Over the last few days I've been researching free ways to promote my site. I have been visiting many blog directories and submitting SproutWorks and SproutSearch. SproutSearch has really been growing it's content, and now has links to over 1.3 million blogs. It is now my task to turn it into a unique and useful reference. I have started to organize the blogs into pages related to various words and phrases. I even thru in some foreign-lanugage blogs for good measure. My mind is actively churning the data mining possibilities.

I have joined several traffic exchanges.

When I am surfing on a traffic exchange, I wonder if the extra traffic I receive is going to make much of a difference. If I sit here clicking away for an hour, is it worth the extra maybe 100 visitors I will get? If you are reading this, I hope you are getting at least a morsel of worthwhile information.

I am working on a web/blog promotion page, to try to get someone to sign up under me in these traffic exchanges. It seems like there are only a few good resources on traffic exchanges and RSS promotion tools.

I have been participating in a few traffic exhanges recently. Traffic exhanges are a resource for web site owners who wish to drive traffic to their site. Within, you will find pages that market to marketers. There is a dizzying array of web sites containing all in one online stores, automated marketing programs, downline programs, email responders, and more. It has been interesting learning about this world.

I have produced a modest list of these promotional tools. If you want to get more visitors to your website or blog, give some of these tools a try.

Promotional Tools

I just joined the Mystical Maze traffic exchange. It has a unique feature which is a maze you can play after you've viewed some web sites. Perhaps I should start developing my own maze program furthur.

Get a free Mystical Maze account here.

Here is a sample of my maze program. It is written in PHP, and I've also created a 3D maze in C++ for Windows, and a 2D maze for PalmOS.

http://sproutworks.com/maze3.php

I just read my monthly DreamHost newsletter, and I was suprised to see that all accounts would be given 4 times the disk space and 8 times the bandwidth, no additional cost. They also increased the weekly disk space and bandwidth quotas accordingly.

I have the basic level plan, which is as low as 7.95 per month. I now have about 21GB disk space and over 1TB of bandwidth to play with. Every week my disk space grows by 160MB and my bandwidth grows by 8GB.

If you operate one or more websites, I strongly recommend switching to DreamHost, they are phenomenal value.

http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?sproutworks

I was getting tired of the old layout, and it had some usability problems. After a few hours of tweaking things, I have created a layout that looks a bit nicer. It has a sky-blue theme, and I moved things around in the code so I can make new color schemes easily. I replaced the Feedburner icon with the one from Firefox (and now IE 7). The tabs now have room across the whole page header, which should fix some problems for people viewing with low resolutions. The new logo has a slight cloudy sky appearance.

Now I would like to find a way to implement faux columns. The 2 columns not being the same height bothers me. I changed some things in the forums, and took out some old code. The forums need a lot more work though.

I have started work on version 7 of the SproutWorks layout. I have decided to incorporate a scrolling tile engine I made. It uses scrolling tiles in a similar way that Google maps does, only it's not for displaying maps. I intend to use it for games and animations. When the new layout is completed, it should look far more interesting than the current one. It will probably have some interactive elements in place of where the logo is now.

Last night I wrote a PHP program that draws a spinning gear. It can draw the gear in any given size, color, and with different numbers of teeth. I will make some sort of interesting animation with the gears.