Joined up with pokerprolife

A couple of weeks ago an online pal of mine Peter Golob, one of the biggest names in online poker in his native Slovenia, and who is also one of the owners of a popular poker affiliate site http://www.pokerpro.si for Slovenian players asked me to join their team, as they are looking to expand beyond their region and into the international stage with their new site http://www.pokerprolife.com.

The right guy for the job

Although of course most of their team are already good English speakers, none of them are native English speakers, so I’m very happy that they considered me as the right native English speaking person to join their team.

Helping pokerprolife with the English language

I will be helping them primarily from an English language point of view but also because of my own knowledge and experience of search engine optimization and the online poker world. I’m fully sure that their extensive experience in the online poker affiliate business will make their new site a success also, and I’m looking forward to playing an active role in the growth and development of this site.

Follow my progress with pokerprolife here

I will be blogging right here on http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com about the progress of this new poker affiliate site http://www.pokerprolife.com and in particular my role in the site.

Study a new programming language

I’ve mentioned before, both here and on the pokeraffiliatelistings forum http://www.pokeraffiliatelistings.com/forums that web coding is perhaps my weakest point as a webmaster. I clearly need to improve in this area.

I’m out of date

The last time I studied any new language was Vb.net and that’s over 5 years ago, and the last time I actually sat any exam was over 11 years ago when I completed my now well out of date Microsoft Certified Solution Developer qualification.

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Keep up to speed with the internet and technology!

These days though and I think especially with anything to do with computers, the internet and technology in general one needs to be adaptable and keep up to date. And so to make myself a better all round webmaster… I’ve decided to study a number of topics on the very resourceful http://www.w3schools.com/ site.

Studying PHP?

I’m going to start with PHP, one because unlike HTML and CSS, which I have some knowledge of I know virtually nothing about how to code PHP, so it’s the area I have most need in improving. Secondly I keep hearing it’s easy to learn, so hopefully I can get to grips with it easily and quickly.

PHP is easy?

I’ve actually gone through about 15 pages on w3schools very quickly already this morning and have to say yip so far it all seems straightforward enough, especially for someone who is familiar with other programming languages, though there could be one little downside to this too, as I can already see myself getting my syntax confused with other programming languages.

Take the PHP exam

Anyhow I’m going to see how I get on with that. There is also an exam option for $75 with w3schools. I haven’t decided whether I’m going to take the exam itself.

Is doing an exam in PHP any use?

I’d imagine it would be useful for someone who was looking for employment in internet programming, for me as far as I can gather it’s usefulness would be purely as something concrete to aim for, but really the main point is just to satisfy myself that I ‘know’ PHP.

I mentioned previously in the “Advertising platform problems put me off working on the site” post that I was having issues with the Ikarus Theme.

Ikarus theme not working

Basically since the update to the latest WordPress version 2.8 (2.8.4 at time of writing) the Ikarus theme is basically broken in several areas and still months after this has happened there does not seem to be any working fixes coming from the developer of the theme. I actually tried to comment on the developer’s site about this and my comments are blocked (for one reason or another), anyway I’ve had to reluctantly abandon using this theme as a result. This has thought me a few different lessons.

• Firstly, it’s important that for whatever theme you choose that either support is readily available to upgrade the theme or the theme itself is simple enough that it’s easily modified to suit new versions of WordPress. Better yet would be if the theme is written in such a way that changes to WordPress and Internet Browsers are likely to have a low probability of breaking the functionality of the theme.
• Fancy Theme = More Issues? Related to the first point. I really liked the Ikarus Theme as it had a lot of different options and functionality. But this seems like it might also be its Achilles heel. Even the developer of the theme months after the initial problems were reported with WordPress 2.8 (and it’s not fully compatible with IE8 either) is unable to fix it, so for webmasters like me who just have limited knowledge of the coding side of things it’s next to impossible to change the Theme when these complicated problems arise. After arriving home and getting back into ‘work mode’ after travelling for the previous month (I really have to stop going on trips!), I thought ok I need to change this theme fast. I picked the thematic theme http://themeshaper.com/ . It lacks a lot of the ‘bells and whistles’ that Ikarus had but it still feels powerful enough. It also works smoothly. The result is my website looks quite bare looking now, but one can still navigate around quite easily. And right now my main concern is that my website is up and running normally once again. Meanwhile, I’m going to continue to see what I can do with this theme and also see if they are other themes out there that I feel would suit where I want to take www.makingapokerwebsite.com.
• Have a backup. Once I started having issues with Ikarus, I had no secondary theme ready and waiting to put in it’s place. This was a bad mistake, in fact this lesson can be applied to many areas of life in general, particularly in regards to your career and business. Basically the old phrase ‘Not to have all your eggs in one basket’ comes to mind, anyway…. before I get too side-tracked, what I’m basically saying is that the smart thing to do would be to have at least 2 themes that you are satisfied with available for use with your WordPress blog, then if for whatever reason your default one becomes broken, then hopefully one of your replacement themes will still work fine, and if and when your theme of choice is fixed then of course you could select it once again if you so wished.

