Tweako.com - Collaborative Computing

Thank you. I didn't want the design to be too crazy. I know a site like this could be confusing enough to a first time visitor. Plus Im not all that great at design, but lets stick to the first excuse.

Hey, thanks for asking..

1) This list is quite long, and growing..

Account_reminder (just for now), actions, addtofavorites, adsense, aggregator, achive, article(custom, from story), block, blogpost(custom, from story), buddylist, buddylistinvite, captcha, cleanfeeds, comment, community_Tags, filter, flag_content, forum, forward, gsitemap, help, imce, links, links_weblink (no longer used, just for old nodes), logintoboggan (only used for custom remote story submission problem), menu, mysite (just added), node, nodewords, page, path, path_redirect, path auto, ping, print, private message, profile, search, system, tagadelic, taxonomny, textimage, throttle, tinymce, tracker, urlfilter, user, userpoints, views, views_rss, vote_storylink, vote_up_down, vote actions, voting api, watchdog.....

jesus..

2) I changed just about every single 3rd party module. A made a handful of changes to the core. The theme is really no longer what it first was when I downloaded it (especially the PHP templates, etc). I would be here for a month if I listed all of the changes. Please use the site and look around. Any things you would like to learn about I'd be glad to help.

Thanks,
Mike

Glad to help, and very happy to hear that my story can benefit others. Thank you for the great comments..

1) This was very overwhelming and extremely surprising. The alexa rank alone, went from 5.7 million to 176,000 I believe now. I was not 100% sure what my marketing strategy was going to be, and thats a bad thing. I didn't know if I wanted to appeal to a small level of very "techie" people to build a small solid community, then branch out. Or if I wanted to just get the message out to the world and let it all come start flowing in. A few hours after the launch, the story hit Wired.com and everything was decided for me right there. I noticed wired as a referrer in my traffic logs and I got so excited. Then a few minutes later I saw it on Digg with a handful of votes. After staring at Digg for 23 hours, the story hit the front page and thats it. The story ended up with 725+ diggs. By the end of the whole rush I had about 300 signups, something like 15-20k visitors, etc. And the next day, because of Digg, Wired, word of mouth, RSS*, and everything else, the story was covered in tons and tons of blogs. Digg's RSS is all over the place. It just spread fast.

On top of that, I built the content of the site up a lot before I made it public. I made sure people showed up to full sections and quality content, large votes, active comments, etc. Because you know when you stumble on a site like this and theres 2 votes on each thing, you're gone. The site has a friendly and easy design also. I think a lot of people find in my site, what Digg use to offer. And thats one of the reasons I created this site. Its a fun place to learn tech without getting hounded by people in IRC and forums etc. And we are up to 1000 submitted links/articles already. It has already become an incredible resource for almost any computing topic. Bookmarking made a huge difference too. I get constant traffic from stumble upon, delicious, and the rest.

Another thing worth mentioning is our Google traffic. I am speechless when I see the logs. Google is sending me tons of traffic everyday (already!). I always traceback most of the searches, and we are already in the top 10 for many many tech phrases/terms. A lot of the Google traffic is international too.

2) The night before the launch, I sent an email out to a handful of tech/web2 sites with detailed information, etc. I was hoping that my age and other factors would be a great premise for a story. Apparently only Wired thought so (and thank you very much for that). I am still getting ignored by Techcrunch, Readwriteweb, Mashable, etc. Its pissing me off now.

3) I was somewhat active in this community, and when I launched I spread the word around here. I talked a lot in IRC rooms (most people got pissed off). Some forum's, blogs, etc. Most of the traffic was from wired/digg though, then it all comes naturally afterwards. There are so many RSS subscribers too. And thats a great thing. I am still trying to gain more exposure, on all different levels. I am just so busy that its very hard to do so. Another way I have gotten members, which I never thought would have happened, was from the sites that get linked on here. Apparently I send them enough traffic that they notice the site, come visit, and sign up. I even have 2 guys from IBM posting their links everyday. Still have a lot more work to do. I am running this entire thing alone right now.

Thanks again,
Keep em coming.

Thanks, enjoy it.

That is done in node.tpl.php of your theme. Messing with that file was one of the most fun to tear apart. Mine is crazy now. This is hard to say because this will depend greatly on your theme. If you show me your file from your theme i will point it out to you. Basically just look for where the taxonomy category is and before it is printed do something like

print '(img src="image.png") '

It is really simple.
(use < instead of parenthesis of course though)

If you are having trouble just let me know.

Thanks again.

1) FutureHosting.biz - They have great prices and the best tech support you could ask for. They respond to anything in minutes at anytime. If you sign up with them, mention me as a referral.

The site is hosted on 2 separate VPS's. One for MySQL and one for everything else. The machines each have a gig of ram, and they share a massive amount of CPU power between each other and a few other nodes. This solution is perfect for now. The "Digg Effect" didn't even rattle it. CPU usages didn't rise much over 10% - RAM was cutting very thin though, but with the VPS's I have burstable RAM up to 4 gigs.

2) First I would work on the design and format of the site. When I first looked at the site it just looked like an RSS reader to me. Make your features stand out and make the site look more fun and friendly. Make sure users can know exactly whats going on the second they open the page. Then determine exactly who you are targeting; age, sex, interest, etc. All of the social networks, bookmarking sites, social news, blogs, forums, etc, all provide amazing exposure at no cost - except time. Look for popular blogs that are related to your sites topic, or blogs that cover news about new sites/services. I got very lucky with Wired.com and you could easily too. Once something good is exposed, the will spread.

I am still in need of massive exposure. Just landing on the Digg homepage doesn't cut it. I have very good traffic but still need a more active community. That is the hardest part by far. 95% of people are just there to grab info and leave. I constantly try to entice users to join; adsense revenue, tons of new features, etc.

Good luck.

Mike

Hey,

Let me start off by saying excellent job on the module. This was added about 2 weeks after the launch. I wasn't aware of it until I was browsing around the modules on here again. Everything is working perfectly, absolutely no problems with it, and the members seem to love it already. There was a small part in the source I had to change. This wasn't a bug or anything, I just changed the taxonomy linking format in the core, and I needed to make the same changes in MySite so all of the links worked.

I am using 4.7, so I guess I cannot benefit from those changes. I will take a look at them anyway though.

Thank you,
Mike