comes to working out how long it takes to do something- take your first guess, double it and add two. I suspect its the same principle involved when you try to figure out why your bank account has less cash in it than you believe. Easy to overlook something.

That said Logoadz is almost ready to roll. If you're reading this- you are?- good grief- welcome reader- please signup and upload a free ad. At the moment there is no size limitation so you can get a big ad placed but don't expect it to last forever. The site is live under logoadz.com, logoadz.co.uk and logoadz.net

Almost all the site functionality is in place. Image uploading, auto building of images- all adz are stored in a database and rebuilt every 30 minutes. This is done by a remote server which runs a special script, gets a list of all ads, then fetches any new images, builds the composite images and client maps then finally uploads it all. Still to do- the placement code for paid adz and intgration of paypal. What fun!

Yet Another Million Dollar Home Page?

Well Yes... and a bit more. Every web developer and their dog is having a go and that includes the HomeParking* team. I feel though that much of it is wasted as they concentrate on the technicalities not the marketing. The Marketing is what will make or break sites in this market. I also think the marketplace is big enough for several competitors- MDHP is cuirrently top dog but its nearly full and won't change much so who will take the torch and run with it?

So what makes LogoAdz.com stand out from the crowd?

• Multiple Pages- using Tags. Its so Web 2.0!! (Investors- start your cheque books)
• Sold by the block (16 x 16 pixels) not the pixel. (Pixels- Thats sooooo gimmicky!)
  
• Free Adz (just the one block mind, 2 if you link back).
• Automated page delivery. Within 30 mins of graphic upload it will be live.
• Book for as long as you like. (In weeks)
• An Affiliate scheme. Yes thats so 1990s but it seems to have done Amazon ok!
  

Adz? Yes I know, but LogoAds.com wasn't available... c'est la vie!

David

* HomeParking.co.uk- while the site is being readied for launch by Team B (Barrie) - Team D (David) has worked night and day (well night) to bring LogoAdz to the boil.