A nice method to hit up your forum activity

I’ve been thinking on how to improve the activity on www.whmtalk.com recently.

I visited a couple of active forums and have been collecting valuable  informations. I liked the idea of adsense revenue sharing. This certainly makes users post more. So I have put the following condition: 100% revenue sharing. e.g : If anyone starts a thread, then the postbit adsense block will be theirs and only theirs and all earnings from it will be in their account. The pub id is configurable in the user profile.

So I have sent up a email to all members and publicly announced this on the forums. Guess what, activity boosted in less then 12 hours.

Forum owners, I recommend you doing the same, because it helped me!

PHP Script to Display Pagerank as an Image on your Site

For those who don’t know what Pagerank is, here is how Wikipedia explains PageRank:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Google PageRank is mostly discussed by SEO’s but also webmasters, web advertisers and publishers. For example, webmasters will not exchange links with websites whose PageRank is less then 4 or 5. Often, web publishers will pay less money for ads on websites with lower PageRanks. So how do you know what a PageRank of a website is? Simplest way to do it is to install Google toolbar. There are also various tools and scripts out there that will tell you the PageRank. One of the popular scripts was the one published by www.googlecommunity.com.

Below is modified version of that script. I used the code to create a PHP class that can be easily implemented with your projects. I also included images for visual representation of the PageRank.

Do following:
Save the code above as pagerank.php.
Download or create your own images to display each rank.
Create a directory “images” containing all page rank images.
See code below on how to use the class.

Put wherever you want in your page this code:

<?php

include("pagerank.php");

$gpr = new pageRank();

$gpr->printrank("http://www.yahoo.com");

//display image

echo $gpr->get_pr();

?>

Then create pagerank.php

<?php 

define('GOOGLE_MAGIC'0xE6359A60); 

class pageRank{

var $pr; 

function zeroFill($a$b){ 

$z hexdec(80000000);

  if ($z $a){ 

   $a = ($a>>1); 

   $a &= (~$z); 

   $a |= 0x40000000; 

   $a = ($a>>($b-1)); 

  }else{ 

   $a = ($a>>$b); 

  } 

return $a; 

} 

function mix($a,$b,$c) { 

   $a -= $b$a -= $c$a ^= ($this->zeroFill($c,13));

   $b -= $c$b -= $a$b ^= ($a<<8);

   $c -= $a$c -= $b$c ^= ($this->zeroFill($b,13));

   $a -= $b$a -= $c$a ^= ($this->zeroFill($c,12));

   $b -= $c$b -= $a$b ^= ($a<<16);

   $c -= $a$c -= $b$c ^= ($this->zeroFill($b,5));

   $a -= $b$a -= $c$a ^= ($this->zeroFill($c,3));

   $b -= $c$b -= $a$b ^= ($a<<10);

   $c -= $a$c -= $b$c ^= ($this->zeroFill($b,15));

   return array($a,$b,$c); 

} 

function GoogleCH($url$length=null$init=GOOGLE_MAGIC) { 

  if(is_null($length)) { 

   $length sizeof($url); 

  } 

  $a $b 0x9E3779B9;

  $c $init;

  $k 0;

  $len $length;

  while($len >= 12) { 

   $a += ($url[$k+0] +($url[$k+1]<<8) +($url[$k+2]<<16) +($url[$k+3]<<24));

   $b += ($url[$k+4] +($url[$k+5]<<8) +($url[$k+6]<<16) +($url[$k+7]<<24));

   $c += ($url[$k+8] +($url[$k+9]<<8) +($url[$k+10]<<16)+($url[$k+11]<<24));

   $mix $this->mix($a,$b,$c);

   $a $mix[0]; $b $mix[1]; $c $mix[2];

   $k += 12;

   $len -= 12; 

  }

  $c += $length;

  switch($len){ 

   case 11$c+=($url[$k+10]<<24);

   case 10$c+=($url[$k+9]<<16);

   case $c+=($url[$k+8]<<8);

   /* the first byte of c is reserved for the length */

   case $b+=($url[$k+7]<<24);

   case $b+=($url[$k+6]<<16);

   case $b+=($url[$k+5]<<8);

   case $b+=($url[$k+4]);

   case $a+=($url[$k+3]<<24);

   case $a+=($url[$k+2]<<16);

   case $a+=($url[$k+1]<<8);

   case $a+=($url[$k+0]); 

