Long Climb To The Top

By

Robbo

Sex Nexus

This article is about the building of my toplist matrix in hopes I can enlighten, entertain, educate and in some cases demystify toplists. Over the years toplists have gotten somewhat of a bad name. Often associated with circle jerks and broken promises. But recently we have seen more of what we can call honest lists popping up that have a balance between content and value for a surfer and webmaster friendliness. Always hotbeds of traffic and having seen first hand the value of having that traffic generating itself was enough to peak my interest.

Previous to this I`ve been scrambling around for a bit over 2 years building free sites and tgp galleries. It came time for me that I needed to diversify and expand my online empire. I also wanted to better control a portion of my traffic and the prospect of having a place to list ones own sites is definitely a plus! Having built sites for a while I now have some residual traffic hanging around and have learned the basics of it`s manipulation. It was high time I climbed for loftier altitudes!

Looking at the options of link type sites I settled on starting a toplist as opposed to a link list or a tgp. After kicking around the idea I decided niche was the way to go. And being that I like to diversify I wanted more than one list. It makes sense with my diverse traffic too. I have yet to claim a specialty niche and build for several different ones regularly.

I began by looking for a script to run my lists and settled on List Site Pro. It`s a free perl script and I had seen it used successfully by other toplists I am familiar with. While it does lack some features of scripts offered for sale it had the ability for webmasters to edit their accounts which was lacking on some of the other free scripts. While preparing to set up a new domain for the lists I installed the script on an existing domain and got a feel for it. To my surprise having never used or installed a script before I had it up and running in under 10 minutes. The instructions were easy to follow and the default settings matched the configuration of my server without the need to edit any variables in the script such as paths to sendmail or perl.

For those of you unfamiliar with these terms and concepts in general there is a great cgi tutorial in the VNWR resources. Honestly that`s about as much info as I had needed along with the instructions to my script to get going. Of course that varies by individual but fear not, good resources abound. Read on!

What this toplist script basically does is collect a database of sites and track hits in and out accredited to each site and ranking them accordingly. The actual index page a list resides on is simply a blank page called index.html on which the script dynamically generates the info to create the page and an up to date list. My lists update every 30 minutes and reset every 7 days...the default setting and practical for a new list site. Elements of the list such as the top and bottom of each list page, rules and ad spots are pulled from templates within folders in the cgi-bin folder. These can be edited to contain ads, site logos and the like.

Installing and setting up the script involves placing the script folder containing the actual script itself along with the html template folder and a password protected folder for the scripts workings into the domains cgi-bin folder. A new subfolder is then created into which is uploaded the blank html page at the url where the list will reside. The next step is to set permissions for each of the files. In other words tell each one if it can be written to, read, edited or accessed and by whom. This is done using chmod commands. Now this being foreign stuff to me and hearing it recommended I used CuteFTP for the job. I already use it as my main ftp client so that settled that! As easy as typing in the numbers according the scripts instructions. After setting permissions the next step is to go look at the list page to make sure it`s working. Then sites can start being added.

Now the real work begins...of generating traffic, obtaining site submissions and turning a bunch of bare pages into a thriving nexus of sex and porn! Sure to be a long climb ahead!

Look for Part II of this article "Down from the mountains to greener pastures" (What it all means to you)

Robbo