Theme support should not be overlooked

So… to surmise what I’m trying to get at here. Basically the theme you choose should not be just about its functionlity and ‘prettiness’, in fact if anything if the functionaility is very complicated it can prove a liability when it comes to adapting to changes. The level and availability of support for your theme is also very important, perhaps themes built and maintained by a community of enthusiasts might be an area well worth looking at, that way you are not reliant on any one person or company, and last but not least make sure you have a second if not a third and fourth theme ready to substitute for the times if and when your theme of choice no longer functions as expected.

Gave OpenX a shot

I had planned on doing lots of work on making a poker website this month but it never happened for a few reasons. Firstly I decided to try out the OpenX http://www.openx.com advertising platform, but I had more difficulties with it than I had bargained for, and it ended up taking up a lot of my time with really nothing to show at the end of it .

Was not impressed with OpenX documentation

Although it is a popular product, the documentation appears very poor and to cut a long story short I basically made a mess of the installation. After having further issues with upgrading it, I decided to start all over and reinstall it, but after then reading a few negative posts on the OpenX forum itself I thought enough is enough.

OIOPublisher sists well with WordPress

I’ve since purchased and installed the OIOPublisher http://www.oiopublisher.com plugin, as it’s just a WordPress plugin the installation was simple. I haven’t looked into it enough yet so I can’t comment on how good or bad it is, but at least I’m off to a good start on it.

Work on site lessened

The problems I had with Openx sort of put me off working on the site – and I ended up drifting off, playing more poker instead and doing other web stuff. Anyway I don’t plan on spending so much time again, for the time being at least, on getting my site advertising ready.

Improving making a poker website

I’ve still got plenty of other tasks I want to achieve before I start feeling really satisfied with making a poker website. The main areas I intend to work on over the next one or two months are to add some more permanent pages, either solve some issues I’m having with the Ikarus theme or switch to a different theme.

Improving the usability of the site

Laying out my posts in a better way so as to improve my readers experience. Improving my site seo wise. Checking that my site is as Google friendly as possible. Beyond Google, trying to also make my site seo friendly for other search engines. See how I can use social networking to further the exposure of my website.

Getting personal

Sorry for the delay in posting. This post is a bit more of a personal blog type post. Going to keep these to a minimum but don’t think it’s too bad writing the occasional one.
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Finished just out of the money AGAIN!!!

Anyway once again I was in Madrid for a week from the 14th to 21st May. I played in the main event €1k + €100 buy-in of the 3rd leg of the second Spanish Poker Tour at the Gran Casino Aranjuez. I finished 11th out of 101, only first 9 finished in the money though . 

Live cash games are where it’s at

After two long days of playing into the early hours of the morning and coming so close to the money as you can imagine I was very disappointed. I did make up for it though later in the week though when I won about €3k in a couple of days play at the bigger casino in Madrid the Gran Casino Madrid. I don’t play live cash games so much but I really really should.

Live cash games are easier to beat than online cash games

There are  many downsides with playing live cash games, the main one being the expense of it all. If like me you don’t live near a casino then you have the expense of travelling and hotels, then there’s the expense of playing, the rake is higher, tips for dealers and waiters, you get to see far fewer hands than on the Internet. However all this in my opinion is more than compensated by how bad most live players are. These days even relatively low stake games online like .5/1 NL are populated by the most part by people who know how to play poker.

Casinos attract fun gamblers

If you can beat .5/1 NL online then from what I’ve seen and heard in most European casinos you have an even bigger edge at 5/10 NL live. Casinos simply attract on average a more recreational type of gambler, some of whom really do not understand or even want to understand the game, they are eager to gamble, better again, some of them have so much money that it seems like they hardly care, as a poker player you can’t afford to feel too much compassion for other players at the table, but I still prefer taking money from a multi-millionaire than a struggling student.

Going all cosmopolitan on you

The other thing about casinos, especially in a cosmopolitan city like Madrid, is that you meet some very interesting people, that you obviously don’t get to meet on the Internet.

