Skip to main content

CMS and RSS Feeds-Pivot Tweaked

For those of you that read my last post, you know I'm diversifying my publishing methods. There are information sites that I don't run subscription lists on. But I do have other sites where I want people to subscribe to a mini-course or newsletter.

I read a post on some blog (don't recall) that the trend is for people to get get information on their own time , instead of newsletters via email; I'll still continue with my autoresponders and mailing lists, but I'll be adding RSS feeds to some of my new sites.

I've realized the easiest way to do this is by using blogs. So, I had to sacrifice something to get an added benefit.

So, back to Pivot. For those of you not familiar with this software, it's a PHP blog that is flatfile based (it uses a text database). I didn't want to add up my costs by getting MySQL added. So I ended up doing some hacking with Pivot.

I changed things around so Pivot is more of a CMS than a blog. There was a feature to turn off live entries. What this does is save each post as a static file. I then changed the templates to write a description from the post subtitle. I added keyword metatags from the keywords used for Pivots internal search engine. I changed the template to make it load faster and make it more search engine friendly.

Will Pivot be my main CMS platform. For blogs-yes, for overall content publishing-not yet. I guess I'll see some results in the next 6-12 months. At that time, I'll do some research to figure out which one I like the best.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Stop Spambots From Stealing Your Email Address

If you've listed your email address on your website, I'm sure you've been bombarded with SPAM. Tons of email addresses are taken from websites manually, or through computer programs called SPAMbots. They rip email addresses for the sole purpose of spamming. One of the best ways to avoid these SPAM programs from taking advantage of your email address is to use a contact form. Using a server side form will hide your email address from site visitors, as well as SPAMbots. If you're not sure how to set up a form, you can also encrypt your email address. A site that I use is Email Riddler from Dynamic Drive . It will encrypt your email so that it is hidden from the SPAMbots. All you have to do is enter your email address, link text, and an optional subject line, click on the button and a javascript is automatically generated for you. Just copy it and paste it into your website where your email or contact us code would usually go.
3 comments
Read more

This Months Star - Earning More Than $144K / Mo

I have to say congrats to super affiliate Kieron Donoghue. After reading his posts on Sitepoint , I realized that I should be focussing on pay-per-click (PPC) more than natural search. It's an idea that I first started to really impliment after reading Rosalind Gardner's book , but I was still pumping out a lot of content for natural search. I've been probably doing 80% SEO and 20% PPC. After reading his posts, I've decided to pump up my PPC ads. Here's a few quotes from Kieron: "Above is a picture taken of 1 of the 5 pages from my business bank statement that relates to late December 2005, early January 2006. Obviously I've used Photoshop to key out some banking reference codes. I've only posted a picture of 1 page instead of all 5 as I don't want to disclose exactly how much I earn in a month. (BTW the currency of my bank statement is £UK Pounds Sterling). As you can see the rough total on that 1 page alone is roughly £82,000 which works out a...
2 comments
Read more

Starting An Internet Business-Part 3-Get A Cheap Web Hosting Package

If you've chosen your domain name, you'll also need a place to store your information. This server space is what a web host is. What you'll want to do is find a cheap web hosting package . When I say "cheap," I don't mean low quality. There are so many places to get web hosting, that searching for an affordable one could be tough. Most of the big named companies offer tons of web hosting packages, but unfortunately are pretty expensive. I'm pretty surprised that Yahoo is still offering their starter package close to $12/mo, with a $25 startup fee. I guess it's the name that sells. Over the last decade, I've tried out several hosting companies. For over the past 2 years, I've chosen a service where I have 10 websites set up on. If you want to set up one website, you pay $1/mo. If you want to have 10 websites, it's $2.95/mo. They have a startup fee, but it's pretty small compared to the monthly savings. Before selecting the package...
1 comment
Read more