Unfortunately I don’t have any version of Windows that allows Remote Desktop work so I’m stuck moving files back and forth (for now). With my recent switch of topics for this blog, I am working on another new theme. It’s going to be different than the previous themes this website has used, but it will contain common elements that might remind you of them. For now I cannot work on this theme from my laptop because, being a genius, I never thought to upload it as an available theme for this site, therefore being able to work on it from anywhere. I’ll have to remember to do this when I get back home, so that I’ll be able to access my website contents from anywhere.

So the next time I post, you just might see a new design up. And Zero Dominance will begin anew.

Blog Mechanic will be a source for all the visual and technical tips for bloggers, and reviews for any plugins and themes that I come across. This is the kind of website I’m more interested in building, and most of my efforts will be directed there. As far as Zero Dominance is concerned, I might still write about blogging and such, but not on a technical level. Mostly I would end up rambling about internet happenings, technology and ambitions I have going on. Not very original these days, I know, but I want to add a more personal touch to it.

Yes, it’s yet another traffic generator e-book, but at least the author used a not-so-banal cover to stand out. For that I would give him props, but my judgement is reserved on the actual product. If I were to be nit-picky, that’s not an actual Transformer, but more like an unlicensed bootleg toy from the mysterious reaches of the far east. And don’t go visiting his site expecting to find a bigger picture of the cover, if you’re curious (you’ll also get a nasty pop-up when you leave the page). So it’s an interesting cover, but I cannot tell (and won’t bother) if it’s worth the time, so the following question will be left unanswered. Traffic Transformer: more than meets the eye, or scammer in disguise?

As a blog idea, I think it’s great. But it could be even better if you can test-drive these plugins right from their website. I actually had a similar idea to this, but mine would be around plugins I personally create along with a few select others. PluginZilla opened its doors just a few weeks ago, and I wanted to take a look at what the fuss is all about. Unfortunately, they’re undergoing maintenance at the time of this post. But in the meantime, take a look at FreshPressThemes has to offer.

Are these directories worth your time?

*The Bad Server tax takes away 20% from this jackpot meaning that 20% of the links may be invalid now. So the list isn’t perfect, but it’s still not bad for a list of 55 websites. Remember, you don’t have to register an account to use most of them. You should go ahead and try submitting your feeds to all of them if you have 30-45 minutes to spare. This is promotion for lazy people, and consistent results are not guaranteed, but you really have nothing to lose here. I have no clue on what the PageRank for any of these pages are, either, but maybe I’ll check ‘em out later with some online PR tool. I’ll also let you know how my subscriber base has changed later on, when I update this article. Happy linking and clicking!

Now I will go in more detail on GameLib than my last post. The plugin organizes information into three groups: games, platforms, and companies. Companies would be the publishers and developers that make and distribute the games, and platforms are the systems that the games belong to. Another game-specific feature I would want to add are a “coming soon” section, a calendar-like widget that shows release dates of upcoming dates. Normally I find calendars to be unnecessary to browse posts in blogs, but in the right context they make a lot of sense to have. Guest reviews might also be a feature but I’m not considering that at the moment.

As you can see, this is all specialized and will only try to promote it to owners of gaming blogs. It would be limiting to shoehorn this plugin for non-gaming blogs. But it will be the foundation for a more flexible system. I am going to turn it into a fully realized CMS that can truly turn Wordpress-powered sites into larger collections of information. For instance, what if you want to write general information about movies, countries or bands, but the Page Manager might prove too clumsy to handle dozens or hundreds of similar articles? You might also want to update a band’s concert schedule, or a TV show’s episode listing, but without needing to update the whole page. That would require another level of organization that would be too much for custom fields. With a full CMS, you wouldn’t need custom fields for every page or article since everything can be automatically cross-referenced.

Now, this is still a long ways off, but once I completed GameLib and get feedback from it I will be more ready to continue on building the next CMS. I want to restrain myself from saying that it will be “huge” in terms of functionality, because most people think of dozens of menus and admin sections that seem loosely connected together. Things should only be as complicated as much as you make them, which is how this CMS would work. For now, keep an eye out for GameLib, even if you’re not into video games. It will be the start of something even better!

