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Yes, that’s right I didn’t do what you are supposed to do when you are maintaining a blog.

What is this cardinal rule of blogging that I broke?

It is really quite simple, I didn’t keep my blog updated. You need to add new content to your blog or site at least once per week to keep the search engine spiders happy.

Of course I have an excuse as to why I didn’t keep it updated, but then again we always have an excuse for the things we do or don’t do.

Even though it isn’t worth the paper (cyber-paper?) it is written on here is why I haven’t made a post recently.

Most of you that know me know that I am a techno-geek and I like technology and learning how to do all the technical things on the internet.

Yes, I can hear you groaning and saying, “How can you like the technical side? I hate the technical stuff!” But aren’t you glad that there are people like me that do like the technical stuff and make it easier for you to get things done.

What I have been doing is actually learning how to write programs in PHP from start to finish.  A lot of you will know that I was familiar with PHP as far as installing the programs and tweaking them to do what I want. But this is a long way for actually creating a script that will run a website.

There were a lot of empty spaces in my knowledge and although I didn’t need to fill in the missing pieces to accomplish my goals there were just some things that I wanted to do that I couldn’t do.

For example, I wanted to create a site where you as a customer could choose from 100’s of products and pick only the ones you wanted to download but you could get the “big package, special, limited time, limited quantity, grand opening, holiday, one time offer” price.

In other words you could buy a package of 20 products and choose any 20 of the 100 products available on the site or you could buy just one product or you could buy 100. This means that you wouldn’t have to buy a package of 50 products to get that one product that you want and leave all the other products collecting digital dust on your hard drive.

I looked around and there is no script that will do this on a site that I could find. Yes there are shopping cart scripts that will let you purchase a number of products but each product has to have its own price and it becomes a cumulative total of all the products with the price going up and up and there is no discount for quantity.

I wanted to provide the quantity discount you find in the big packages where you pay very little per item and the price per item would go down when the number of items goes up.

So, I though about outsourcing the script and having someone else create it for me. But to be completely honest with you, I haven’t found a PHP programmer yet that knows what they are doing and would be willing to get tied down to putting my work first. This means that if there is a problem with the script I might or might not be able to get support.

With this in mind, I decided to create my own script and let me tell you I have spent a lot of time running down errors in the script and learning new things about PHP. I learned how to integrate PayPal’s IPN into the script to ensure that the package was actually paid for. I learned how to have PHP count the number of files in a folder. I learned how to protect a download link and right now I am learning how to create a search function for the script so that you can search through all the products to find that particular product that you want.

I doing this I actually set a goal to have this script up and running by June 3 and when I set my goals I go after them whole heartedly. This means that I have at times lost track of what day of the week it is.

But I do have a working version of the script done (except for the search) and when it is completed you will be able to see it in action at www.YourChoiceProducts.com (nothing there right now)

So, there’s my excuse for not posting but remember it is only an excuse. I could have created a post similar to this earlier to let you know what I was doing and helped keep the search engine spiders heading this way.

I have to keep telling myself, “Keep posting, don’t stop, keep posting, don’t stop” The only advantage I have is that this blog is not about making money it is about providing information to you.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 9:40 am and is filed under Blogging . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.