Tweaking ‘n stuff

On another note, I’m going to be concentrating for the next 2 to 3 weeks on adding pages and tweaking elements of the site so there might not be another post for a while, there should still be pages added and updated, so do come back during that time to check for updates.

1. Plan your SEO before launching your site

    Well I have to admit I didn’t exactly plan my SEO for http://makingapokerwebsite.com. I can’t argue with the point really, seo is such an important part of a successful website. I will say in my defense that this poker website blog is very much about someone who is not an expert at web design finding their way towards creating a decent website. One of the mistakes I made in this area was assuming that WordPress tags were stored as meta tag keywords, where the hell I got that idea from I don’t know. Though this wasn’t quite as bad a mistake as I first thought, as the value of using meta tag keywords is debatable these days.The great thing you’ll discover about WordPress if you ever use it, is that there seems to be plugins for just about anything you can think of. I found a great plugin called all-in-one-seo which helps to simplify making your site search engine friendly http://semperfiwebdesign.com/portfolio/wordpress/wordpress-plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ .

2. Plan to build a content rich site

   I think I’m on the right track in this regard. I’ve gotten into a good habit of providing one new post in or around a week. In addition to this I’ve also began to add some new pages and see this continuing on.

3. Don’t stress out about the domain name

   I got lucky I think that this domain name wasn’t registered. It pretty much describes what the site is all about, so I’m very happy with that. For the poker site I have in mind I already have registered a few domain names, but I’m inclined to think for a few reasons that I might wait until the time, when I’m ready to begin the poker website, to then choose the name. One of the reasons for this, is because I read somewhere that domain names registered for a longer period are viewed more favorably by search engines, which my domain names aren’t. Also, perhaps were I to come up with another domain name from scratch it might make the whole process a bit fresher.

4. Keep your site design simple

   My website’s design isn’t as simplistic as Randy’s. Nevertheless, I think I’ve kept it reasonably simple. I don’t have a whole lot of colors going on. I’ve big text for ease of readability. I don’t have any flash images. I do have some javascript but that’s because it’s built into the theme I’m using. I think the stuff I do have on my site like social networking tags, tag clouds, latest posts etc add to my user experience, so it serves a purpose rather than being there purely for show.

5. Do the basic on-page search engine optimization stuff

   Again I would have to fail myself for this point. Now that I’ve started to use the all-in-one-seo plugin this should help matters, but I haven’t been paying due diligence to every post and page’s search engine optimization. This is something I absolutely must change going forward and also to get it right from the start once I commence the poker information website.

6. Get links, but don’t stress out about it

   I’ve made pretty much zero effort to get links so far, so I certainly haven’t been stressed out about it. I think I have been right so far not to go looking for links too proactively for my website as it was in its very early stages and I didn’t want to be pestering webmasters looking for links to a site that hadn’t yet much to offer. I think the making a poker website blog is beginning to come along nicely now though and soon I will embark on a link building campaign along with the other non-spammy ways Randy suggest to increase my website’s exposure. I’m thinking sometime in June would be a good time to kick off such a campaign. I will of course blog the whole process.

7. Pay attention to your traffic

     Pay attention to your traffic: After hearing many great things about it, I installed google analytics last week. It provides a whole stream of interlinked information that can really help you address issues and improve the way your site operates in terms of being found more often in search engines and retaining your visitors for longer. The making a poker website blog is still very young, but if and when the site grows, is when I would expect google analytics to be a very useful tool. But even now, I can already see, that for some of my posts, especially the longer ones, that people are not always taking the time to read them. This tells me that perhaps I need to take into account peoples short span of attention these days, perhaps to emphasis key points and provide in post links to key points, such as my post about the best way to display your email address http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/the-best-way-to-display-your-email-address-on-a-website/. The real juicy bit is at the end of the post when I talk about Recaptcha, but people may not always have the patience to get to this part, so maybe making the overall reading experience more user friendly I can help my readers to get more out of my posts.
   

8. Use the force Luke aka Stay away from the dark side

   Sounds a bit sinister. I presume Randy means don’t try anything underhand, annoying or illegal and so forth. Well I hope it’s clear that I’m putting in some honest effort here. I certainly have no intention of doing anything illegal or underhand such as spamming, sending annoying auto-generated link requests and the like. Anyway that’s a pretty simple point to follow, its either a path you are going to take or not. Even from a purely selfish point of view though I think staying ‘white hat’ makes sense, as Randy says you can make a ‘fortune’ as a poker webmaster by just doing things the right way without undue effort so why the hell take an underhanded approach!

    

Going forward positively?