I am aware that other solutions exist, such as the included WP widget for feeds and Magpie’s Wordpress Plugin, but I wanted to create my own stripped down approach to feed aggregation. So yes, FeedBin is an article scraper of sorts, but I tried to be cautious on not letting it slow down loading times and performance. Bloggers usually don’t like for their articles to be scraped, but that’s in cases where the scraper doesn’t point back nor gives credit to the original owner. This is not the case with FeedBin, which was created as a promotional tool.

Download FeedBin 1.0 here

Now, how to use FeedBin

By now I would assume that you know how to install plugins if you’re a regular user of Wordpress. FeedBin 1.0 is very easy to use. First, create a folder called “cache” in your Wordpress blog’s root directory, which will store the RSS feed info locally. Then, install the plugin. Once installed, you will be able to access it from the Manage tab, and then selecting the “FeedBin” suboption in the menu below it. Follow the simple on-screen instructions; there’s only one form field to fill out, which is for the RSS feed URLs.

The features are very bare-bones for now and there are limitations. It only displays the last article published for each feed, but this is what I considered all along. You can display a maximum of 10 feeds to link back to. Deactivating the plugin will not delete the URLs.

The Technical Side

FeedBin uses the very lean LastRSS parser to pull RSS feeds, and I modified the parser a bit for FeedBin’s specialized purpose. Its primary function is a wrapper that calls LastRSS’s own output function, and it “cleans” and formats the feed to reduce it down to just the necessary content. Additionally, it uses the caching function provided by LastRSS to increase performance. This way, articles aren’t fetched every single time a browser loads the page. Cache time is set to 3600 seconds, so this is the amount of time FeedBin will check for new content.

Currently it’s in beta but it’s very possible to use on your own blog right now. A known issue is that invalid URLs would show an ugly caught exception message. I want to keep that exception handling, but will try to make it invisible to users in the future.

Styling the Feed List

To stick with good coding standards, FeedBin displays the links and articles as an unordered list. One CSS selector is used for the list. You can style it by using the following selector:

ul#feedbin_list

And style all list items as:

ul#feedbin_list li

Each list item (article link with website title) also has a numerically ordered id that is named as “feeditem_##”. You can style each item individually with its corresponding order number (starting with 1).

What’s Next

For newer versions of FeedBin, I hope to add maintenance options in the Wordpress admin area, such as force clearing the cache and setting your own cache time. Currently, you only need to add one line of code in your theme to use the plugin, but it might as well be one line too many. It is one of my goals to make FeedBin widgetized, so that theme editing won’t be necessary, as well as making it more adaptable for Wordpress updates. Let me know how version 1.0 is working out for you and I’m open for suggestions you might have for future updates.

But the last thing I did was out of curiosity: I used StumbleUpon. Here’s when I at last discovered the effects of Stumbling. The first day had a surge of hits but nothing major. Then I stopped checking the site for over two weeks. Last week, though, I logged into my admin area here and out of curiosity went over to check on stats of my this site, and then picked Portabalooza. I received over 500 visits on several days, unheard of for that site, and it peaked at 952. Did people stay long? Nope, it was just hit and run traffic. However, StumbleUpon does have some power if you know how and when to use it. If Portabalooza was packed with original content, it would probably have gotten a new fanbase, and I might be forced to revive it again.

Now I wonder what would happen if I Stumbled it again, weeks later. Would it have the same effect, or would it be like the boy crying wolf another time? Portabalooza may be dead in a blogger’s terms, but I’m keeping it around for web traffic experiments. Regardless of how successful my sites become, having a “sandbox” site for playing around helps. It may not be a perfect model for how your real sites perform, but it is a great way to try, fall and learn from your mistakes before applying the strategies you have found.

Apart from that, I resolved the domain issues and everything should be back to normal. Let me know, though, if you have problems loading the site by e-mailing me. But I don’t think there would be any serious problems now. Stick around because some of these could get more interesting.

So what’s next for me and the site? As I’ve mentioned before, Zero Dominance will take a focus on tricks and tips for enhancing your blogs, mostly of the Wordpress kind. And every now and then I will share some discoveries or personal thoughts on websites, or even pet projects I’ll be doing on the side which should be interesting. That’s all for now, I’m only here to announce my return and new design. So get back to bouncing out of the site or whatever it is you do. Shoo! Vamoose!