Top 5 Problems Running Your Sites?
 

In an effort to make the life of a webmaster easier, we're asking you, the webmaster, what your biggest problems are. Are there things you encounter regularly that you wish you could wave a magic wand and have fixed? What was the biggest problem you experienced this week? What kinds of things do you find your time wasted on?

While I know others will have much bigger problems and wastes of time I personally find the time I use hand coding new links into my multiple small hubs, niche LL etc a huge annoyance as I am sure a nice little script could do it all in seconds.

Biggest problem I've had this week is some network of assholes hotlinking my pics on a freesite, took the pics down, but apparently they are still sending so many hits that the domain has to be shut down temporarily.
My hosting guy can't figure it out, and I'm a mental midget when it comes to the techy server type stuff.
And how ya doing Ray? I remember you from the good ole days ;)

Moderating my message board for sig spammers :D

Sponsors who are in all liklihood shaving (1:4000 ratios).

Everyone tells me that I suffer from depression. Possibly Agitated Depression. More likely, I'm bipolar. Due to this, I lack focus and have a great deal of difficulty completing projects or maintaining those which I have miraculously managed to complete. If you could wave your magic wand and make this all go away - make it all seem worthwhile, without me having to go to therapy and have to discuss my entire life with someone who I'll probably detest and end up gutting, I'd be forever thankful. If you could do this before my wife comes the realization that she could do much, much better than me, that would be helpful as well.

Or for the armchair psychoanalysts out there - yes, I am left handed.

She already knows that but seems to love you anyway. I think you make her laugh.

Yeah, me too. |club|

You love Useless?

Ah, hell, sure...someone has to. :)

Free Hosted Gallery descriptions...Grrrr! I'm so freakin' tired of rewriting descriptions because it's SO painfully obvious that who ever wrote the original description never even looked at the gallery or just didn't give a rat's ass. Okay, breathe...Man it's a good thing I'm going on vacation soon...:)

Regards,
SF

I need a full time programmer VERY much, not having a guy to program for me at my fingertips always has and currently is holding me back from maximizing my potential in this biz

So much time building the damn tools I don't put them to use - or maybe it's just too damn boring not to? |huh

I'm in the same boat as Useless. ADD, Agitated Depression Disorder. I have to many ideas bouncing around in my tiny brain to remain focused. :D

1.TIME
2.TIME
3.TIME
4.TIME
5.TIME

I seem to spend a great deal of time tracking down dead links.

My TGP pretty much takes care of itself as the bot checks everything each day and removes anything that has changed or gone 404.

My LL also has a bot but I then have to check stuff that it finds and manually remove the sites. This is that bad but what is a problem is with LLs, unlike TPGs, the submitted stuff is multiple pages and my bot only checks the first page. I spend a great deal of time checking for sites that have changed the pages that have removed their gallery pages or pics or something.

Then there is the thousands or promotional pieces that I have built and submitted but the sponsor has gone out of business or something so the ads on my promotional pieces or no longer any good.

I think something the Link List world needs is a good bot that can check all four of the pages of all submitted (and hosted) free sites every day, or on whatever schedule the LL owner wants. Idealy it would be a customizable bot that would let the LL owner tweak a few settings so that the bot would check the free sites according to that particular Link List's rules.

Nice if it could run as a plugin of some kind to the top Link List scripts too. And if you could tell it what to do with different kinds of errors when it finds them. Something rule-based would be good.

:)

My main problem is the fact I can't program a thing. So I have to be after my programmer all the time to fix every thing but most of the times he's not online at the same time as me or he's busy with other things. If I knew at least basic programation I know I would save A LOT of time and headaches.

staying focused on work

Telling some hot little teenage tramp that you can't film today cuz you need to edit the video you shot last week - and the one the week before that, and the ........ And she cries cuz her rent ain't getting paid. (did I mention that I love hot little teenage tramps?)

the most big problem for me is little traffic amount on my cjs and tgp |banghead| work hard but i can not make my traffic biger |banghead| (but i work in narrow niche)... and lack of time always |cry|

Its not hard or time consuming. I started learning Perl by reading 'Perl For Dummies', and wrote my first useful program within a few hours of opening the book (still use that program occasionally too). I have since advanced beyond 'Perl For Dummies', but it teaches you enough for most basic jobs. I'm told the same is true for PHP, but although I bought a book, I have not got round to reading it (because I can now do everything I need to do in Perl, so why bother with PHP, particularly as PHP is slower).