So on the 8 points though I think I got somethings right, it was by no means a flawless performance. Link building is something for going forward. I’m still not totally happy with some of the finer points of the look of my posts, so I want to address that before I really start to promote my site. The main areas which I need to focus on now is improving the way I do things seo wise and improving the overall experience of the reader on my site. On a positive note I think everything is moving in the right direction and I have learned a few lessons for when it comes around to beginning the poker information site.

]]> http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/a-detailed-look-at-the-8-points-of-poker-seo-guru-randy-ray/feed/ 1 http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/the-best-way-to-display-your-email-address-on-a-website/ http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/the-best-way-to-display-your-email-address-on-a-website/#comments Wed, 06 May 2009 09:45:46 +0000 Barry O'Callaghan http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/?p=142 Spam, whatcha gonna do?

I didn’t have my email address up on the blog from the start, this was for a reason. Spam is a major problem for all users and webmasters especially are exposed to this, as they will by and large wish to be contactable, and so have to make their email address available in some format for their users.

How can you defend yourself against spammers?

Check bottom of this page now to see the solution I picked!



I did some research on it these past few days to look through the most common methods of displaying your email address and determining which one would be best, in terms of both protecting my email address from email harvesting spammer scum while at the same time making it user-friendly.



Common methods used by webmasters for displaying their email address

1. Encode your email address by using character entities

   In this method you substitute ASCII codes for the alphanumeric characters of your email address in the html of your page. The advantage of this method is that your email will still be clickable and visible to the end user normally, but the less sophisticated email harvesting programs won’t sniff out your email address.There is an automatic encoder and further information available at http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html . This email page however was last updated in 2006, so I’m inclined to think that nowadays most email harvesting programs would still be able to detect your email address.

2. Display your email address in a non-email format

   A simple method often used by sites is to have your email address displayed something like username at mydomain dot com. Again this method makes it more difficult for harvesting programs. I would still think that a sophisticated harvesting program could parse this to determine the real email address. There are a few disadvantages of this method however, one is that a user can no longer simply click on the email address and also the less Internet savvy user might have difficulty in reconfiguring it to the correct email address, it also allows for the possibility of human error, even from an experienced Internet user.

3. Should you use web forms?

   Web forms are very commonly used amongst many of the bigger sites. In fact you often see them used in many of the online poker room sites to allow a user to submit a support request. The main advantage of this method from the point of view of the more regular webmaster is that it makes harvesting your email address very difficult if not impossible. The one downside to this that I see is that if you genuinely want people to be able to contact you easier, it’s a bit more cumbersome as people have to submit their details in the web form and as such may put off many potential useful contacts from getting in touch with you.

4. Script it!

   You can build server side scripts in different formats like php, asp.net or using javascript. The advantage of using scripting is the email address can be broken up into different parts but it appears usable to your user. Disadvantages are that it’s still not 100% foolproof method and also if you use javascript to build the mailto link then in order for this to work, your user needs to have javascript enabled in their browser.

5. Picture your email address

   Instead of using text to display your email address, you can create an image of your email address. Now email harvesting software will have a much more difficult time in sniffing out your email address, the harvesting software would require optical character recognition capabilities in order to sniff out the email address. The downside to this method is that the user would be required to physically type in the email address and it also increases the chance for human error. Alternatively you could make the image clickable and link it to say a web form or javascript, but doing this of course would expose you to the disadvantages associated with these methods.

The solution is recaptcha!

So after scouring the Internet for information on the best way to protect my email address from email harvesting scum I still wasn’t 100% sure which method would be the best. I was sort of split between scripting the mail address and using an image. Then I thought about it a bit more laterally. I decided to take a look at how someone like James Thornton actually made his own email address available. He’s using a service from http://recaptcha.net/where a user has to manually enter two words which are easily readable by humans but cannot be read by spamming programs.

Avoid junking genuine emails

Well it seems like a very good way of doing it to me, it does involve a small bit of work (about 10 seconds) for the user to get your email address, but I figure if someone is genuinely interested in making contact it’s hardly a big deal. There are a few benefits to this, hopefully it should mean the amount of spam I get will be very low and the side benefit of this is if someone is sending me a genuine email it lessens the chance that I might mistakenly dismiss it as spam.




For further information check out the following resources

http://www.windowsecurity.com/whitepapers/Email_Harvesting_Techniques_FAQ.html Techniques used by email harvesting programs.

http://kb.iu.edu/data/alcm.html Indiana University’s very useful information on methods of protecting your email address.

http://jamesthornton.com/software/redirect-mailto.htmlInternet Business Consultant James Thornton’s information on how to use mailto smartly.

http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/Wpoison – an interesting looking tool that makes the job of email harvesting scum more difficult.

