Technology Reports

Well, it has now been just over 3 weeks since I launched my first web proxy, and I just wanted to recap a little as to what I have found has and has not worked with building and promoting them.

First, I started with a proxy in a sub-directory of this site and found that it was using a lot of resources. It was also reasonably profitable, so I got another server to put it on. The next problem I had was that It was in a sub-directory and this was causing some other problems. So, when I moved to to the new server, I put it on a sub-domain.

Whatever you do, if you plan on running a proxy or a proxy network, make sure you get a reasonable server to run it on. For the 4 days I was running it on the server with my other sites the performance was terrible and all the other sites on the server were affected as well.

I always planned to set up more than 1 proxy, so a few days later I set up another proxy on the server as well - this was after the first proxy had been running for a bit over a week. I basically duplicated what I did with the first site and just re-wrote a little bit of the content so it reflected the “branding” of the new domain.

Proxy number 3 was put online at the start of week 3, but this time, I tried a few different things with the actual proxy site. I experimented with the colours and layout etc - only time will tell if this will be succesful.

Promotion of the proxys has been a fairly simple process. In all cases, I have submitted them to 2 or 3 common sites including proxy.org The next thing that I did was to submit each proxy to 5 or 6 topsites - making the submissions to different topsites for each proxy. This strategey was to maximise the spread of the traffic sources for each site. The first proxy, I had a couple of myspace bullitens done about the site - and had mixed results. Yes, I had a lot of traffic, but very little return traffic. I basically broke even on that method.

Regarding traffic, I have found that the traffic is reasonably good and continues to grow without further promotion.

Proxy 1 went from nothing to about 3K visitors when I had the myspace bulletins done. It has settled down at around the 300-500 visits/day now.

Proxy 2 went from nothing to around 300 visitors for 1-2 days after launch and dropped off a little. It is slowly improving and now getting around the 500 visits/day as well.

Proxy 3 has only been going for about a week so far and is getting around 200 visits/day - I hope it slowly improves next week.

What I have noted is that the traffic is slowly improving without doing any further promotion after the initial launch.

The daily traffic is normally around the 1200-1500 visits/day during the week and drops off quite a lot over the weekends. My strategey of launching a new proxy each week is quite easy to do and I am currently spending around 2 hours to skin and promote each site. I plan to continue to add a new site each week until I reach the resource limits on the server that I am running. When I get close to fully using the resources, I will do a bit more evaluation of the profitability of the network and if it is going well I’ll keep doing more of the same. After all, for the time and effort I have put in V’s the income made I am pretty happy so far with the results.

It might sound a bit strange, but when all things are considered, outsourcing some of your web development or design tasks makes a lot of sense. For the struggling webmaster who is earning only a few $ per month from their site, they may question why they would actually pay someone to do some work for them.

Well, for me, I know what ny own skills and strengths are, and also know that there are a lot of people who have the skills that I don’t. In some cases, it makes a lot of sense to pay someone to do a job or task for you. A couple of examples of paid work are: directory submission, coding or graphics design.

Now, lets look at these 3 examples in a bit of detail.

Directory submissions are what you would call simple, repetitive and very necessary tasks. Yes, almost anyone can do it, but at what cost? Directory submissions generally take a bit of time to do, and as time is money, it makes a lot of sense to outsource this task. In a lot of webmaster forums, you can pay as little as $10 and get up to 100 or more submissions made on your behalf. Now, $10 is not a lot of money, but if you consider that typically it takes 4-5 hours to do the 100 submissions, you need to consider how much your time is worth.

Coding for a website or web application is a skill that is developed only with time and practice. If you need a particular feature for your site and are not able to code it yourself, then your choices are to outsource the work to a programmer or to buy a script that already does what you want. Sure, you can find scripts to do a job for you, but it may not be exactly what you were looking for.

