Web Dev Notes

ArticleDashBoard.com is a website which allows authors to write and share their articles online! Submitting articles online is a great way to get discovered and to boost traffic to your website. Lynn Little at SeoDance.com suggests some good websites to submit articles too and explains why you want to do so!

For the Web Developers reading this, perhaps writing/sharing content is not your main interest if you are not writing a blog. For you guys however, you may be interested in knowing that you can download the Article Dashboard software and use it to start running your own article directory website!

Thanks to the continued support from 451 Press, I will likely test this software on the web-hosting they kindly provide me with and then write up a review for you all! If anybody has any experience running an Article Dashboard website, please let us know what you think about the software!

Update: I now have a website called Writer Database up and running that is using the Article Dashboard software. The site has been online for a few months and so far I am very satisfied with the results! There have been no problems, the software is very easy to use, and people are definitely eager to submit when doing so is free and beneficial to them!

Feel free to visit the website and submit a few articles!

The only issue that I have with Article Dashboard right now is that approving articles can be quite a time consuming task! While it has not been a problem, thus far, if the site were to suddenly take off and receive hundreds of articles a day, it would become a full-time job approving new submissions! It would be great if instead there was an option to auto-accept new submissions and then give users the ability to report or flag poor content so that at this point an editor can take action. Meanwhile, editors can still maintain the site and moderate the content, but in the meantime those submitting articles will not end up in a huge-backlog delay because their content would appear right away.

Another thing that I found quite confusing at first was the method for subscribing to RSS feeds. When you click a feed, it seems like nothing happens. Many users would likely take this to mean the page is broken or the feeds are currently unavailable. However, what actually occurs is that the address to the feed is posted in a text-box at the top of the screen. At this point users can copy/paste this info to access the feed. It would definitely be way better if clicking the feed link simply opened the feed, since most browsers will take action on this and ask the user how they would then like to subscribe to it.

Overall though I am very pleased with the results! I definitely recommend the software to anyone who wishes to setup their own directory!