Feed The Dragon
My very first website was launched on November 5th of 2006. Originally Feed The Dragon was home to my coding tutorials that I had written pertaining to HTML, CSS, and designing MySpace div layouts. The website was popular for a while but didn’t pay the bills so I didn’t have time to keep it updated with new content as often as needed in order to maintain a regular flow of traffic.
Then the unexpected happened, my hosting account was suspended due to excessive bandwidth usage. Without telling me exactly why they demanded that I upgrade my shared hosting ($10 mo.) to dedicated hosting ($170 mo.). I told them to cancel my account, I’ll take my business elsewhere. They left it suspended for two months before finally canceling my account. Setting up shop with a new host, I got the site back up. A week later however, excessive bandwidth usage. At least this host informed me of the details and was willing to allow me to fix the problem.
Apparently, hosting my affiliate link image on my host’s server is a bad idea since one of my affiliates was a social networking site that grew to have 300,000+ members and my affiliate link image was in the footer on every page. Deleting the image from my host’s server and hosting it elsewhere wasn’t enough to solve the problem. I had to contact the owner of the social networking site and have him update the url to my affiliate image link in the footer of his site. That proved to be quite the task and in the end it never happened. Feed The Dragon ceased to exist because one guy choose not to take the time to edit a url.
Several months later that social networking site unexpectedly went down. I felt bad for the members of the site, as a moderator in the forums I got to know quite a few of them. At the same time though, in the darkness a spark ignited, Feed The Dragon opened an eye. Now websites go down and come right back minutes, hours, days, or sometimes weeks or months down the road. I didn’t want to get my hopes up but as the days became weeks the spark that ignited was becoming a flame. I contacted my web host, they had me wait it out for a couple of months and finally decided to let me put Feed the Dragon back up.
After almost a year of MIA the dragon was back. What do I do with it now? I had grown way beyond designing div layouts for MySpace and was a self employed freelance website developer. I always had plans to expand the site as I expanded my own horizons, writing tutorials for others covering what I was learning as I learned them. With the site down I had focused more on working on not as much on sharing. There I was though, no tutorials and not much spare time to write any.
Funny thing was that even after being down for so long Feed The Dragon was still going strong. In search engine result placement…#9 out of 1,250,000 in Google for ‘myspace tutorials’ a PR of 3 with over 200,000 backlinks all thanks to some old affiliates still linking to Feed The Dragon. I see potential and I’m gonna lighten up my work load to focus on it more often. I just reformatted the site and relaunched it as a beta phase social networking blogging community for other website creatives like myself. Let’s see how things go from here on out…
url: http://feedthedragon.net – Visit Website
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