Motorcyclists love to share infobits, pictures, and experiences. Whether it’s blogs, social networking sites, or picture albums; bikers tend to have just as much fun as anyone else.

What we don’t play well with are singular sources of information. So if MotorcycleURLs displayed a group of links from Google News or technorati, there is a solid chance that most of the links listed would:

• be of little or no interest
• if it was of interest, the information would eventually disappear from the site anyway
• couldn’t be learned, because one part may not be as useful on the next visit

When the Motorcycles International Portal goes live, the MotorcycleURLs domains will be pointed to the WebLinks Directory within the portal. If a user wanted to browse or contribute links involving Ducati for example, they will be able to browse and share what excites them.

When it’s one or two sites, you plan your day as a normal person.

When it’s several upgrades, none of which are “simple”, it’s an entire day out to deal with the many changes.

In any case, the results look good. R3Owners.Net is running very well. MotorcycleURLs shows absolutely no difference. Motorcycles International hasn’t yet achieved any level of custom/unique status that would create problems.

The weather has been too cool to ride. Shame, but it did keep me inside.

There’s a few bugs and a planned upgrade, but the entire site has finally been moved over to a compltely new portal platform – after two years of planning, developing, testing, and implementation.

It’s difficult to gauge what the overall perception is right now. Traffic has increased, as well as visitor and member participation. Time will tell as everyone settles into the new surroundings.

• The Wiki didn’t stay. It was running fine, but I converted everything to a blog system.
• The Original Photo Albums couldn’t convert completely. I ended up doing a conversion to a new format that was more stable, and developed my own integration.
• The new Member Albums have been a great success, but we’re still in the early stages of what it can do.
• Other features formely part of forums or special posts are now organized in their own respective applications. The New Classifieds are well accepted.

Time to get some more riding time in

This morning, the familiar yellow security icon appeared in my desktop tray. I knew what was going to happen next, Internet Explorer was going to get updated.

I was right, it was the only issue that needed to be updated.

Downloading wasn’t much of a challenge. Roughly 16mb at first, and I ran an errand while the subsequent download/install phase took place. When I got back from the grocery store, my computer was ready to reboot.

Changing the default text-bolding mechanism was the first step, and fixing some of the toolbars around so that I could get a grasp on what was going on with the menus. Chose to stick with default tools only for now.

The true scare came when I saw how a couple of my sites looked under IE7. I did a similar test recently after upgrading to Firefox 2 with no issues; but IE7 was trashing primarily DHTML and CCS menus that were being used on some sites. Even though these sites validated 100% at the W3C Validator, as some of you already know it doesn’t matter much when you’re dealing with buggy browsers.

My sites that relied on primarily HTML 4.0 code, with more tables than css, weren’t harmed by IE7 bugs.

IE7 was basically a solid install without any issues. It isn’t crashing or behaving erractically. So in that respect, we can say Microsoft did well. However, Microsoft has some work to do before IE7 will be accepted within the enterprise market.

For me, I’m going to use Firefox a bit more.

ShawnReed.Com went through several updates this time, including manual changes to the core code (again). It wasn’t to facilitate any tests really, just time to be done.

It is possible to create pages that are coded to a single line of text. Yes, starting from the opening XHTML Tag (or HTML if your a coder from the Dark Ages) to the closing document tag. Even your JavaScript, which should be externally called, should be able to co-exist at the single-line level.

Realistically, if one were still coding static pages the concept would likely create more work and effort. However, if your site is dynamic and built upon objects that are easily referenced and re-usable the process is much easier.

Although the savings in bandwidth and server utilization is negligible, if added together the overall savings would be enourmous. Web Site Owners may sneer, but your users will appreciate the download and browser loading efficiencies from a site whose pages represent a single line of code. That includes your stylesheet as well!

The trick is to develop in what is easiest for you, as your web site (or web application) develops and matures tighten it up by defining common terms and layout code to variables and/or templates and making use of external CSS.