Graphics tend to be an area that you either can or cannot do, and I tend to fall into the cannot area myself. So, for me, this is a no-brainer I outsource this sort of work. I normally have a pretty good Idea as to what I am looking for and tend to try and find someone who can create the graphics to my requirements. Sure, I tend to shop on price somewhat, but I also look for a few other things. I like to find someone who charges a fair price and can complete the work in a reasonable timeframe.

It honestly does not make any sense to spend hours (or even days) struggling to do some tasks when you can pay a small amount and get it done for you. My own personal skills are coding and SEO, so I know it is easier for me to pay for things like graphics. Now other people run very succesful Internet busineses and have never even created a web page. They have strong markeing skills and pay for everything else.

This morning when I got up, I found I had a message in my inbox that had came from the contact form on one of my proxy sites.

The message was short, sharp and to the point: it said

Your TechnologyReports Web Proxy has been blocked by Websense.

So, off to see if it had been blocked, I logged into websense to check it out. and sure enough on a database update on the 15th Feb 2007 the site was blocked. Now, this site has only been live and online for about 2 1/2 weeks and the search revealed the following:

URL: http://bypass.technologyreports.info
Category: Proxy Avoidance
Database version: 92731
Database date: 15 Feb 2007
Product used: Websense Enterprise® v6.2

Now, I understand why people who run Proxy sites don’t just run 1 - they have literally hundreds of domain names.

This means that all the effort I put into getting the site known has probably already come to a halt and I need to consider setting up another domain as a Proxy. What I will look at and consider, is to set up some additional sub-domains so that hte technologyreports proxy can continue to work. I just need to experiment with all possible solutions and see how it goes.

The good thing is that by having a blog as the main page of the domain, people searching for technologyreports will probably end up here on this blog, and as long as I continue to update a post and link here, I can probably change the sub-domain of the proxy fairly regularly and give people who use the proxy the freedom to do just that without being filtered. Let me know what you think!

Most blog sites are powered by Wordpress - the blog software that powers this site. Now everyone who gets into blogs is looking for the elusive unique theme to give them their own look and feel.

By default, it comes with 2 themes as part of the install, but there are literally hundreds of other themes available for you to install. You can go looking for a theme, find what you want and install it. You could either create a unique Custom theme or get someone to create one for you.

If creating your own theme sounds like a lot of hard work, you could get one that is published and customise it to your liking. That is what I have done for this site. While reading other Blogs, I liked the look of the “Freshy” theme, but wanted something a bit unique as well. So, I installed the theme and then set about seeing what options it has.

This is one of the better ones in that it has a decent set of config options so you can get it looking how you want it. So, I set it up, and didn’t like the choice of Top banner images that were available. With 10 images, I figured that they would have been used at least once each and using one of them would not give me the look I was after.

I had 2 choices - Go to a stock photo site and pick out an image that I could use or take one of my own. As luck would have it, I had recently been taking a few photo’s of my bike. I looked at the size of the images and set about to create something that would fit and would give a decent, unique feel to the site. I wanted Techno and retro all at the same time, and the whole chain that is made up of (web) links was my answer.

A little bit of editing a photo I fortunately had and that is how my site became what it is. I know the site is unique for the simple reason I took the photo - nobody else will be using the picture I am on their site. So, next time you create a blog site, grab an existing theme and customsie the colours and images to give it your own personal touch.

Well, I found a bit of a weird problem with the phproxy script.

I had it installed in a sub-directory on this site at http://technologyreports.info/bypass/ but it was not working too well when going to some sites. well, one site - MySpace. When you logged into myspace via the proxy, it was giving an error.

In order to fix the problem, I had to put the proxy into a sub-domain and now it all works. It is now located at http://bypass.technologyreports.info/ and it lets you log into myspace.

I guess that I need to do some more research on this and find out why!

While researching the whole proxy idea, I followed a link at digitalpoint and came across a useful site.  The site is a series of articles on making a succesful proxy site.  It is broken up into various topics, and at face value it looks really good.

I will be monitoring it, and commenting on how the info compares to my own efforts.  At the moment, they only have 4 articles published, but that’s ok!  The 4 articles cover everything that I have done or am doing to date.