Ubscure Article Directory Blog

Hello once again,

I’ve got a few projects in the works that I hope will make Ubscure a lot better. I’ll be working on these projects over the next few months and hopefully they’ll all be in place by the end of the summer. Here is what I’m working on:

Better Spam Protection

Since lots of people like to treat article directories as their personal spam playgrounds, I’ve decided I need to beef up security and spam protection around here. I’ve already installed several fixes that have allowed me to remove the Captcha from the submission page without any negative side effects (Keeping my fingers crossed on that one). The goal of the whole spam blocker project is to make it easier for real authors to get their articles approved.

TinyMCE Editor Implementation

TinyMCE is an editing script that makes it much easier to format text. If you’re familiar with WordPress at all you know exactly what I’m talking about. The editor that you use to write your posts on WordPress is powered by TinyMCE. This will make it much easier for you guys to insert things like lists, bold elements, italics, etc. You’ll be able to do these things without having to know (or type) any HTML code. This should make it much easier to format your articles.

Article Rating System

The article rating system is designed to help reward those who create useful content at Ubscure that readers will enjoy. It will help weed out the junk articles that might slip through review processes, or spammy articles that might have ended up on the site many months ago. As you can probably guess, it’s very difficult for me to sift through over 100,000 articles to try to find any hidden junk. The rating system will make it much easier for me to spot spam articles.

Commenting System

This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while but haven’t had the time. Actually, I still don’t have the time…but whatever. The goal of the comment system is to allow Ubscure users to post comments on each other’s articles. I mentioned in another post that this will help spread the pagerank around a bit better and hopefully push all of our articles up a bit in the search engines. It will also promote engagement within our community which is something very important to me.

Site Redesign

The site redesign will occur slowly as I finish up different pieces of the site. It will be a bit like putting a puzzle together piece by piece. My ultimate goal is to make Ubscure look more professional while at the same time making it more user-friendly. I’m going to be implementing some HTML5 and CSS3 elements, so I highly recommend you switch over to using Google Chrome as your browser if you’re not already. And by all means, please avoid using Internet Explorer. That browser doesn’t display Ubscure properly and has almost no support for HTML5 or CSS3. Microsoft is determined to stay in the dark ages in terms of web browsing for some reason.

Download Chrome

I can’t really give a solid timeline for all of these upgrades. Running a site as big as Ubscure by myself while at the same time being a full-time student and having a job is tough. I barely have enough time to enjoy my life, let alone teach myself how to code all of these things. So please, be patient! Things will be changing over time and I promise they’ll make your experience at Ubscure much better!

- Patrick

Hey guys. I just finished making another small update to Ubscure. I think it will be helpful to a lot of you. If you go to the article submission page you’ll see that I’ve now made it so you can insert certain HTML tags into your articles. If you don’t know, an HTML tag allows you to style your article in certain ways to make it look better.

I saw that a lot of people were submitting articles that originally contained lists. However, when they were sumitted to Ubscure all of the list tags would be stripped out. This has now been changed so that lists can be included in your articles.

Here are the allowed HTML tags and some examples of what they do:

<strong>: Strong text

<em>: Em text

<u>: Underline

<i>: Italics

<ul>: Unordered list

• Number 1
• Number 2

<ol>: Ordered list

1. Number 1
2. Number 2

<li>:

<center>:

Centered text

<blockquote>:

Here is a long quote.

This is a long quotation. This is a long quotation. This is a long quotation. This is a long quotation. This is a long quotation.

I have continued typing after the quote.

Credit: fotosearch.com

Hey guys,

In an effort to increase the amount of visitor interaction on Ubscure (and to entice users to stick around for a bit (: ) I’ve added a “Related Videos” section at the end of each article. This will give a reader the option of watching videos related to your article topic. If anything, this will increase the amount of time that the user sticks around on your page. This will help keep people from clicking out of your page immediately after they get done reading your article.

The videos will open in a pop-up screen that is easily closed. When the video screen is closed, the viewer will be returned to your article. Once again, this helps ensure that the reader stays on your page a bit longer.

I’ll be testing the system out over the next couple of weeks to see what kinds of improvements (or problems) it will bring to Ubscure. Hope you guys enjoy!

