Actually, I have two good reasons for skipping yesterday – the first one was that I actually had too much to say. Wrote it all down, found it too spread out to make a cohesive entry, and mothballed everything so I could spread it out over time.
This wasn’t laziness or vanity – according to a seminar I heard about ‘second hand’ (where all the best rumors come from), Google likes web pages of a certain length – currently around 200-300 words. A year ago, 700-800 was consider fine (of course, I could already tell that less was better: I have articles with AdSense on them, and shorter ones usually end up better targeted).
The second reason was money-oriented – I’ve been working on my paying sites, in particular Gift-Cal.com and byGwen.com, my wife’s art site.
I already described the PHP for rotating a series of pictures – but I also worked on a catalog/shopping cart style code in PHP. Each shows catalog images/thumbnails of the products (calendars or artwork) – you can click on it to view more detail, and order by PayPal.
The result is a couple of small, light sites, with PayPal payment processing (instead of a merchant account), no need for a db backend, and a single easy to maintain file for data (image name, title, description, price, as well as id and category numbers).
Besides a great workout in PHP (I’ve only just started it this November), it was an opportunity to tailor a site the way I wanted, rather than try to fit my model into a prebuilt solution. There’s still more to do behind the scenes (right now, I edit the data file by hand, instead of creating an Admin section to handle it), but it works, and I like the result – you can of course drop by byGwen.com and Gift-Cal.com and see if you agree.