]]> http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/the-best-way-to-display-your-email-address-on-a-website/feed/ 1 http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/thoughts-about-webdesign-issues-for-a-new-webmaster/ http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/thoughts-about-webdesign-issues-for-a-new-webmaster/#comments Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:47:27 +0000 Barry O'Callaghan http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/?p=120 Blog it yourself

In this entry I’d like to talk about my thoughts on web design issues for a new webmaster, but firstly I’m going to talk about the reasons why I decided to do this blog entirely on my own.

Get in the ‘professionals’?

I could have taken the option to bring in outside professionals to help me design this site, but there’s a few reasons why I didn’t do this. Firstly, I have gathered from the few people I spoke to on this, that it would be anywhere in the region of $2000 to $5000 for a decent professional job per site.

Exercise control

Right now I really can’t afford to pay anyone that sort of money. Secondly, even if I had that money to spare, a part of me wants to exercise full control of this website, at least in its initial phases. That way, at least I learn more, and if I wish to adapt or change the website in the future, it should be easier.

Have fun fooling around

Lastly, although trying to figure out design issues can be a right pain at times, it still can be interesting and fun just playing around with this stuff on your own.

Use your strengths

While I certainly wouldn’t categorise myself as a web design expert, I do have the advantage of having some experience in that area and I am also aware of the importance of seo issues, and although I am new to blogging I’m an absolute battle hardened veteran when it comes to just about anything to do with online poker .

Be open and ready for changes in the future

 Anyway I still don’t rule out that I might bring in some outside help for a future project or maybe even to assist me in one or two tasks in this project, but right now it’s still a one-man-show.

Design and implement theme

When working on a website there are numerous challenges, but perhaps the two most difficult ones are choosing and implementing the design. It took me a few weeks of browsing the internet, checking out and playing around with various themes before I’ve settled on the Ikarus White theme from http://www.wpthemespress.com/. 

Tweak the theme, feel the pain

As I said before I’m no web guru so it took me about a week of tweaking the Ikarus theme to get it to the state where I thought it was internet ready enough to be used for my site. It really can be quite a frustrating and tedious process.

Let me write please

The challenge of writing the material for the blog is actually far easier, especially when it’s a subject matter that you are genuinely interested in and enjoy writing about.

Doing it my way

Going it on my own I believe was the correct decision for me given current conditions, basically for the reasons stated above.

Internetify your goodself

I wouldn’t presume to tell others what to do when they start their own poker information websites, but I do think as a poker webmaster whether you bring in outside help or not, you should definitely work on your internet skills.

Y’all come back now ya here

If you wish to know more about how to create a good poker information website or in fact any website do come back here, as in the coming weeks I will be getting far more into talking about good web design practices both for poker websites, websites created in WordPress and websites in general, which I hope will prove very valuable for would be webmaster readers of this blog.

]]> http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/thoughts-about-webdesign-issues-for-a-new-webmaster/feed/ 0 http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/some-random-thoughts-and-links-on-website-design-and-wordpress/ http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/some-random-thoughts-and-links-on-website-design-and-wordpress/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:21:00 +0000 Barry O'Callaghan http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/?p=97


Introducing Ikarus White

Yippeeeeeee. I’ve finally gotten around to changing the theme I’m using on makingapokerwebsite.com to something a bit funkier than the more staid original Kubrik theme. I’m using the Ikarus White theme from http://www.wpthemespress.com/.

Looking sexy in white?

Of all the ones I’ve tried it seems to match the closest to what I would do myself if I was able to do such a theme from scratch. I still have to do a lot of fine tuning on the theme, but I am pleased with the overall new look.

Keep your options open

There are a lot more options now, like the ability to search by tag, archives, the ability to add posts to social network sites like delicious.com and stumbleupon.com, but even with all these new extra options I don’t think the site looks too cluttered. Please let me know what you think of the new theme and if you think the look and operation of the site could be further improved I’d be glad to hear your opinion.

]]> http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/some-random-thoughts-and-links-on-website-design-and-wordpress/feed/ 0 http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/made-it-to-top-30-in-googlecom/ http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/made-it-to-top-30-in-googlecom/#comments Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:27:17 +0000 Barry O'Callaghan http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/?p=92


Making it on Google

A few days ago when I did a search on google.com, as I have done a few times since I started this site for the terms ‘making, poker, website’. I spotted that google had finally found me, in fact I was in the first 30 sites, not bad going I think for this blog which has been up for less than a month. So it gives me encouragement that I’m on the right track already, especially since there’s still loads for me to learn and improve upon.

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