Plans and a growth spurt.
by Joseph Delgado

I've always wanted to include a chart of hits from the previous month, definitely not to brag about the number of hits, but to show Intervue Digest's growth in a hopefully positive direction. Now that I over a year's worth of data I can pull graphs together like this fairly easily.

Compared to last month's stats, they seem to have dropped this month. I have been tweaking my Site Database program to be more efficient and easier to use, so no real promotions went on.

I was even thinking about making a scripting language for Site DB--for a commercial purpose, but I would need to port the text engine to something other than Visual Basic. I would like something portable like C++, where I can keep control of the source code, and just have people expand upon my work without losing it. Anyway that's one of the projects that seem to be on the back burner.

The reason for the revision is that I want it used for other pages like Directions, Net Parties, game sites, etc. Any page that can be made into a template can benefit from Site DB's tag engine. Sometimes I think the word engine is too elaborate for my little program especially when compared to a Quake or Unreal engine, but it sure does sound cool. My Directions aren't that bad to assemble, but a Net Party article involves a lot of sorting through images, image manipulation, and just hand coding all the image links and text. It has been a pain and even though the net parties continue, we have not reached the next level where it becomes an after thought, where it becomes fun.

Some people have used the submit form and I give them the highest priority over other sites that I find by myself, which makes the most sense to help a person who actually came to my site instead of a stranger who's probably never even heard of it. The form works well, but I want to do a similar thing for shareware and even support PAD uploads. Yes, I'm still a little jaded about PAD and how it is being used by other sites, but it does contain a lot of information and makes it easier for developers to get information about their shareware to various places in one format. I still want to write reviews on the shareware posted and use the PAD information as a reference.

I had pretty good months in March and April of this year; probably the highest hits for my shareware sites since I restarted in 1998 over 130 hits. Nowhere near to the 1,459 mark I had back in my golden age of November 1996, but almost triple the average of last year. I did some free advertising on 200-shareware links.com and it paid off. I wouldn't think about paying for advertising, since I have nothing to sell yet or have any sponsors.

I wouldn't attract any sponsors since I don't have the hits, so my objectives are to make more of a contribution, do more free advertising, and find people outside of search engines to link to. Newsgroups have been saturated, so I haven't seen a good increase from that and people are pretty sensitive about spamming. So things are growing kind of slow, but a lot of foundation work is being laid down now and I believe it'll set the stage for success later.

Thanks for reading,
Joe Delgado