I had a hankering to build another online community site, this time focussed on another of my interests, ballroom dancing.

As usual, I focus on the Australian market, because it is under served. And there are few things more annoying that searching for an online shop in a particular niche, even restricting the search in Google to Australia, and being presented with a list of American results. Unfortunately the domain I wanted was already taken. And the site looked like it was rarely updated. What a waste.

There was recently a big fuss about the release of Niche Socializer – software to build online communities. A large lead up to the launch, with lots of promise and hype, but no real examples to look at. I like examples. You can look at the code, links, and decide factually if the product has value. There was a definite lack of sample sites – warning indicator number one.

I tried finding samples. Using Google to search for uptodate info isn’t as good as it should be. Even with the Greasemonkey script to permanently have the Google date pulldown (so you can restrict searches to the past 24 hours/week/month/year), I don’t get the results I want. So these days I often end up using search.twitter.com. And then restricting it to the hash keywords, for example searches for #sytycd gets quality results from twitter, by people who really want you to know what they’re tweeting about. Or at least how to use twitter.

But from all my searches on twitter for #nichesocializer since it was launched, today was the first time I found an example site. All the other tweets have been attempts to flog the product. The site I found was http://www.perranporth.tv/. My first impression was how similar it was to phpfox, myspace, elgg and the other online community software packages I’ve looked into.
And the site was slow. It didn’t have a business directory (yet), which I think has to be the first priority for a niche community site these days.

But because of all the hype, plus lack of examples, I didn’t bother with Niche Socializer.

I had tried playing with Elgg, but it didn’t have all the functions I wanted as standard – business directory, in particular. And I couldn’t be bothered building a module, as I just haven’t played with Elgg enough. Even though it has that big bonus – it’s FREEEE.

PHPFOX was my choice. I’ve used it before for mydogspace, very happily. It just keeps getting better. And there are so many add-ons available.

So my new site is now ready. I may have left it too late for the traffic for tonights So You Think You Can Dance final in Australia. I may experiment with twitter, to see if that garners some interest. Haven’t SEO’d the site yet, or even submitted it to directories.

Check it out. It’s free. For dance in Australia MyDanceSpace

I’m getting pretty happy with my halloween site halloween-australia.com.

It’s moved up the organic listings at Google, and is now high on page one for “halloween australia” and “halloween events australia“, which was my objective.

People are finding it, and submitting listings for halloween events this year. Some really cool events at the Australian Museum, Manhatten Bar and Nepean River cruises so far.

So I beefed it up again tonight.
Previously, the events search page just had the search fields, and if you hit “Search” without putting in a suburb, it listed the suburbs for you as links. That way you could see if your suburb, or one nearby, had any events.

But it wasn’t easily showing some of the recent cool stuff. So I added a little teaser, showing the last 5 events added, as soon as you land on the page. That will also help SEO, as the content on the page will be frequently changing. Made the suburb an active link, to make it user friendly, and reduce clicks.

And improved the formatting and colours of the event listings.

Wonder if there’s any chance of getting to position one by the end of the month.

Wonder if it will translate into some earnings, from affiliate costume sales, and adsense.

Cross fingers.

I finally have my new site about online shopping in Australia ready. It’s called MyOnlineShops.

It’s a replacement for the shopping site that I lost last year, when the domain renewal email went to an old address I wasn’t using any more. Someone quickly grabbed it, as it had a great ranking at Yahoo, and solid PR, and then offered to sell it back to me for $800. No thanks. I did the work for that once, so he won’t get any profit from me. And it no longer ranks anywhere useful.

MyOnlineShops was completely created with Drupal, an open source Content Management System. I didn’t have to do any code at all – it is pure core Drupal, a large number of contributor modules, and CSS. OK, maybe 10 minutes of html for the page layout, moving a few things around from the default layout.

I obviously have a thing about My…. websites. This is my third, after MyDogSpace and MyDogSite.

The reason for calling it MyOnlineShops, is that it lets me (and free members), create my own list of favourites, have my own shopping blog, my own profile, and make my own reviews and comments on shops I’ve used.

I’m still busily adding more online Australian shops, but feel welcome to suggest any missing ones through the contact form on the site.

I seem to have lost my two most profitable domains this week.

I logged in this week to check that links were working, and found someone else’s strange site there! My sites were christmas.best-australian.com and best-australian.com – and as you can imagine, there starts to be a lot of Christmas and online shopping traffic at this time of year.

I had put a lot of effort into getting my Christmas site ranking well – it was position three at Google for “Christmas Australia” all year, and had even been position 1 for a long time last year.

So I looked at the registration details – and it no longer had me as the owner. However it was unusual looking – my original registration date of 2003 was still there, but it had been updated in November, which is obviously when the new person’s site was loaded.

I had registered the domain through my host, so i contacted them. But they were just a reseller for Godaddy, and suggested that I contact them. So I lodged a support claim to both Godaddy, and WildWestDomains, the new registrar, who is actually a kind of sister site to Godaddy. No news yet.

I did a bit more research, and yes the expiry date on my credit card was out of date – even though funds were available, and the card number hadn’t changed.

But I did not receive any warnings that my domain was about to be transferred to someone else.

The (wry) twist is that I had just rebuilt a new more improved Christmas site at a new domain – Christmas Australia. But I had been planning to use this as a case study on transferring sites – using 301 redirects etc. Well I can’t do that now. But I do have all the details on my old incoming links, and you can bet I will be contacting them and asking them to link to my new site.

It may be too late to rank well this Christmas.

But it has taught me a few lessons. Centralise domain registrations, so you don’t have lots of email addresses to check. Hide your domain registration, so you don’t get spammed to death. Lock all your domains. And use captcha’s to stop automated robots from spamming your addresses.

I was in the process of doing all this anyway. But I wasn’t quite fast enough. Wish me luck in my new domains.

FastFrame.com.au is a new Flash and Flex-based site with a luxurious rich application interface, created by webqem.

The company behind it is a photographic agency that subcontracts photographers for specialist events or skills, such as portraiture, wildlife, weddings, sport, etc.

So you can arrange for a photographer to come to your event, take photos, and them make them available to view and purchase online.

Very fancy