Building the 9rules Network

by Paul on October 8th, 2004

The Ideas

Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s always funny to me when people ask me how do I come up with the ideas for my sites because I know that every single person sits at their computer and for at least one split second thinks to themselves &lduqo;It would be cool if someone did a site like this…”. I know I do it all the time and I make sure to write those ideas down. The only thing preventing me from having 50 high-quality content sites up is me being one person (yes I could bring on contractors, helpers, etc.).

Every idea, website, and company starts in a day and when I say that I mean this phrase which has been uttered way too many times in my life:

One day I will start a…

If you are going to build anything you need to simply just start. I’m not telling you to throw money at it right away, but get started on it somehow. That way you can build momentum. If you confine yourself to always saying “one day” then nothing will ever get done.

The Content Management

Every single site uses Movable Type 2.661 to power it’s content. I had no intention to go with MT for every single site because it does offer its limitations. However, once I knew how to get it running, it just became so easy for me to quickly install it for my other sites and get things moving. Eventually, I will develop my own custom solution to better handle my needs, but until then MT works just fine. TextPattern is another viable solution to my needs. WordPress and its current lack of support for mulitple blogs keeps me away from it.

Although it can be argued that no blogging software is a full-fledged CMS, I believe they work better than any CMS out there because they aren’t bloated. They get down to the essential thing that every site needs, content. Not all of my sites can be considered “blogs” and so many people may not even think to use a blogging tool to power their sites, but they work. I should know :-).

Amazon Stores

The Amazon stores that I have integrated into my sites come from a custom script I developed. I may package this up one day, but first I need to get it running with Amazon Web Services 4.0. The great thing about Amazon being so large is that they pretty much have something that any site can sell.

I think the stores offer a great chance to further enhance the experience of your site if done correctly. I could definitely do a better job of integration with all of my stores and those changes are in the works (along with a 1,000 other things).

If you can’t wait for me to put an Amazon Store package together there are plenty of freely available scripts that can help you setup stores quickly. If you are even mildly knowledgeable about any programming language getting one setup yourself isn’t that hard. Careful though of using scripts that include every single category of Amazon into your site because Google will frown mightily upon you. Trust me, I know from experience.

Pretty Simple

I wish there were more to tell you, but that’s all there is to it. People see all my sites and might think that I am a machine or never sleep, but it’s quite the opposite. I don’t work as much as I should and I kick myself everyday because of this. But you can see that the only thing that can hold someone back from starting there own little network is time.

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