Some ideas to build a Pligg site

[Divisive Cotton]

Here's the story: I wanted to create a website directory for history websites. History is a particular interest of mine and there was no central point for history websites on the web other than the Yahoo directory and the Open Directory project. So hit upon the idea of using Pligg because it would allow me to create such a site, but do so in a fun way, what with its voting system and other features.

It took two weeks full time work to create the site. It is now five months old, but I haven't really done any site design or SEO work for the last two months because I've been working on others projects.

In truth, the search engine ranking and daily site visitors are still pretty crap, but I know that this has to be a two year project if it is to have any chance of succeeding.

I tried out quite a few different avenues of publicity and I wrote notes on the way. Hopefully some of this may inspire you to try them out.

As we all know, building a following for a Pligg site is hard business and requires all the tricks that you can muster.

So cheers Pligg developers. Just donated $50 to the fighting fund, will donate the same amount again soon.

Here we go...

History Nexus

I slimmed down the basic code as much as I could. Just kept it to the basics – removed tags, trackback url, send to friend and many other functions.

Decided to label the site “Beta 0.1”.

The idea behind this is as new functions are added, and as the Pligg script itself matures, I can email members with “History Nexus 0.2 Launched”, “History Nexus 0.3 Launched”, etc.

The plan is that some point in the future, as the website has established itself, a blog will be added to the core. Having an (hopefully!) popular website to back me up I will get in contact with book publishers and organise book reviews written by myself and other members.

The aim of the site is to be a history portal, rather than just a Digg-clone for history.

Sent out emails to other history sites.

By the end of two weeks only three had taken up the offer and joined and submitted their history websites.

Then realised that it needed a traditional SEO campaign.

Google has started indexing the site like mad, Yahoo follows behind but it takes a month to come out of the MSN sandbox.

After one month:

* Roughly 800 incoming links as reported in Yahoo. This has come mostly through signature links, but also the mass submission to directories.
* On average, 20 unique users every day.
* 10 members have signed up.

Added paid modules Blackball and Pinger.

First piece of spam comes after five weeks.

Added a number of anti-spam solutions after the great Bots Vs Pligg war of December 2007.

Decided not to implement the email confirmation solution until necessary because it only adds another hurdle before people join and become active.

Set up sites for History Nexus on MySpace, Bebo and Twitter.

MySpace.com - History Nexus - 32 - Male - UK - www.myspace.com/history_nexus
Twitter / HistoryNexus

I the time of writing I have over one thousand friends on MySpace.

You have to be careful with MySpace because people hate anything that stinks of spam but adding fiends gradually over a period of months is fine.

Twitter.com is good because it is easy to add to your site. I placed comments on Twitter based on quotes about history and latest updates about the site.

Noted there was problems with the Twitter Flash object in non-Firefox browsers. Can’t explain why.

Decided that having a History Nexus site on Bebo was too much work, until I noticed that Bebo is far friendlier to the SERPs than MySpace.

Added history quizzes and polls to Bebo and then set about joining groups and finding friends. (edit: keeping up Bebo and other social networking sites is too much, let Bebo die)

Launch History Nexus Beta 0.2 during the New Year – added Tags and more categories.

After two months I had 2,000 incoming links to the site. This was done, mostly, through directory submissions and signatures from forums.

I also emailed a number of history blogs about History Nexus and got good coverage and backlinks that way.

Building 2,000 incoming links in two months was too much for Yahoo which puts the site into the sandbox.

Created Facebook page:

History Nexus | Facebook

It's easy to set-up and just include the RSS feed from your site which will give your page automatic and regular updates.

Added anti-profanity module to site. I noticed that at work the filters automatically block any page with any swear words so took note of this and took steps to prevent any swearing appearing on the site.

Set about building friends on Digg in participation of some sort of entry into its upper ranks.

Reaching the front page of Digg can produce phenomenal traffic.

Opened up account with the Yahoo-owned MyBlogLog.com – supports Pligg as one of dozens of blog-type scripts.

Not to sure what the purpose of MyBlogLog.com is really – may bring give a bigger profile to site.

History Nexus - MyBlogLog

After two months:

* Still low daily traffic.
* 50 members have signed up.

Signed up for Feedburner.

As a note, I’ve spent quite a while cutting down on unnecessary pages in the search engines. My robots text reads as follows:

User-Agent: * 
Disallow: /story/title/
Disallow: /search/ 
Disallow: /submit/ 
Disallow: /login/ 
Disallow: /admin/ 
Disallow: /webalizer/ 
Disallow: /modlogan/ 
Disallow: /files/ 
Disallow: /template_c/ 
Disallow: /user/ 
Disallow: /3rdparty/ 
Disallow: /cache/ 
Disallow: /files/ 
Disallow: /backup/ 
Disallow: /avatars/ 
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /js/  
Disallow: /libs/ 
Disallow: /internal/ 
Disallow: /evb/ 
Disallow: /install/
Disallow: /generator/
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /upcoming/
Disallow: /tagcloud/range/1
Disallow: /tagcloud/range/2
Disallow: /tagcloud/range/3
Disallow: /tagcloud/range/4
Disallow: /published/
Disallow: /scarecrow.php
Disallow: /topusers.php
Disallow: /story.php
Disallow: /user.php
Disallow: /topusers/
Sitemap: http://www.historynexus.net/sitemap.xml

Implemented hack to put story title in front of website name, as well as changing the url to hyphens instead of underscores.

