SE Noodles

by

Pastaboy

Of

Pasta's Pissers

You Can Be On Top

You can reference Robbo's Climb to the Top Part 1, Part 2. Toplists or "Friends Pages" are a way of filtering "crap" traffic into traffic that is a little more productive for you. The main focus as always is getting traffic into the toplist to get the exchange started. Since it's your toplist you will have to "chase" traffic. Putting recips on TGP pages, Freesites SE campaigns, submitting to similar category toplists, repointing htaccess rewrite rules. Whatever it takes to get traffic into *your* toplist.

Let's get into setting up Autorank Pro. First step to setting up the script (any cgi script), locate your perl interpreter. It varies from server to server usually #!/usr/local/bin/perl or #!/usr/bin/perl or #!/usr/sbin/perl. To find the path to perl telnet into your server and type "whereis perl". Don't know how to use telnet? Refer a newbie article by Barron, Basic Telnet. Your also going to need to know the correct paths to your directories and cgi files, or you could run a little cgi file called server.cgi or echo.cgi specifically written to give you server and directory information making editing script files a snap.

Refer to the Reference Page for example of the points in the article:

HTML Directory: Server path to your toplist directory outside the cgi-bin.

Cgi Url: Absolute url to your Autorank directory in the cgi-bin

Forward Url: Page the *Cows* end up at when they surf your site, the first page after your index.html page.

Forward URL: Your Toplist ranking page

Html Url: Html directory outside the cgi-bin

In Url: Absolute URL to the incoming hits tracking script (rankem.cgi)

Email Setup: Location of send mail on your server /usr/bin/sendmail, usr/sbin/sendmail or in some server setups domain.com

Overall Sites: This tells the script how many sites per page you want listed

Main Ranking Page: Your main Toplist Page, if it's a cumshot toplist; cumshot.html

Split List: This is for splitting your toplist up among a few pages your top 25 first page, 25 to 50 second page etc.

Break List: This is for your list breaks. Meaning if your list is a Top 50, you can include your own advertising in 1, 5, 15 positions of your (50) line list.

Font Sizes: Font sizes for different ranks. The higher the rank the larger the font.

Overall Banners: If you would like to give members a choice; banners instead of text

Category Ranks: This section is for a multiple niche toplist, tits, teen, babes etc.

The "Other Options" section is for tailoring your toplist

Minimum Hits: How many hits a particular site must send before getting hits back to their url

Site Title Max Length: Minimum number of characters a site tile can have: Keeps your list orderly, prevents long winded webmasters. Helps enforce short descriptive site titles.

Site Description: Same as above, but for the site description

Time Zone Offset: Self explanatory

Date Format: How the script will generate the date, the manual gives a pretty good explanation of the various formats and variables.

Time Format: How the script will generate the time, refer to the manual

The series of check boxes is up to the user, with the exception of requiring a recip link, IMHO the a way of controlling your toplist environment with the available options the script provides.

Rank Sites: How you want to rank the sites the script Auto Rank Pro gives a lot of options. Let's make it real easy: Hits in

Cron Update: Cool Feature but not necessary you can reset the list through the admin.cgi

Rerank Time: How often in seconds to rerank your list

Reset Time: How often in seconds you want to reset your list to "0".

Table Row Colors: If you want alternating row colors for your list rows.

The Next section is for your html and banner information and restrictions.

Check Boxes: Enable LWP perl module and verify urls during submission, can't have one without the other. Nice feature to verify the url of the submitted site people do make mistakes:)

User Defined Fields: More information you can gather in your database. You can use these however you want. Also enable the fields mandatory for inclusion into your toplist.

AutoRank Pro offers you some cheat protection. These are up to the individual toplist owner if they want to enable these features. Enabling some of the features requires disk space on your server. On a virtual account I would be very cautious using the cheat protection. Disk overage fees can hurt your pocket, and some hosts might even bump you up to the next plan and an increased monthly charge. Next week will take a look at the admin section of the script and the templates.

Hasta Pasta

Pasta's Cool DFN Link
Of The Week

How You Doin?

Never Enough Tools

Hasta Pasta