Friday, April 28, 2006

Creating Personal Website - TOO MUCH TO DO!

Lots of companies are offering personal website creation these days. Lots and lots of people create personal websites and then abandon them! I have done that many times myself. What's the reason? First of, who is interested in looking at your website? What good will your website do to the world? How in the world will you let people know that you have a website? And above all, how will you make people visit your website? Most of it is in the content of the website. So you are imaginative and create a really cool website. Now what? You have to spread the word that you have a really cool website that people will like. But how can you put the word out? There are so many search engines to submit the site to! and then on top of all that, you have to compete with the world!!! That's a lot of websites we are talking about.

I created my website http://www.hfaridi.com some time ago. Have submitted it to most of the search engines. Now whats the key which will make random users come to this website? There are two ways! Spend a lot of money and put ads on search engines. I don't have money!!! 2nd is to spend a lot of time creating blogs like this one :) Ofcourse just one blog doesn't take long. You have to write a lot of them and make them interesting enough so people actually read it. Also, go do different websites and make references to your website. This way is cheap in monetary terms, but takes a hell lot of time. Which again, I don't have!

So finally, I thought I should just write one blog. Hope maybe someone will look at it and take a look at mywebsite. I am not saying that it's an imaginative website :) Just trying to make people look at it.

BTW, I created a php script for creating photo albums. It's a stand alone script which just needs to be copied to a directory with nothing but pictures or directories of pictures. Thumbs for the album are creating on the fly by just minimizing the actual pictures. If you have a directory e.g. "Pictures" and have 5 more directories inside of that directory named "January", "March", "Birthday", "Trips"and "Landscape". Just put the script file in "Pictures" directory. Make sure you do not have any picture files in the "Pictures" directory. When linked, the script will look at all of the directories inside of the "Pictures" directory (If there is even one .jpg file it will consider the "Pictures" directory as an album, therefore showing the pictures in album format) and show them with links. If you click on any of the 5 links, it will take you to the album with all pics as thumbs. Clicking on the thumb opens a new window with the fullsize picture. There is a link above the thumbs "Full size pics with scroll" which opens another page in the same window with the first picture in fullsize and previous, next links to previous/next pictures in that album.

If you do look at the website or the script, please let me know if it was of any use.

Happy surfing!