So originally I thought that it would be okay to let people post articles without having me check them over first. This worked well for a while, and it was great because it really reduced my workload. However, now that spammers have caught on to the site it seems that I’m going to have to change the policies for everyone.

Lately, Ubscure has been getting tons of spammy crap from a few people. Spammers have been submitting content that doesn’t even make sense when you read it and content that is just a long list of keywords. Apparently spammers haven’t gotten the message that this type of article “writing” doesn’t work anymore. This used to be fine back in the good ‘ole days of the internet when search engines didn’t really care about the quality of the content. But now, companies like Google actually keep track of things like keyword density and they have a keen eye for spam. Google even keeps track of how much time a visitor spends on the site and factors this into their ranking algorithm. As you can imagine, visitors to Ubscure are not going to stay long if they keep seeing spam on the site. If I continue to allow spam to be posted on Ubscure, this will hurt not only our search engine placement but also our credibility.

Spammers have ruined it for everyone by forcing me to no longer allow instant article submissions. It also makes my job a lot harder because I’ll now have to go through every article by hand, by myself. I apologize to those of you who are legitimate article writers. I know many of you work very hard to produce quality content that people will actually read. The good news is that now that spam is going to decrease on Ubscure, we should actually see higher search engine placements for our content. This means that those of you who are actually legitimate article writers will see an increase in traffic to your individual articles. Hooray!

I can’t give an estimate of how long it will take to get articles approved anymore. It could take days for me to get to your article since this site gets hundreds of submissions per day. The other problem is that this is not a full time job for me. I have tons of other work to do on top of maintaining this site.

So, moral of the story = we’ll all have to be a bit more patient.

Once again, sorry to those of you who actually post useful content. I’ll try to approve your submissions as quickly as possible.

Best,

Patrick

Owner – Ubscure

On August 29th I added a new commenting system to Ubscure. This system is courtesy of IntenseDebate, a commenting platform that’s used by a lot of other sites. I thought about trying to implement something like this by doing my own coding. However, I quickly discovered that something as complicated as a comment management system was way over my head. I’ve only been doing web development for about 3 years and I’m not quite an expert. Things like HTML and CSS are fine, but when it gets down to serious script writing it can be a bit challenging.

Needless to say, finding a system like IntenseDebate was a godsend. The comment boxes at the bottom of each article allow users to post as a guest, or they can log in and post using their IntenseDebate, Facebook, or Twitter accounts. Commenters can also subscribe to the posts that they comment on in order to keep up to date with any conversations that might be occurring. I think this is a pretty cool feature.

One of the main reasons I wanted to implement commenting on Ubscure was to help get the community of authors, as well as guests, more involved with the site. The web-scape is constantly changing and websites need constant updating in order to keep up with the current popular trends. One of those trends, as you might have guessed, is commenting.

Commenting has been popular for a long time, but it doesn’t seem to be as prevalent among article directories. Most article directories host static pages that don’t allow reader interaction and that’s exactly how Ubscure has operated, until now.

I’ve read quite a few SEO articles and reports that seem to be emphasizing the fact that search engines like Google are putting more emphasis on fresh, updated content. Therefore, I’ve taken a little more time to examine exactly how my site (Ubscure) fits in with what the search engines want. My hope is that by adding things like a commenting system I will be able to keep my users more engaged, as well as attract more attention and traffic from search engines.

Updating my site with new features is not done for the sole purpose of personal gain (more traffic = more money for me), but also for the overall benefit of my users. The goal of an article directory is to provide readers for the article writers. The more readers that an author has, the more chances he or she has of making a sale, spreading awareness for a business, or getting a brand name established. If I can perform my job as a webmaster to the best of my abilities, then all of my users benefit.

If you currently run a site that depends on user interaction I would highly recommend that you add something like a comment system if you haven’t already. It’s a great way to promote activity and buzz on your site. And as I said before, it will benefit your business in terms monetary results, as well as increase the satisfaction of your users.

For those of you who are already users of Ubscure, I hope you enjoy the new comment system. I’ll be tweaking it over the coming weeks and months in order to make it fit well with the operations of this site. Thanks for reading.

Patrick Brady

Owner – Ubscure