Joe Majewski

Comment on my Blog, and I Will Return the Favor

One of the most underrated ways to improve your blog’s reach on the Internet is to get in touch with other people that write similar content to yours. When logging into your `Admin Panel`, one of the first things you take a look at is the new comments that you’ve received. It’s always good to see that other people take interest in the content that you write.

This article serves the purpose of letting others know that I fully respect the notion of you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Taking some time here and there to search the web for other bloggers much like yourself is never a waste of time, and I honor this very rule.

With that said, leave a comment on my blog, and I will do the same for you. There is a small exception to this rule, however; spammers. It’s not difficult to spot them, but when a legitimate response is made to one of the articles that you took the time to write, it’s a kind gesture to do the same for them. The more you get your name out on the web, the higher your traffic will rise.

What I’ve noticed is that only a small handful of the articles that I write actually bring in traffic through Google, and the percentage of these articles that are written will greatly increase once a sort of fanbase is developed; a fanbase in the sense that people will continue to return your website to read more of your articles on a regular basis.

Partition the time you spend writing articles, the time you spend reading and commenting on others’ articles, and the time you spend updating your website with utilities that offer better navigation, readability, and fresh ideas to write about.

Take some time out and consider what you need to focus on most to bring in more traffic to your blog, and soon you will realize that writing new content isn’t the only way (although it surely is the best way) to drive visitors to your website.

Help From Fellow Webmasters

The primary focus of this domain is my blog, the one that you’re reading at the moment, discussing Computer Science and the like. While I do have quite a few domain names under my belt, I have been trying to maintain this particular one as a means to write about the things that I have learned and the things that I have created.

One of my creations, the World of Warcraft Information Database, linked at the top of every page, is completely unrelated to this site in terms of the content that the Google spiders will crawl. What I’d like to know is whether or not this will hurt my ranking according to Google.

Imagine a website with the main topic being “mathematics” having a folder containing a lot of content regarding something completely unrelated; like “bees”. That is sort of the situation that I am in. The root directory of this site is the blog that you’re reading, but there is a sub-directory (the World of Warcraft Information Database) which contains completely irrelevant information, which I store on this domain because I do consider it to be part of my portfolio.

Does this hurt my Google ranking at all, the fact that I have a website with two unrelated topics? I sure hope not. If anyone has some insight on this baffling situation I would really appreciate some feedback, so please do comment.

My interpretation is that Google will not compare this blog to the aforementioned database nor will it penalize me in any way. Rather, Google will view this blog as it’s own entity, as it will the World of Warcraft Information Database. If some overlap occurs in terms of keywords and content, I would only assume that they will cumulatively affect my keywords. In fact, they will without-a-doubt impact my keywords. The fact that the blog and the database have nothing in common causes Google to add keywords to my site with very low relevancy, and that is why a website such as Wikipedia, which houses keywords on just about every particular word or phrase imaginable can attain such success.

Had I placed the World of Warcraft Information Database on a separate domain name altogether I do not think that anything would change in terms of keyword relevancy.

So that’s my two cents; I would highly appreciate any insight from any webmaster or Google “expert”, so please comment below! Thanks very much, friends!

The World of Warcraft Information Database :: My First Content Management System

I finally finished up my very first PHP and MySQL-based content management system known as the World of Warcraft Information Database, which can be found here. I started this project over the summer this past July, and today I wrapped it up by finishing the leaderboard page, category page, and the right sidebar, as well as various other odds and ends such as the advertisements.

I built this CMS from the ground up, and I intentionally programmed it very loosely so as to create a highly customizable and easy to manipulate piece of software. Right now it is aimed to be populated with articles about Blizzard’s World of Warcraft game, but it could easily be changed to fit any topic worthy of having content.

I would not mind making this software go open source, but I would really prefer it if people asked me if they could use it. Not because I am greedy and don’t want certain people using my code. It’s actually quite the opposite. I would really enjoy it if people used my software, but I figured that if I made the source open to the public, people would just take it and I would never know about it. I am curious to see what kinds of things people would use it for.

Please contact me if you would like the source code.

I am placing a link to this CMS at the top of the blog so people can access it at any time. I don’t know if it will ever really kick off and get popular, but I will preserve the link to it so that people can always take a look. It would be interesting to see how the scripts hold together when being used on a large-scale website that has tens of thousands of articles.

I will surely be updating and adding new features when I get the chance. I tested it pretty thoroughly, but it would not surprise me if there is a bug or two to be found. It would be nice if I could write my own search functionality, but I decided to use a Google Search Bar instead. Writing a search algorithm would be a whole project of it’s own, and that wasn’t my main focus with this CMS.

So please check it out and comment to let me know what you think. And again, if you’re interested, I would be more than happy to donate my source code to anyone who would put it to use.

How to Increase Member Activity and Community Size on a Website

Back in the day when I was first learning how to use PHP and MySQL, I decided that I wanted to use these skills to create a browser-based RPG much like Kings of Chaos, X-Kings, or the countless other games of similar nature. My installment was titled The Arena, and it was the single most successful game that I have ever created to this day.

The objective of this game was to build an army of soldiers and increase your stats to gain a high rank in the leaderboard. This game grew in size and became bigger than I could have ever hoped for; it was not unusual for there to be 40 people online during it’s peak times. So how does a developer cause a community to grow to such capacities? Here’s the trick…

The reason that this game became so popular was due to a little programmer’s trick known as the infamous referral bonus. I’m sure most readers already know what I’m talking about; a referral bonus gives users an incentive to invite other people to a website. When users would refer someone to the Arena, they would gain units to their army and gold (the game’s currency). In addition, if the person referred was an active member, they would naturally gain more units due to the player’s activity.

When developing a website, it is extremely important to give user’s some sort of an incentive to stay and invite others. For example, if you run a forum, members will be more likely to come back if you log the number of posts that they make. Users like to see numbers that show how much time they have spent on a given website. The more statistics you log, the better. Perhaps you could give users the ability to edit their posts after they achieve a certain postcount milestone.

Creating a leaderboard is also a handy trick to increase activity on your site. People enjoy seeing how they stack up against other members of a site. If you cater to your members, they will reward you by coming back to your website.

Keep that in mind, and happy developing!