ZWAH REPORT

… then head over to the Weather Underground. I searched high a lo for an international weather widget, with no luck. Then, I landed at the underground. They have plenty of widgets to choose from. Check ‘em out!

You can see one of their widgets in action at HungaryGuide.com, my latest development project.

I ran into a snag while using a phpLD install into the root of my domains. It appears that the installation’s .htaccess file is missing a line (RewriteBase /). Here’s a complete snippit of the mod_rewrite section:


# URL rewrite rules
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
## Category redirect
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [QSA,L]
</IfModule>


… for the new Mochila content service. I’ve just added one of their widgets to my ToyotaPictures.com. Check it out! This domain gets about 10+ type-ins a week; I’ll let you know how it converts. Stay Tuned!

While checking the logs for my collection of “self-parked” domains, I noticed that Google is ranking my websites for the keywords that appear in the domain names -AND- for the generic categories in my sidebar. Sweet!, but nonsensical really. This just means untargeted traffic, which generally doesn’t convert as well as the targeted variety. Here are a few examples:

search: “INVESTING IN BREAD”
landing: datebread.com/investing

search: “dating in hungary”
landing: hungaryrentals.com/dating

I’ve got about 100 domain names and have tried various parking services: Bodis, Parked, Sedo, NameDrive, etc… With mediocre names, they all perform about the same for me (well, Sedo is paricullary horrible). And switching between services sucks. Even with only 100 names, re-doing the templates, re-choosing the keywords, re-optimizing every time is a huge headache.

So, I’ve pulled all my domains OUT of the parking garage and started down the road of development. Here are some examples baby.bz and taxday.us. I’m aiming for something between a parked page (single ad feed) and a full website, a kind of hybrid design all database driven and easy to update with affiliate links and orignal content.

So far, the design has been mostly inspired by ShoppingDepot and OrganizedWisdom. I’m also hoping to link these sites together in a Kosmix fashion taking advantage of my domain verticals. I’ve earned a couple bucks so far off the PPC feed and Adsense, but the design needs improved before the affiliate offers start paying off though…

What do YOU think?

I’ve created a new widget hosted at WidgetBox called “Avatar”. The avatar widget is a multi-talented widget that can display an avatar using one of four different avatar services: Gravatar, MyBlogLog, MonsterID and Identicon. Check out my little monster on the right!