Flukeit

Going against everything I talked about in previous posts, and as if I had any extra time on my hands, I started another forum.

I contemplated using PHPbb script, in order to keep the cost down but decided that I’m going to go all out and do it right so I bought another VBulletin license. The new board is geared towards Labor Unions and the url is http://www.unionchat.org.

I am also using the Chestnut style, created by Allan. I have decided that I will be adding a link directory with this as well.

I’ve been noticing a growing trend in some of the forums I frequent. People are renting their signature lines (links) as well as their avatar.

I recently sold my avatar image on Digital point for $8.00 for one month. I guess there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a good way to advertise, and when enough people have the same avatar it created a bit of a buzz around the forum.

Signature line rentals are also getting popular, although mine aren’t for sale. I think they are too valuable to me to let someone else use.

Obviously, the higher your post count, the more you may be able to charge for rental.

I am beginning to ponder the possibility of soliciting a few rentals from some of my other forums I visit.

I just read a post on map100.com, where the poster explained how Google comes up with Pagerank. Here is what Google has to say about it, and they should know:

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

In my opinion, this is how it really works in layman’s terms:

1. An inbound link from a website that is similar in nature to your site may offer more “Google Juice”.

2. The higher the page rank of the linking site/page is, the more Google juice you get.

3. Inbound links from “Bad Neighborhoods” may take some of the beloved juice away.

4. Quantity of inbound links is not nearly as important as Quality inbound links.

This, of course is my personal theory. Anyone who claims to know how Google really calculates PR of a website is either mistaken or a Google insider.

I wanted to “Christmas Up” my forums by changing my header image to something a bit more seasonal. I created a new logo and was curious about automating this change. Maybe I can have different logos for the different seasons, etc.

I looked to the Digital Point Forums and found my answer. A big thanks to JEET who answered my dilemma with the following:

Try this code:
(Assuming your images are stored in a folder called “images”, 1 directory below where the code is executed.)
$mdarr= "18-25/12,13-20/05";
$miarr= "christmas.jpg,happy_birthday_jeet.jpg";
// Format explained below and why use this.

$jtd= date("d");
$jtd= $jtd-7;// Minus 7 days to match above format.
$jtd= $jtd . '-'. date("d"). '/' . date("m");
$jc=0;
$r= explode(",",$mdarr);
foreach($r as $v)
{
if($jtd==$v)
{
++$jc;
}
}
if($jc>0)
{
--$jc;
$img= explode(",", $miarr);
$img= $img[$jc];
print '

';
}
else
{
print '

';
}
?>

About the date format.

$mdarr= "18-25/12,13-20/05";
Here you can fit an array for all the dates you wish to change your image on.
For example 25/12 (25 December.) Minus 7 days makes it:
18-25/12, so your image starts appearing 7 days before the actual festival.
Add a "," sign and enter another date in same format.
(Minus 7 days)-(Actual date)/(month)
Add as many as you like.

Which Image to use:
$miarr= "christmas.jpg,happy_birthday_jeet.jpg";

Just enter the full image file name for each date at the same "number" position as it appears in date array.
Seperated by "," sign.

18-25/12 was first item, so "christmas.jpg" is first in this array.
and so on.

Then replace the img tag for your logo with this code above.
Fill the array once, and probably will never have to touch it again...

Several days ago, I began seeing animated image ads showing up in my 728×90 leaderboard ad block. It’s not just one, there are several of them. These aren’t the video ads that Google mentioned months ago, because they do not have audio. I have never seen these type of ads on my sites before, and neither has my visitors. I know this because I have seen an upswing of clicks from this site.

I strongly believe that with a moving image in the ad, this will drastically reduce the effects of Banner Blindness. I have seen an increase in revenue of 40-60% in the last week since these ads began appearing.