  } 

  $mix $this->mix($a,$b,$c); 

/* report the result */ 

return $mix[2]; 

} 

function strord($string) { 

  for($i=0;$i<strlen($string);$i++) { 

   $result[$i] = ord($string{$i}); 

  } 

return $result; 

} 

function printrank($url){

  $ch "6".$this->GoogleCH($this->strord("info:" $url)); 

  $fp fsockopen("www.google.com"80$errno$errstr30);

  if (!$fp) {

     echo "$errstr ($errno)<br />\n";

  } else {

     $out "GET /search?client=navclient-auto&ch=" $ch .  "&features=Rank&q=info:" $url " HTTP/1.1\r\n";

     $out .= "Host: www.google.com\r\n";

     $out .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n"; 

     fwrite($fp$out);

     while (!feof($fp)) {

       $data fgets($fp128);

       $pos strpos($data"Rank_");

         if($pos === false){

         }else{

           $pagerank substr($data$pos 9);

           $this->pr_image($pagerank);

         }

     }

     fclose($fp); 

  }

}

//display pagerank image. Create your own or download images I made for this script. If you make your own make sure to call them pr0.gif, pr1.gif, pr2.gif etc.

function pr_image($pagerank){
   $this->pr = "<img src=\"images/pr" . $pagerank .".gif\" alt=\"PageRank " .$pagerank. " out of 10\">";
}
function get_pr(){
  return $this->pr;
}
}
?>

Nokia 6288 (Black) Review

I’ve purchased Nokia 6288 yesterday, and here’s what I have to say about it.

 Design and Dimensions

The phone is a slider (my favourite) and is pretty small (100*46*20 mm). It’s buttons are very pleasant navigable and beautifully integrated in the phone’s design. So my rating is 8.5/10 in terms of design.  Here’s a picture of what the phone looks like:

Screen and Display

The screen has a resolution of 240*320 and a impressive size of 35 x 45 mm. It’s TFT with 256 colours.

Data & Memory 

The phone comes with pre built 8mb of memory and an included memory card of 64mb.  It supports mp3, mp4, 3gp, jpg, bmp, jpeg, gif etc., so basically reads all supported file formats an advanced phone would need.

Connection Types 

The phone has bluetooth, infrared  and has an USB cable in the box, so it can basically connect to anything.

Other features 

The phone has a WAP 2.0/xHTML browser, a 2mp camera (1600×1200 pixels) and othe features such as :

- Push to Talk
- Java MIDP 2.0
- Stereo FM radio (visual radio)
- MP3/AAC/M4A/eAAC+ player
- T9
- Organiser
- SyncML
- Voice dial/memo
- Built-in handsfree

Battery 

The battery stands up to 5h on talking and  250 hours on stand-by.

 Overall

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the quality of the phone. For the price of around $340, the price is a steal. It has everything! My overall rating is : 9/10.

I recommend this phone to everyone!

General Directories vs. Niche Directories

Most general directories, are a waste of a time. The concurence is so big, that if you want to have a really authority site on the market, you need have a massive financial back-end and a great knowledge about what customers really want. And certainly, most of us don’t have anything mentioned above.

So, why bother to fight with the ones who are immortal? This is non-sense. By immortal I mean the authority sites. Aviva has a good list compiling most of the immortals. Check it. Let’s face it. You will not be better then Alive, Aviva, Forplex, Botw, Yahoo!, Map100 and other directories listed on Aviva’s blog.

The point is, start a niche directory. That’s what the market needs, niche directories. We don’t need more general QBC’s.

Yes, you might be thinking that the target audience for your niche directory will be much smaller then for your general one. Wrong. If you spend same amount of time/money on a niche directory, you will have same and even better result. Here’s a live example, I am getting over 600 visits/day on GamingType.com. It’s a gaming directory, and I didn’t spend that much on it. I would have spent much more on a general directory, and would have gotten a few paid submissions per month and 200 visits daily if the day will be sun will shine bright.

It would be also a good idea to start a directory on a very specific topic. I once had the idea to start a directory of paint-related sites, but the project was abandoned and instead of that I created a myspace directory. Because, there are barely and myspace directories. But there are very many myspace sites, so I expect some nice revenue there.

Hope this post encourages you not to create any general directories anymore, but start a directory of the niche you lvoe the most!

Regards,
Radu