Increased sites to Plinger module so that the list reads as below. I’ve no idea whether this actually achieves anything… but it’s free and only results in a few minutes of lost time every week.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Signed up with Yahoo Pipes! and created a special widget that combined all the feeds of the sites so far submitted to History Nexus

Widgetbox › History Now! Widget
Pipes: History Now!

Called it the History Now! Widget

History Now! Widget

Used Google AJAX APIs to create the History in the News page:

History in the News

This is extremely lightweight as the files are hosted by Google.

As I wrote, after a few months my attention went elsewhere, but will come back to History Nexus with some more ideas in the future.

Anybody with any inventive ideas about how to build a Pligg site?????

[Geoserv]

Fantastic post, I will look at implementsing a few of these things in my pligg sites.

I have completed the Widget one and the Yahoo Pipes one as well. Can you offer direction on the Google API process?

Thanks for posting,
Geoserv.

[Geoserv]

I tried to setup on twitter, but perhaps I dont quite understand what it is suppose to do.

I dont see an option to have it import a feed, do I need to post my entried individually and manually?

Geoserv.

[Divisive Cotton]

I tried to setup on twitter, but perhaps I dont quite understand what it is suppose to do.

I dont see an option to have it import a feed, do I need to post my entried individually and manually?

Geoserv.

No, you can't import a RSS feed into Twitter. You need to create some original content for Twitter and then think of ways of linking in to your site. I used to have the flash badge on the site, but took it off because of the lack of space

Twitter

I do have it on the History Nexus MySpace page though as way of trying to interlink all these together.
If you create a Facebook page you can import an RSS feed though, see my effort here:
History Nexus | Facebook
I don't add any content to this as the input RSS feed does all the work.

The Google Feed API.

For starters, see the page I made with this:
http://www.historynexus.net/history_news.php

It's just a way of adding a little more to the site to make it more attractive.

What this does is use javascript to add together RSS feeds of your choice. It also creates a CSS file which can be changed to suit your site. The javascript and CSS file is created by Google.

Google AJAX Feed API - Google Code

Go to the Google Wizard:

Google AJAX Feed API - Dynamic Feed Control Wizard

Play around with this. Then click generate code.

Don't add the javascript code to the base template - create a separate file and link it into to the head. My code reads as follows:

function LoadDynamicFeedControl() {
var feeds = [
{title: 'BBC: Today in History',
url: 'http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/on_this_day/front_page/rss.xml'
},
{title: 'HNN: Breaking News',
url: 'http://hnn.us/blogs/rss/41.xml'
},
{title: 'Blogs',
url: 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/HistoryNow'
},
{title: 'Digital History',
url: 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/digitalhistory'
}];
var options = {
stacked : true,
horizontal : false,
linkTarget : google.feeds.LINK_TARGET_SELF,
title : "History in the News",
numResults:10
}

new GFdynamicFeedControl(feeds, 'feed-control', options);
}

google.load('feeds', '1');
google.setOnLoadCallback(LoadDynamicFeedControl);

And is placed into my template as so:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/templates/yget/historynews.js"></script>

You will also need to link to the external Google javascript code as so:

<script src="http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/dynamicfeed/gfdynamicfeedcontrol.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

When you use the wizard it will also supply a link to the CSS file. I merely copied the contents of file and set up a separate CSS file on my site, obviously changing the CSS code to fit the design of History Nexus.

http://www.historynexus.net/template...istorynews.php

Ops, sorry, you also need the Google Feed API key.

In the head of my site it looks like this:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=ABQIAAAAteUS33V7G5LMfPUUbynb7hQghBl1OuFH kI7YPYHUfY55687A9RQgSydINq8aHGqX2NWyPhGdcF5PRg"
type="text/javascript"></script>

Sign up for one here:

Sign up for the Google AJAX Feed API - Google AJAX Feed API - Google Code

[Divisive Cotton]

One thing that I forgot to add to the list is this nifty little free content generator tool for quiz's:

Multiple Choice Generator - ContentGenerator.net - create your own Educational Flash games

It creates a Flash file to embed in a HTML page.

I used it to add quiz's to the History Nexus MySpace page but it would be easy to add it to a Pligg page.

Myspace.com Blogs - History quiz number one - History Nexus MySpace Blog

[Divisive Cotton]

Another thing I did a couple of weeks ago was to increase the life of my domain name. Previously the .net was only purchased for one year, and now the I have secured the name for five years.
Two weeks later - after running a keyword trawl - I see I now have a lot better SERP positions, especially in Yahoo, but as there are so many factors in SEO it's hard to pinpoint this as the sole cause.
There is a school of thought in SEO that having a new domain name with only a one year lifecycle is a sign to SE's that your site is for spam, increasing it to a long length is a reassurance to them that you are in it for the long haul and not just after a quick buck. Who knows.

[catchpen]

Thanks for the info, very informative. This thread could possibly be a sticky and more info added from everyone here.

But IMO your logo should be more Wikipedia like and less Terminator like. :not me:

[Divisive Cotton]

But IMO your logo should be more Wikipedia like and less Terminator like. :not me:

Do you think so! You could be right...

[aviator]

How can you limit the number of stories that appear in the RSS feed?

Found the solution:
line 20 in rss.php - else $rows = 40; - is the line to edit with the number of rss items needed.

[Divisive Cotton]

In the Pligg rss field? I really don't know I haven't looked into that.