Bastion Special Projects - Wordpress Blog

Allowing guests to post on you site can be a great thing in
theory but in practice, not so much. If everyone behaved
like adults and thought before they hit submit things would
work out just fine.

However, too many people seem to think that being allowed
to post comments anonymously gives them the right to be
incredibly rude and to bluntly show their butts in public.

I’ve tried several times to allow guests to post and every time
it has basically blown up in my face. Spammers and spam bots,
wannabe trolls and people that just generally want to give you
a headache seem to gravitate toward any forum, shoutbox, or
chat room that allows them the perceived cloak of anonymity
that guest posting creates.

If you have a particularly thick skin and don’t mind the extra
work guest posting might work out for you but I would strongly
recommend taking the time to give it careful thought before
you allow it on your site. After all, if people think they can get
away with leaving trash all over your site your job will go from
webmaster to garbage man, and just remember pickup day is
everyday.

Forums are a great way to meet new people that might
be interested in what you do or that have interests that
you want to learn more about. They also make a great
way to promote your site.

However, there are some, often unwritten, rules to
promoting your site on forums.

In no particular order…

If the forum allows you to add your site’s URL to your
profile, do it. This is a perfectly acceptable way to
let other members know about your site.

If the forum allows you to have a signature add a text
link to your site. Just remember to keep it simple and
concise. People, forum Admins in particular, tend to
take a dim view of someone that has huge billboard
like ad for their site in their signature line.

A side note:
Myself, I will usually use two links in my signature on
forums. One to the main site and one to a joke page
I made sometime ago just to let them know I am not
some stiff.

Post content from your site. This has to be done
within a certain level of reason though. If you have
a forum of your own, most people consider it rude
to post part of a forum post with a link to the thread
at your own forum. However, if you have a blog or
write articles on any given topic that people might
find entertaining or useful, feel free to post it with
a link back to the original. You are not required to
post the full article but a lot of forum Admins do
generally prefer it. About half of the article and a
link to the original is generally enough. If people
found the part you posted interesting enough they
will visit your site for the rest. On the other side of
that is, if you choose to post the full article, some
people will click your link to see the original anyway.

Another side note:
Remember to keep it on topic. If the forum covers
everything under the sun, feel free to post whatever
you want. However, if the forum is focused on one
topic stay on that topic. Example: If the forum is
about hot rods don’t post an article about how
to prune a rubber plant. Your topic will likely be
deleted and anyone who sees it will think you have
lost your last marble.

If you register an account at a forum, for pity’s sake,
take the time to discuss things. Don’t go there with
the sole intention of promoting your site. If every
post you make is a promotion for your site, people
will class you as either a spammer or a spam bot.
If the Admin has to take a hand in the matter, you
could well find yourself banned and any posts you
made deleted or edited to the point of being little
better than a blank page.

If you own an online store, don’t make ever post an
offer for the goods you sell. This relates to the last
paragraph. If, on the other hand, someone mentions
that they are looking for something you sell, mention
that you have such an item for sale and send them
a personal message. Just don’t be crass about it. No
one likes a hard sell in their forum PM inbox.

I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of webmasters can
become obsessed with themes, CSS, and the overall
appearance of their web sites. Sometimes they become
so obsessed with their site’s aesthetics and neglect it’s
most important aspect, the content.

I won’t say that a really cool theme doesn’t help a site.
However, no matter how cool the theme is a theme adds
nothing that your visitors are really interested in. Look at
the search hits you get everyday. Ever seen one that
says, “websites about Alice in Wonder with a really cool
theme”?

No, of course not.

People look for things they are interested in. I won’t say that
you shouldn’t spend time trying to make you site look good
for your users. However, I will point out that if your site is
about making jewelry, focus on posting content about
making jewelry. If your site is legible and easy to navigate
no one will notice or care that you are using a default theme.

Having Global Moderators on your forum can help you
as an Admin since they can take of a lot of day today
matters, like moving posts to the correct board or
deleting spam from the forum. With SMF you need
to pay a little extra attention when setting up the
permissions for Global Mods though.

The default settings for Global Mods are missing a
few important things that should be corrected early
on to save you a lot of work and your Mods a lot of
confusion later. GMs can not see the default General
board until you give them permission to view it. You
can fix this by simply modifying General by checking
the box beside Global Moderator and saving the new
setting by clicking the modify button at the bottom.

Next you should probably look at the Group Permissions
for Global Moderators. You can give them a wide range
of permissions that will let them do a lot more. One thing
you will want to do is make sure they have the permissions
needed to view and post attachments if you allow your
regular members to do so. By default that permission is
not checked.

