Failed ideas are great if you went through the process of trying to make something work, but you learned a lot in the process, and I suppose in this sense, it really isn’t a failure. I’ve made a lot of websites and web apps, and definitely some of them are no longer in existence. So maybe this page is somewhat of a retired shipyard. Let’s go through a few:
Article Script
This site was sort of a “second fiddle” to a more successful project called phpLD. The idea was to create an article directory organized by category. We had a few sales, but a few months into it, there was a major flaw, and many of our customer sites got hacked. Of course, we issued a fix, and recovered. But also there was a script called WordPress that had us outclassed, and we didn’t get too far. I am writing in WordPress now. 🙂 Here are the features we advertised at the time:
From the creators of PHP Link Directory, the Article Script is an easy way to add content to your site, or allow others to submit content and watch your site grow.
Search Engine Friendly Pages – The directories and the articles use good page titles and urls to make it easy for search engines to index your site. Mod rewrite can be turned on or off.
Uses the Fcked Editor – One of the most popular editors is now integrated into the script allowing easy cut and paste of formated text. There is an option to use a simple editor or an advanced editor with more features.
Create Categories and Subcategories – You can create an unlimited number of categories for your articles.
Most Recent Articles are displayed on the homepage so search engines will quickly find the new content.
User Submitted Articles – By default user submitted articles are “locked” until approved by the administrator. In the admin panel, you can view the latest submitted articles and then unlock them if you like them or delete them.
Smarty Template System is used for the templates in the script allowing designers to design and programmers to program. Easily add your own header and footer, and integrate with the “look and feel” of your site.
Database Tested – has been tested on databases with over 30,000 articles, and runs faster than more expensive commercial scripts.
Hopefully you will see this is a great value for only $10. The price will not stay this low. We will be adding more features soon. This is a great opportunity to purchase before the price increases.
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Look back… certainly I learned a lot about text editors and security! And this led to features that were included in future software projects.
NewsTopica
I still like the name, but I no longer own the domain. It was sort of phpLD for News Feeds. It actually was pretty cool in that you could set it to automatically import RSS feeds, and they would be searchable. At the time, the technologies that were available to import RSS feeds were not that advanced, and there were always incompatibility issues. We sold quite a few, but I guess is could be said that bot created aggregator sites don’t really thrive anymore. Here are the features we advertised:
Using the powerful engine of PHP Link Directory, NewsTopica brings a whole new concept, allowing you to create your own news site similar to Google News or Topix.net.
Create Categories – you can create categories for news. You may import multiple feeds into one category.
Import Feeds – Feeds are imported, and sorted by age. The more recent news appears first.
Front Page – For each category, you can decide if you want stories to appear on the first page (or not), and decide how many.
Setup Cron – You can setup a cron to import news stories as often as you like. Probably once per hour will be sufficient.
Great for Niche Sites – Let’s suppose you want to create a news site for your niche. For example, you could create a news site about Baseball, and then import RSS feeds for each team in the league.
Create a large, searcheable site – Over time, your site will be enormous, with huge stores of information that is all searcheable.
Search Engine Friendly – Using mod_rewrite, category URLs should be spidered well by search engines.
Linkable Search Results – Just like Topix.net, you can link to search results.
Perhaps, I will have more (past!) failures coming soon, and maybe some in the future too. 🙂
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