Changing the Background Image on a phpLD Template

Something that is quick and easy, but also can bring about a dramatic change to your directory's overall look is the background image. You can take a default template, change the logo and change the background image, and you have something unique. There is a quick tutorial called PHP Background Image over on the phpLD forums that tells you exactly how to change the image. This works on version 2 and up, so basically all phpLD versions. Now, some template designers may have changed their CSS or overall structure, but it should work in most cases.

Good luck!

Blog Directory Script

What has been popular over the last few years are blog directories which do some of the following:

1. Allow you to submit your blog

2. Let people rate and comment on blogs

3. Contain an RSS feed to the latest blog posts.

4. Have a profit model such as charging for blog submission or for featured blog listings.

A nice example of this is Delightful Blogs. It has been a blog directory for several years now and was recently revamped. Check it out!

Google Spreadsheets for Quick Data Management

As mentioned over on Warrior Forum, the Google Spreadsheets Import Export Mod for phpLD is a wonderful way to make it easy to manage your content. Rather than editing each page of your site, you can see all the content in the spreadsheet, search the spreadsheet, edit cells on the spreadsheet, etc.

And if you do a lot of hiring of content writers or link builders having everything on a spreadsheet makes it a lot easier to track the progress of your employees, and also makes their work faster and more organized.

In a recent test we found that hired help was able to add about 2-3 links with titles, descriptions and URLs per minute. For more simple data entry tasks, their are VERY competitive rates with people offering to do data entry for less than $2/hour. Even hiring employees in developed countries, it is not uncommon to see rates around $5/hour.

So we encourage you to try the speadsheets mod. We think you will like it very much. :)

Import and Export to Google Spreadsheets

There is a new phpLD Mod that allows you to Import and Export to Google Spreadsheets. I'm really having fun with it. I've been able to clean up the titles and descriptions on a directory of about 800 links in just a couple of hours of work. It is a nice feeling knowing that there are few if any junky titles or descriptions on your directory.

The next thing we will be working on for this mod is making it easy to enter lots of new links to your directory quickly. Basically, you would just add title, description and url, and also add a category. Then run the import.

For adding a category, you have to use the correct structure with a colon as the separator like this:

Computers : Internet : Scripts : Directory Scripts

Then the link will be automatically inserted into phpLD with the correct category.

It works really smooth already and I hope you will try it.

Directory Reports

There is a new mod released by phpLD user Bruleo that does an excellent job of showing stats that are helpful to the directory administrator titled Directory Reports. What is really cool is you can setup a cron job that produced the reports at regular intervals so you can track progress. Here are some of the stats published in each report:

• Active Links.
• Inactive Links
• Pending Links
• Unconfirmed Links **
• Active Articles *
• Inactive Articles *
• Pending Articles *
• Unconfirmed Articles * **
• Active Main Categories
• Active Sub-categories
• Pending Categories
• Symbolic Categories
• Inactive Categories
• Registered Members
• Confirmed Members **
• Unconfirmed members **
• Links about to expire
• Articles about to expire
• Banned IP Addresses
• Banned Email Addresses
• Banned Domains
• Banned Words
• Link Sequence Table Status
• Article Sequence table Status
• Category Sequence Table Status
• User Sequence Table Status
• Payment Sequence Table Status
• Tables with over 10% OverHead
• HIT Table size report.

And if you like this mod here is the big list by Bruleo.

phpLD in Chinese

There is a lot of work being done to make phpLD more available to Chinese users. If you want to see phpLD running in Chinese, isFree.cc is a good example. Here is a another one. We've also been working recently on making a section just for Chinese users. We've also completely revamped the translation going through line by line.

phpLD has been translated into every major language with successful sites running directories in every language as well. If you need help with a translation, feel free to drop us a line.

Tell Stats

Have you ever used Tell Stats? It's an interesting site for getting some basic information about a site. For example, here is the phpLD Listing on Tell Stats. I especially like the keyword feature, as it gives you a quick overview what the site is optimized for. I find the keywords it found for phpLD much more "centric" on directory related phrases:

directory script
php ld link directory
php link directory
phpld
link directory script
directory script
php directory script

But when I checked one of my directories the keywords were more "diverse"

Here are some of the keywords for Directhoo (Tell Stats listing)

religious supplies wicca new york
nadu furniture atlanta ga
kimption hotels
article payments phpld
national centenarian awareness project
phpld database inclusion
wiki hallucinogen

So not sure what to make of it, but an interesting tool!

Website Magazine Discusses phpLD

Always nice to get mentioned by a magazine. It looks like Website Magazine wrote a nice little article that included phpLD:
Weekend Warrior: Websites you Can Build This Weekend

That is one thing that has always been cool about phpLD. You can install it and have it running today, and be making money by tomorrow. I'm going to tell you that getting rich is easy, but we have tried our best to make it so phpLD is easy to get up and running, and making money as soon as possible.

Thanks again to Website Magazine for mentioning our script!

Team Building - A History

Today, I had wrote a post over on SitePoint discussing a little about building a team, and a little bit about the history of how I did it. Sometimes people think that I am an expert in PHP or design or search engine optimization. While it's true I have experience in all of these area, what makes me stronger is the people know through building solid working relationships with people over the years.

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to make friends and develop those friendships over time. No man is an island, and we need each other to progress!

Here is the link to my SitePoint post:

Developing a Virtual Team

You'll notice in the article I talked about having to develop an application just to manage all the work. Here is a link to that as well:
phpLD Jobs Area

Clickbank Widget for phpLD

We have a new Clickbank Widget for phpLD 4.0 users that allows you to display clickbank products (and earn commissions on sales!

Here is a little screenshot:

And you should have the following settings for the widget in the admin:
ClickBank Account, Keywords, Number of Ads, Number of Columns, ClickBank Trace ID, Width, Link Hover Color, Link Font Color, Font Color, Background Color, Font, Font Size.

If you are not familiar with ClickBank it is a HUGE affiliate link network in which Internet Markets make millions every year. Often what they do is look for products, and then build a site optimized around the keywords for the products. There is no reason phpLD could not be used in a similar way where we have a "product directory" and show clickbank products in the categories.

I would be happy to get one of our developers to do more with this widget so that it really works well for you, and I am expecting feedback. I think one area is going to be the way we choose the keywords for the ads, so that we can have good targeting throughout the phpLD directory.

To download this you will need to have a phpLD account, and then you can get it here:

Clickbank Widget for phpLD

phpLD Yahoo, Google,Compete, Alexa Updater

We finally have ready a windows application that connects to a phpLD database, and updates the data for Yahoo, Google, Alexa, and Compete. It also has been built to respect the data providers by getting the data slowly. This is still something that is considered "beta" or experimental. It works great, but depending on how it is used, it is one of those things that can draw negative attention from providers, especially if the user chooses to get too much data too quickly. For this reason, we may never release this app to everybody.

If you are interested in getting it, feel free to inquire in the phpLD Supporters Forum.

phpLD is Spreading!

It's amazing how phpLD has grown. Just since 2005, phpLD went from being on zero websites to over 100,000 websites. This is really exciting to everyone who works at phpLD. According to Yahoo we have about 11.5 Million links pointing to phplinkdirectory.com. If one link were created every minute, it would take nearly 8,000 days to get this many links!

In addition to this being the first post on blogger, we also setup these pages:

Directory Script on Wordpress

Directory Script on Squidoo

And now we have a presence on blogger as well. More to come!

Oh, and I almost forgot, we have a press release now too!

Thanks to everyone for your interest in phpLD!