Depending on how comfortable you are with it, you
can also give you Global Moderators some access
to your Admin panel. This can come in handy if you
will be away for an extended period of time but don’t
want to temporarily promote someone to full Admin.
Just remember to give them what they will most
likely need and not give them access to something
where they might accidentally damage something.

If you add any new mods to your forum make sure you
check your Global Moderators permissions too. On occasion
the members will have the needed permissions to use the
new mods by default but the Global Moderators won’t.

If you have looked at the SMF forum install at BSP
you may have noticed that they have a number
of Mods applied to it to expand it’s functionality.

Bastion Special Projects SMF with Tiny Portal Example Forum

Here I will give you brief overview of each mod. please
see the “Located here” links for the full details of each
mod.

SMF Gallery Lite

What is it?
Simply put it is a basic image gallery for SMF.
It can have multiple categories and sub categories
and it can be set to allow any user group you want
access to it.

Located here

Global Headers and Footers

What is it?
This something you may find quite useful if you want
to add some HTML code to your forum but don’t want
to play around with the PHP code. Take a look at either
of the example forums and you can see some uses for
this mod, Adding links to other areas of your site, adding
code for Adsense and other ads, code for free hosted
toolbars and more.

Located here

SMF Links

What is it?
This is a links directory that can handle multiple
categories and sub categories. Much like the gallery
mod you can give permissions to specific groups.

Located here

Auto Embed Video/Audio Clips

What is it?
This is a neat little mod that allows audio and video
clips from a wide variety of sites to embedded into
forum post without needing any special BB Code or
major modifications to your forum. You might want
to take a look at the link below to get a better
idea of what sites it can auto embed from.

Located here

TinyPortal

What is it?
TinyPortal is an addon Portal System or CMS
(Content Management System) for SMF. It is
a great way to greatly extend you forum into
much more by adding the ability is write and
post articles in addition to your existing forum.
It also includes a built in Shout Box among other
features. For the full details visit the link below*.

* TinyPortal requires you to register an account to
download the mod and to view certain areas of their
forum.

Located here

As I find and try more Mods I will update this blog
entry.

A new webmaster may not be aware that the major
search engines offer some extra tools that they might
find useful. As a general rule you only need to have
registered an account with them previously. In all cases
listed here a simple email account with them will allow
you access to the tools.

Google offers their Webmasters tools which are quite
comprehensive although I have observed that the
results they give you in regard to your site will wildly
fluctuate.*

*Please note: This is only my experience, it may be
different with your site(s).

Yahoo! offers their Site Explorer. It doesn’t seem to
offer quite as many controls and options as Google’s
but their results seem to be a bit more stable and
they do let you see when your pages were last
indexed by their searchbots, very handy if you have
been updating pages and want to know if the updates
have been indexed.

MSN offer their Webmaster Tools as well. It would seem
to still be in it’s Beta form so I can’t really tell what
features it will have when it is finished and operational.
However, I will say what I saw was impressive and should
be fairly useful.

In all cases you will need to validate your site by either
included a meta tag or by uploading a file to you site’s
root directory. Personally, I find uploading the file to
be the simplest and quickest option.*

*Note: Google and Yahoo! will provide you with a
pre-generated XML file that you can upload. MSN
however provides you with a file name and an HTML
code to make the file yourself. It is fairly simple and
painless. Open a notepad and copy the code to it
and save the file using the file name they provide.
Under Windows you will need to select Save As
and select All Files in order to save the file as an
XML.

Installing Mods to enhance SMF is fairly easy and will
allow you to expand your SMF forum’s functionality to
no small degree.

SMF main site link

Go to SMF’s site and select the customize link at the top
of the page. This page will let you select both Mods and
themes for SMF. Look though the Mods they have to find
the one(s) you are looking for*.

*A word of advice, only try one new Mod at a time to see
if any of them are going to conflict with each other. This
makes it easier to trace a problem.

Now the step by step…

1. Make a folder on you computer named SMF Mods. You
can save the Mod files to this folder to make it easier to
find them later.

2. Download the Mod(s) you want to the folder you made.

3. Log into your SMF forum and click the ADMIN tab/button.

4. Inside your admin panel click the Packages link. The page
this brings up will show you what Mods are currently available.

5. Click the Download Packages tab. This is where you will
upload your Mods. Look for the box marked: Upload a Package
Simply click the browse button to find the mod file on your
computer and then click Ok after you find the file. Next just
click the Upload button and sit back while it uploads.

