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Max, I have been keeping up with your progress here. Seems like you are heading in the right direction for a good product.
I hope you do not consider my posting here as whoring in your thread.
As you know, it is my belief that host free sites will be widely used in the future for the same reason that TGP's jumped on the free hosted galleries craze. Therefore, I would consider admin controls to deal with hfs' separate from submitted sites. Some of the things you will want to consider:
1. Entering several hundreds or thousands of sites into a database is boring and very time consuming. Therefore, you should have the ability to mass import sites via a delimited text file. (Stay away for insert statements as I don't think average WM will be able to handle that)
2. Most often the import would cause the sites for each sponsor lumped together. Since most db apps will pull the sites from the table in the order they were enter, you will want the ability to randomize your hfs database.
3. You should have the ability to tell the script how many hfs' to include each day and define the algorithm to be used to pull the sites from the database. I would also include a scheduling feature to allow one to specify when a site becomes eligible for display.
4. Click tracking has been mentioned. Consider adding a field for sponsor names in your db so you can track sponsor clicks. Increase productivity should be increased by knowing which sites, categories and sponsors are the most poplar with the surfers.
5. It is natural for me to think it is cool to be able to go to one site and get links for most available hfs'. How cool would it be to have your script poll such a site for new hfs' and have them imported into the script owners' hfs database? This could be done with a cron job or manually. Or perhaps go the other way and have HFS resource send an RSS update as new sites are added to its database.
One final thought. I would not limit this to a Link List script. IMO, there is a trend to do hybrid sites. This should not increase scripting too much but the templating system would be a little more complicated to handle thumbnails. You will also need a field in the database for type - FS, TGP, MGP.
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