Which do you want? A website or a place to tell about your passion?

June 2, 2004 by JD · Comments Off
Filed under: Site Build It 

Everyone has a passion in life.

There are thousands of companies that offer a way to build a website. There is only one that offers a way to explore your passion and tell the world about it.

Perhaps your passion is a hobby or a business. Perhaps you want to help others. Whatever it is, there is a right way and a wrong way of presenting it to the world over the Internet.

The wrong way is to get a cheap web host and put up a website that recreates your brochure. Who’s going to find that?

The right way is to write about your passion. Build a website full of excellent content that offers information others want to find.

In the offline world, it’s all about location. In the online world, it’s all about information.

If you provide good information, the search engines will rank it highly and people will find you. This builds traffic, and a website with no traffic is just a waste of time and money.

There is exactly one company that will teach you how to write about your passion and build a website that automatically attracts targeted traffic with no tricks and no need for advanced technical skills.

Site Build It will help you tell the world about your passion.

It all starts by wanting to share your passion with the world — that’s where you come in.

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GeorgiaDragRacing.com rebuilt

June 2, 2004 by JD · Comments Off
Filed under: Georgia Drag Racing, Musings 

I got side-tracked in May. For several months, I’ve been fighting one or more hackers who have been breaking into my brother’s site at GeorgiaDragRacing.com and installing software that attacked other computers and ran an Internet Relay Chat — both of which are not allowed by our hosting company who have been working with us to put a stop to this.

On May 5, 2004, I received a notice from our SysAdmin that the hackers had installed software once again and he had detected and deleted it. He told me that he’d been patient for a long time, but this was the final notice. One more break-in and our account would be cancelled and we’d have to find another company to host the site. There are over 2,500 pages on that site!

Since I didn’t know how they were breaking in and I’d done everthing I knew, it was time for drastic action. After a long talk with David, my brother, we decided to completely rebuild the site and remove all the scripts that we were using to power the photo album, bookstore, forum, and news updating. It was going to be a big job, but it would be less work than moving everything — including thousands of photos — to another site.

So, I looked for alternate ways to do what we’d been doing with PERL and PHP scripts. We decided to create a blog at blogger.com for the news updates, which can now be found at gdrn.blogspot.com. The photos will be hosted at ImageStation.com until we find another site that is easier to use. The bookstore was completely rebuilt using javascript and direct links to Amazon.com and the forum was deleted in favor of the mailing list hosted by Yahoo groups.

So, I had to completely redesign everything and rebuild all the pages of the site. It took about three weeks of working around the clock to get it finished, but now we’re moving on using the new tools. Most of the functionality was saved, but it was a huge job and it pulled me away from the other tasks I had scheduled for this month.

There are probably quite a few broken links on the site and I’ll have to find and squash those bugs as they come up.

So, why am I telling you about this?

When building a business on the Internet, you may not always have total control over what happens. We had to make a decision and I had to do a lot of work to do our best to keep the site open. Now, we’re running no custom scripts and nobody but me knows the password to the site. Hopefully, that will foil the hackers.

In this case, the bad guys won the battle, but I still intend to win the war.

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