6. after the file is uploaded it will give you the option to
apply the mod. Just click the Apply Mod link and follow
the on screen instructions.

An important note: Some Mods will require that you modify
your current theme before they will work properly. Most
Mods will work on the SMF Default theme automatically.

And that’s it…

These are links to various sites I have either found or been
introduced over the last few years that have been of help
with my various web sites.

DNS Stuff

DNS Stuff

A good collection of both free and paid DNS tools for webmasters.

Interpulse

Internet Health Report

A handy tool to determine if a connection problem is with just your
ISP or if several of the major internet backbone servers* are
having trouble.

*backbone servers are the servers on the internet that tell
other computers where on the internet your web site is.

Conduit toolbars

Conduit

A great way to offer your visitors a neat toolbar that is completely
free and a wide range of features available.

Changing LINKS

Changing LINKS

A great website that shows users random web pages. Just add
their short bit of HTML code to your pages and submit them to
Changing LINKS.

HTML Tags

HTML Tags

Something that can help you to no small degree when manually
editing HTML code.

You Want A Basic Color Code, Huh?

Basic color codes

This site offers a good selection of color codes that will work with
HTML and CSS and they even show you what the color should look
like.

Simple favicon maker

FavIcon from Pics

With this site you take almost any image and turn it into a simple
custom favicon for your web site.

StatCounter

StatCounter

StatCounter offers both a free and paid traffic tracking service.
Just open an account with them and add their code to your sites
pages.

Meta Tag Analyzer

Meta Tag Analyzer

If you are interested in SEO and meta tags this is a site
you will want to use. It’s quite helpful in getting metas
set up working in a way that will make it easier for the
search engines to index your site.

Free games are one good way to keep people on your site for a
while longer than they might have normally stayed. They can
range in size from only a few Kb up to several Mb. They cover a
wide range of gaming interests from simple card and board games
all the way to deeply involved immersive role playing games.

Most games a webmaster would be interested in would be
flash, java, or shockwave based games. There are other kinds
but I will focus on those in this article. The number and type
of games for a web site are more a matter of personal taste
depending on the webmaster. Some sites might only want a
small number of games, around three or four for most or a large
library of several hundred if you are creating a gaming site or
general “mega site”.

There are a good number of sites that offer free games for
websites. Some offer you just the games so you may upload
them to your own site and there are others that host the games
and provide you with an HTML embedding code so you don’t have
to use your own site’s bandwidth to offer your visitors free games.

A short list of sites offering free games:
www.crazymonkeygames.com
www.freegamesforyourwebsite.com
www.dailyfreegames.com

For more free games just do a search for “free games for websites”
and you will get a long list of sites.

Usually adding the games is just a matter uploading the game
files to you site into a “games” folder, like this…

http://shadowsbastion.com/gameroom/3dreversi/3dreversi.html

Sometimes though you may find games that have only the
game file itself, usually ending in the extension .swf if it is a
flash game. Then you will need to make an HTML page with an
embed code so the game can be played.

The easiest way to do this would be to take the HTML page from
another game that does have one and substitute the file name
and upload it to the one that didn’t come with it’s own HTML file.

As a general rule you can expect to pay around $50 to $100 a year
for the average website. This is counting only basic hosting and
domain name registration and a brief look at software.

This will give you a general idea of your costs…

Hosting: Prices tend to vary from host to host depending on
what kind of hosting package you get. on average the lowest
price is around $3 to $4 USD for a month but many hosts offer
lower prices for paying by the year and some even give deeper
discounts if you buy several years worth of hosting in advance.

Domain name registration: On average you will pay around $10
to $15 per year for a .com. One service most registrars offer is
a private domain name. This means that you own the name
but you pay a modest fee (usually around $9 a year) for a
company like Domains by Proxy to protect your private
information by listing their address and contact information
instead of your’s. Some people argue that using a service like
this is not a good idea but I disagree with them. Anyone that
knows where to look can perform a WHOIS on your domain name
and get your private information without you being any the
wiser. However if they have to come to your site you do at
least have a log showing that someone was looking for how
to contact you.

Software: With the wide variety of open source software
available it is doubtful that most people would need to buy
their software unless they are looking for specific features
that are only available in some paid softwares. This blog
and the other software used on this site are all open source
and free for anyone to use. Now if you want to buy your
software the prices can vary greatly. A Flashchat by tufat.com
costs $5 whereas some more sophisticated “scripts” can run
well into the hundreds.