The low-cost webhosting business is nothing more than a bunch of marketing B.S.

Get this; 2400 Gig of Disk Space – 150 Gig of Data Transfer – and many other BS Features = $7.00 per month.

It goes on and on, and people actually waste their time mulling over all of these services as if it is as significant as reading automotive reviews in Consumer Reports.

Look at disk space: Some hosting services offer 2 Gig of disk space, which does make some sense but where does 2400 Gig come from? Even if they did provide it, you would have to fly in and install a high speed storage server to make regular backups a bearable experience.

Somebody stop the bandwidth BS: 150 Gigs! Geez man, if your website had enough content for kind of draw it would have to fall within such a fine spec that maybe 1% of the worlds websites could fall into. For the rest of us, if you are transferring that much data your site is doing more to the server than just transferring bandwidth.

The fact is that the small hosting market has become so consumed in low-cost hosting that it is almost impossible to find a provider who does the “necessities”. Things like a guaranteed share of the server’s processor or memory would be a start. Firewall support would also be nice, but most webmasters don’t understand the significance of locking down your site (come to think of it, most web hosting providers don’t know either).

Personal Blogs are usually not entirely server resource intensive, so what should you use? Well, if security and availability aren’t a concern then just about any service will work. However, if security and availability are a concern and you don’t mind a little commercial advertisement on your site then check out what the big ISPs or Portals offer (AOL, Yahoo, Google, etc.) They may not be perfect, but at least there are some smart folks behind the infrastructure.

If you prefer to go it on your own, then get ready because few Hosting Providers have a working knowledge of Network Security of Server Administration. Don’t believe the BS that most spew out about 24×7 NOCs and around-the-clock engineers, because the web hosting reseller business is huge. All they have to do is setup a snazzy website and wait for the unsuspecting to sign up.

My advice is either sign up with a big-name hosting company, or find a small business in your area that provides hosting. You’ve either got a well-established support process to fall back on or a local relationship that may not always be available, but you’ll better understand what your challenges may be. For example, if your site does do 150Gigs of data transfer the next web hosting choice will represent a smarter decision.

Don’t confuse my definition of Ranking with how high you place on search engines. Instead, it is what another rank another site assigns you.

For some sites, it is nearly impossible to win hearts and minds by traffic alone. There are plenty of informative places to go, that may never attain a traffic level higher than a few hundred page views per month. One example would be a site with pictures of German Sheperd pups for sale (I’m still looking for something to replace Murphy).

If we measured by traffic alone, then my site TriumphRat.Net, should command mega-dollar advertising rates. At least enough to buy me a few more bikes

Some folks think that Google’s PageRank feature is a sure-fire way to attain preferred status. In fact, some consultants make handsome sums feeding their clients that garbage.

Then others do the various tricks that involve creative keywords, hidden texts, and jump pages. Yet, with all of the stupid implementations, most of it actually does work when words aren’t abused.

We could go on exploring, but the truth for most sites is that creative effort is needed to be found by your target audience.

Here are some proven strategies:

• Don’t use execessive images – If you don’t know CSS or have a creative design in mind, hire a developer to do it for you.
• Don’t use excessive Flash or Shockwave – Don’t sign off on a project where the site is nothing but a bunch of multimedia unless you’re already spending millions in marketing somewhere else. For example, Ozzy Osbourne can have a 100% Flash Site, Sharon has already done a wonderful job marketing him and doesn’t need help from Yahoo or Google.
• Spend more time on your content – Make sure site informative and resourceful, so many fail to do this.
• Spend less time on your Meta Tags – If your using a language like PHP, ASP, HTML/OS, JSP, & etc. try assigning dynamic variables to your tags that represent the content on the page. I’ve done it before – it works.
• Crosslinking – Allow sites to link to you that need your site as a resource, but not the other way around. If you link to another site with the same content as yours, why would anyone go to your site (or why would search engines).

Simply put, the old idea of constantly changing content only works if it benefits both the user and the indexers & search engines that are looking for the information you have to offer.