Is there any money left?

It took a village to make this website (Stairway to Devon) and it took me several months to complete it.

I’d been experimenting with Joomla! and Drupal, and one of the first things I found was that Joomla! has several options for purpose built business directory extensions, and Drupal doesn’t have any (at least it didn’t at the time). Joomla also seemed a lot more user friendly. So I went for Joomla.

I decided to minimise complications by sticking with one of the default Joomla templates (rhuk_solarflare_il) - I just changed the graphics and colours to be more artistic and Devon-like. I also tweaked the PHP of the template to some extent, eg replacing a couple of module positions with the Featured Artist spot.

The directory itself was the next thing to consider. I looked at the Joomla extensions site and chose Sobi2 directory from Sigsiu.net because it was free, had good reviews and lots of features, and a forum that seemed active and helpful. It’s proved to be a good choice, for all those reasons, and I’ve been using it at work as well. I also installed OpenSEF for search engine friendly URLs, because the Sobi forums recommended it and there is a Sobi extension for it. It’s added a lot of extra complication, but I think it’s worth it to get more meaningful addresses.

I think possibly a less detailed directory would get more entries in, but Google and co seem like they may be coming down on that sort of thing. Then I saw a flyer from a local Chinese takeaway on the pavement, and they had a web address that was obviously a directory, subdomain or page of something else. So I decided the directory could be something a lot more featured and detailed than a link directory, perhaps providing an inexpensive internet presence for people starting up in self employment, or sole traders who might not ever want to spring for the cost of a full website but could still do with somewhere to present themselves on the internet. And for those who do have a website, it’s another way to get it noticed and found. Fingers crossed.

The next thing I got to play with was modules and module positioning. I used Mod HTML to set up modules for the Google AdSense.

Given my customers to date, I thought it would also be good to provide an arts focus, firstly to provide them with more publicity and also because it would make the site look a lot nicer!

So I added some more features, including e-cards from RWCards, image galleries and a randomly displaying ‘Featured Artist’ spot with a corresponding information page. I needed some way for members to upload these so I added the perForms form component, which seems to work well.

I added a members’ news section using the content management features of Joomla, set up RSS feeds to bring in a Devon news section, and installed the VFM component to provide a downloads area. I offered Devon flags to download in various sizes because it was something I had been looking for myself. Then I thought of other things to download and made provision for a coupons area.

I wanted members to be able to find and edit their listings easily, so I installed Community Builder and its Sobi2 plugin. This provides user profiles with contributions listed and accessible for editing. This also had to replace the login and registration module.

I added an events calendar using JCal Pro. I think it’s ok, although the mini calendar, which I’d like to use, unfortunately breaks the layout. I was undecided about the front page anyway so I ended up just not using it. But I liked that the calendar had the potential to bring in musical events. In theory I could add music and video to download from the directory pages, but I don’t think my hosting allows this.

Then Google maps arrived, because I needed to do a lot of test work on them for another site. They became an extra feature for directory listings and also a feature to offer from the menu. UK postcodes caused a lot of problems, and basically did not work, so I used a clickable map (provided by the Sobi2 people) to fetch latitude and longitude coordinates instead.

The final artsy feature (so far) was the jBook Book Catalogue component. It’s a great idea, but I ended up having to do quite a lot of PHP tweaking to get this one working on my site: the book reviews were not working with the search engine friendly urls, and then when I turned off SEF URLs for that section, the reviews would be posted again every time I reloaded the page. So I added some session variables to sort that out, but it could still do with some work on the URLs.

Lastly, I installed BannersManager and its Sobi2 plugin, because I wanted to test out more flexible banner management, tailoring the display of banners for different sections of the site and different categories within the directory. I applied for a selection of affiliate programs via TradeDoubler and was somewhat astonished when they approved my site - I’ve been working on this too long!

Some of my new site’s registration emails are not being received, so once again I am fiddling about with SPF records.

Here are some useful links:

• SPF setup wizard. This is a good place to start, but then use the validation checked in the next tool as well, because each edit takes hours, or even a day to become updated.
• Scott Kitterman’s SPF tester is a Python tool that can either look up the current SPF record for for your domain, or check the validity a record you enter. I’ve found this very helpful.
• Email this address: check-auth@verifier.port25.com to get a reply containing the results of the SPF check.
• Enter your server’s IP address here to check whether it is blacklisted by Spamcop
• Find out a lot about your domain and server with the DNS report here.

I almost can’t believe it: today I had a returned mail message that actually had come from me. I also recently had a special offer on Adobe products that really did come from Adobe. What’s going on? I’ll be hearing from a genuine pharmacist or dentist next.

I’d had the plan of launching a web directory for about a year, and bought the domain name a long time before I got the chance to work on it. The idea was that a directory would provide the following benefits:

• Advertising opportunities, with special features to offer to my customers
• A chance to increase my skills, resulting in a new site to add to my portfolio
• Something to test out various advertising and marketing strategies with
• The possibility that it could make some money
• And of course the possibility of it bringing me more work in web development

This blog section will report on progress in developing and marketing the Stairway to Devon Web Directory.

The beginning of August was disrupted for me by an avalanche of Spam.

It started when I checked my email early one evening and found over 30 messages in my Spam folder. I may have been lucky until now, but this was unusually high for me. So I checked the folder and was horrified to discover the dreaded bounced back spam mails were back: every single one was a bounced back spam email that had failed to be delivered and appeared to come from my domain name. (See my earlier post, Email spoofing - Spammers are pretending to be me).

But it was to get much worse.

I moved that first batch to save in a folder in case I needed to investigate them later. When my Spam folder refreshed itself, another 30 emails appeared. I tried refreshing it again, and the number of Spam mails went up to 60. Every time I refreshed my Spam folder another 30 spam mails appeared, and this went on for the next 6 hours until I had over 3000 bounced back spam emails. I dreaded to think how many other spam mails might have got through.

I put the ’sorry but it’s not my fault’ type spam message back at the top of my home page, expecting fallout throughout the next couple of days, and started testing my SPF record. The SPF instructions are terrible, so not surprisingly it wasn’t quite right. This was annoying in itself, as every time I changed it via my web hosts the change would take at least 6 hours to propagate through the internet. I changed it several times after this until the testing script finally said it was valid.

In between testing my SPF records, I started checking through the spam mail headers to see if any of it could be traced or reported to anyone. I found the most complete headers generally came back from ‘qmail’ programs. I posted every one I could find into ‘Spam Cop’, which traced most of them to a server in Mexico and a couple to other servers as well, so I sent spam reports for all of these. I also reported as many as I could stand to the address that Gmail suggests for this purpose, which is: spam@uce.gov

I continued doing this as more and more of the spam mails came back. The next day I expected a second avalanche of angry responses from real people, but thankfully most of them seemed to either recognise spam without opening it or ignore it: I only had one reply from someone in Australia, saying ‘Please don’t send emails any more’. I felt bad that even one person would think I would send this rubbish.

I must have sent some of it to some kind of email address collectors as well, as I have been receiving a lot more spam myself since then.