Links and Resource Cloud MOD in the Works!

January 3, 2008

Hi Everyone -

Well… as my luck would have it, I loaded up the car (02 Mercury Mountaineer) this morning, kissed the wife goodbye, heck, I even kissed the dogs! I get out to the driveway and go to get into the car… dead battery! OK, not a big deal, I will just jump start it and get on my way, after all, I have not driven this truck in about 2 weeks and its perfectly normal for the battery to struggle on a cold morning. I got it jumped pretty easily, but the battery would not charge…  To make it more fun, one of the belt pulleys on the engine was bad and screaming at me to replace it. SO, I run to the parts store and grab a new battery and pulley, replace them real quick and it is still early enough to jump in and start the 11 hour drive to Massachusetts… wrong. The power seat on the drivers side won’t adjust. Since my wife drove it last, the seat was parked as far to the front as it could go… she is only 5′1 (5 feet, 1.75 inches, if you ask her) and I doubt I can squeeze my 6′2 body into the tight space. So, here I am… 4 hours later and not 1 mile closer to Mass. Eventually, I just unbolted the drivers seat from the floor, adjusted it to fit me and I will leave VERY early in the AM to make the trip.

Did I mention this is my fathers truck? I drove it home a few weeks ago so I did’nt have to fly here and ship one of my PC’s UPS. (They have a habit of damaging things)

OK - Enough of my sob story, Lets talk about the link cloud MOD…

First, thanks to all of you who have been going in and grabbing up links on the Niche Site Directory page. I kinda messed up and deleted the first 4 people that submitted  by accident! Please check back at the page and see if your word is listed as available, if so, please resubmit. Sorry about that…

It took me a total of about 45 minutes to get the MOD loaded onto the Race Cars for Sale website this afternoon and you can see it at: http://www.getaracecar.com/racing-sites/ . For myself, it was a cut and dry installation.. I don’t however think it is going to be such an easy thing for everyone and I am trying to figure the best way to present it in the MOD instructions. The issue lies in the fact that you have to separate it from your BANS store, and then rebuild the header and footer so the page looks right.

Here is how the process went:

• Step 1 -  Create a new MySQL database for the cloud script.
• Step 2 - Edit config file (5 lines) and upload files to their own directory.  (Named according to niche market of course)
• Step 3 - Browse to the new directory setup file and install. (2 steps, 1 minute)
• Step 4 - Add a content page that leads to the new directory (file-name needs a trailing slash “/” to forward to the new directory)
• Step 5 - Test… Does the script work? If so.. move on to the next step, making it look like your existing site!

See… this is actually where it gets tricky! The way I did it was to go to the main page of the site and simply view the source code. I copied EVERYTHING from the top line to the edge of the menu, where the normal header.php in your BANS template folder ends. Paste all of that into the scripts header.php file… delete the search box section (It wont work on this page) and upload the header.php to the script directory.

Next, I moved to the bottom of the source code view and copied everything from the closing body tag up to the point that the footer.php file from BANS. I pasted this into the script footer file and uploaded it as well!

Perfect! Works like a charm! The hard part is making it clearly understood to all of the visitors of this site where to end the copying and pasting… which is hard! The other bad part is that if you make changes to your main menu on the website, you will again have to update the header/footer files on the cloud pages… I know, not too convenient, but only a 1 minute process once you have it done the first time.

SO… Once I get the instructions completed I will push this out. I anticipate it will be on Saturday as I will (hopefully) be travelling tomorrow. I have also considered offering an install service on this so that there is no guesswork on your part, but I don’t know a fair fee to charge… is $10 too much? I mean, after all, its really just an upload, setup, copy/paste thing. I will leave that all in your hands to decide…

One last thing on the could script… As I said yesterday, the price you set for links is purely up to you. You can even them FREE links ($0.00) and only request a fee if the person wants to add some of the extras like bold text or larger sized text etc. I made it $25 on the Race Cars site… with a max of 451 links! I just pulled a number out of the air…

Thanks again everyone… have a great day!

Mark

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