I am sure alot of people wish they had your problems!

Should be able to fix that with .htaccess, some of those places send insane amounts of traffic.. I remember having a problem with a certain one a while ago, my server guy hooked up .htaccess (at least I think it was .htaccess) to block their entire domain and it seemed to work well.

My Top Five:
1: Time
2: BBS Bullshit
3: ICQ Interruptions
4: Sleeping
5: Eating

staying motivated to work

I've been going through the free tutorials at http://www.w3schools.com/ . Seems like a pretty good resource.

Isn't there a rule that PHP scripters aren't allowed to read any books
or take any classes?

I got a copy of PHP For Dummies for an employee to read. He never
read it, of course, but every so often when I look at PHP code I flip it
open and verify that indeed the obvious errors that seem to be in every
bit of PHP would have been avoided had the "programmer" bothered to
spend a few hours reading "PHP For Dummies" before writing and selling
their script.

Getting squirting sites submitted to my squirting link list (hint) Also getting more traffic to it.

My full experience with PHP is reading the manual in CHM format and learn from other people's code (open source, client projects, company work with other programmers). My code is the best, which makes me conclude that reading PHP books is for noobs :D

- Making sure all my sites have fresh and usable backups (static files + mysql databases + ...)
- Making sure my sites are fast enough and getting warned when they are too slow.

USELESS! You're not paranoid enough!

These 5, no particular order. all equally annoying.

-People trying to hack your password files or database
-Chargebacks
-Content ending up on torrent sites
-Cheating webmasters using your content to promote other progs
-Record keeping/2257

I guess I have six top problems running my site.

Finding time to sit back and evaluate.
Finding time to learn new things.
Finding time to apply new things.
Finding enough time to produce quality content.
Forgetting to eat.
Having to sleep.

Getting my hosting invoice with overcharges for last month because we missed putting our hotlink protection on a few domains. |banghead|

For everyone that needs more time: we just came up with a schedule for Monday - Friday 8AM to 11PM to make sure we get everything in. It includes everything from learning to breaks to the division of the work load. Last week was our first go at it so hopefully we can keep to it for the rest of the year. |thumb

i have only one big issue, also the reason why i dont make free sites anymore,sponsors who change their urls to their paysites every year, i know that is it mentioned many times here on the net and on the boards, build and forget, why forget a free site made and worked to get traffic there and the sponsor you used changed his links, if you dont changed that then you give the sponsor free traffic and it will only cost you because you will earn no shit, so dont build and forget........i cant build and forget, i need to stay up todate and fucking change all those links every year and that makes me fucked up bad!:) thats the only thing which bugs me!

I have a simple solution to that. Don't use those sponsors. A couple of my sponsors changed their code, but kept the old code active, so that old links did NOT become inactive, that is fine. But if a sponsor ever changes their code, and the old ones become invalid, they are history.

This is not just because of the inconvenience, there is also the fact that a Perl script to change the link code at the sponsor's end would take a few minutes to write, and solve the problem (EG the surfers click on a link saying http://www.bongo-sex.com?pro=ccbil&aff=123456, the code then changes it and redirects to http://www.bongo-sex.com?pro=paycom&aff=fred). Even if the sponsor is a 'one man band' type of organisation with no Perl/PHP programming skills, it will not cost much to pay a programmer to write a short piece of code like this (hell I'd do it for $100 and laugh at the way I overcharged them). In fact, I would guess that a quick search of the free Perl resource sites will come up with several free programs that will do the job for you.

So any sponsor who does not do this is either deliberately ripping off his affiliates (changing code deliberately to avoid paying for 'old' traffic) or is so incompetent that he/she will probably not still be in business soon, and you won't get any owed money from a bankrupt sponsor (well maybe ten cents in the dollar five years down the line).

Just don't use that type of sponsor, it will cost you money at some point if you do.

Sounds like TIME is everyone's biggest issue - mine too. In addition to my personal sites I also work for a couple of different clients on a daily basis - both adult and mainstream.

I will just keep my fingers crossed for the 36-hour day OR the opportunity to clone myself multiple times so I can start delegating some work and free myself up to start all these new projects I've been putting off for years... *sigh*

|cry|

Since I have a full time job and do this on the side TIME is also my biggest problem. I have tons of things I want and need to do every day but I just cant find the time to do it.

Also staying motivated to keep at it when You hit a dry spell with sales is a problem, I know that if I keep at it, it will come around eventually, but it is hard to convince yourself that this is actually true when it is looking so bad.