Introducing myself and eugl.es

[a_ronilla]

Hi,

This is Toni from Spain (Europe) and I just started my first Pligg site! And first of all, sorry for my poor english...

I've been a professional webmaster for some years, working for some high profile companies, but I've been retired the last few years (mostly taking care of my daughter). Now I'm back and ready to start a series of sites and I started with Pligg just as an experiment and as a warm up. I plan to release another Pligg site in a month or so, not as a business but to fill in an empty niche that is my main hobby.

Being from Spain I'm very familiar with meneame.net which code is the base for Pligg itself. I've been an active member at Menémae almost from the start of the project, so I know very well how it works (and I have my own idea on how Pligg sholud work too -I miss a working karma system the most). The main criticism about Menéame is its leftist bias: there is a majority of socialists and communists members (hey, this is Europe after all), so positive news form the right wing parties have a hard time reaching the homepage. And that's where my first site stands: a Menéame alternative for liberals (I know liberal may have a different meaning in USA and other countries, but here a liberal is someone from the right wing, a capatilist).

I don't expect the site to be a hit, and that's not my goal. As long as it is useful for some people as a less biased or biased-to-the-right news source, and it is useful for me to practice coding and site and community managing, I'll be fine.

Now onto the changes: as you can see (eugl.es) I'm using my own template. It's not a great design but I didn't want to spend too much time with it. It's practical from both a user and a SEO point and that's all I care right now. I have another design that I'll implement at some point if I have the time.

I have made some small modifications to the Pligg code, like using the comments module so it makes the site work like a forum (just a way to try to engage users into conversations), or like duplicating some admin functions so admins don't have to access the admin control panel to make changes (like changing link status).



Well, it has take me almost a whole month of hard work (more than 10 hours a day!), but I'm satisfied with the results. And since it will be the base of my second site and I'll be able to reuse almost everything, I think it's been worth the time.

Now comes the hard part: bringing in traffic.

Greetings from Spain and a big thank you to the Pligg team and everyone who has contributed.

Regards.

[wannabe]

welcome Toni!

your site looks nice. I am wondering though, how can you spent 10 hours per day while working?

[a_ronilla]

Thank you for the welcome wannabe!

Believe me, it's easy to spend 10 hours a day... when you have nothing else to waste your time with. Having been out of the business for some years and trying to start up again is a good reason to be motivated and spend even more time. And when you LOVE what you are doing, well, too much time is never too much.

Now that the site is on-line, I plan to spend just one or two hours a day with it, mostly submitting some stories, doing SEO and managing the site (if I can get some people to join, which is not an easy task). I'll spend the rest of the time with my second site (which will be a copy of the first with small changes) and then, after all this training with site set-up and managing (something I really need after years of inactivity), I'll try to start a commercial site.

[wannabe]

well maybe i should rephrase my question

How can you work 10 hours on your site next to your normal work? I work 40 hours per week, i only wish that i could spent 8 hours per day working on my websites. That would greatly improve a lot of things

W.

[a_ronilla]

Normal work? What normal work? LOL! That's the key: I don't have a job. Currently my wife works and I take care of our daughter and our home. Once I leave my daughter in the school, I have almost all the day for me (my wife brings our daughter home later). I just spend some time cleaning (if you clean a little every day, you don't have to spend hours) or cooking which is something I love.That's why I can spend so much time.

But this is something I'll try to change in a few months releasing a commercial site. Luckily I'll call that a 'normal work'. Time will tell.

Regards.