Well, I decided to make a living developing software. Not working for anyone else though but developing my own software products. I am already in business so this is a simple extension to my existing business of web marketing.

In my last post I toyed with the idea of developing language software but now I junked that idea. What I have been working on for about a month now is web site development software. I am aware that there is a vast number of existing products out there but I have never really found one that is ideal for my needs.

Most tend to be all bells and whistles and the process of making a web site with them is harder than it should be. Some that make it very easy to make a basic site produce very bad code though with lots of formatting code in the content.

My solution will produce very neat code and be like a rapid website development solution. In the programming world we have RAD (Rapid Application Development) tools where wizards and drag and drop controls save you hours of coding standard things such as file opening dialogue boxes.

As an example, my way to produce a site map will hopefully be jaw-dropping to anyone used to the usual methods of doing it after you created a site with specialist tools. My way will be right at the start where you will be helped to define a set of pages based on keywords for your topic. Then you will play around with a graphical tool to produce your site structure by dragging, dropping and shuffling around the pages or lists of pages. And I will save the site map as XML so it’s compatible with the Google standard.

I would struggle to code this feature if I hadn’t already coded something similar for my table editor. This is a graphical tool where you define table cells in a graphical manner and it spits out the HTML code once you are happy. One feature of this I haven’t seen before is the ability to change your mind anytime about how many rows or columns you need and not have to start again.

There will be so many cool features in this software. Even the text editing is cool! Wait till you see the way you edit styles with this software, see the colors and sizes in the code.

I am hoping to release the first version in December.

Here are the codes for smilies in Worpress along with the icons for reference:

‘ :)’
‘ :D’
‘ :-D’
‘:grin:’
‘ :)’
‘ :-)’
‘:smile:’
‘ :(’
‘ :-(’
‘:sad:’
‘ :o’
‘ :-o’
‘:eek:’
‘ 8O’
‘ 8-O’
‘:shock:’
‘ :?’
‘ :-?’
‘ :???:’
‘ 8)’
‘ 8-)’
‘:cool:’
‘:lol:’
‘ :x’
‘ :-x’
‘:mad:’
‘ :P’
‘ :-P’
‘:razz:’
‘:oops:’
‘:cry:’
‘:evil:’
‘:twisted:’
‘:roll:’
‘:wink:’
‘ ;)’
‘ ;-)’
‘:!:’
‘:?:’
‘:idea:’
‘:arrow:’
‘ :|’
‘ :-|’
‘:neutral:’
‘:mrgreen:’

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Directories can be a great way to get vital links to your Blog but the problem is actually getting your site listed.

Take for example Blogwise.com today they have 71067 blogs listed and a queue of 48335 blogs waiting to be approved. There current rate of approval is a mere 25 sites in the last 7 days. Clearly they cannot cope with the boom in Blogging.

The reason for this slow approval rate is that every site is manually reviewed by volunteer editors. This outdated approach is bad for the  blogosphere and  creates frustration with webmasters, just like with the old dinosaur DMOZ (open directory). In these days of high speed internet, the mechanics of these incredibly slow search aids should be re-thought.

My suggestion is that all submissions should be instantly added to the database with the assumption that most will be honestly submitted to the correct category and contain inoffensive content. Automatic spam filters could be used to hold suspicious sites in a queue for manual checking. This way the approval queue would be much reduced in size.

Sites in the index could then be subject to user voting to adjust their ranking in the directory rather than it being an alphabetical list that attracts spam names such as 1aardvark.com

Also, there could be a “report this site button” where people can send feedback to the editorial team.

Submitting to directories should be made quick, free and easy. Please comment…

I was getting concerned about all the images I am hosting eating up my bandwidth so was looking for a good image hosting service. My son, DarkCoder recommended ImageShack.us They offer unlimited free space and plenty of bandwidth. Hop over there to check it out:

Over at forum.weblamp.net the staff members started posting some simple guides to webmaster topics.

My own topic is on PHP Coding

It’s quite fun to do this in order to get people experimenting with things that they previously thought were maybe too difficult to get to grips with. My own tutorial is simple to read and try out the examples but will no dought stimulate a lot of curiosity in readers to explore further.