Chellenge accepted

Well I've decided to enter Burt's challenge. Unfortunately since it is the holiday season I don't have much extra time to concentrate on AIS sites. Couple this with the fact that I'm going on vacation for 10 days and I'm going to have to put AIS site generation aside in the hopes that my "challenge" website will actually do some business. Let's see if I can get something together in a week.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

Burts at it again. This time he is sponsoring an AIS competition. The goal? To build and monetize a website in 45 days (and hopefully learn something along the way). The winner (person who earned the most $$ from their site) will receive a cash prize from Burt and will get to brag to us how they did it.

Entry deadline is the 16th of December. Make sure you check out the details of the challenge over at Burts Blog.

Good luck to all the contestants!

RSSGM?

I was looking for some additonal info on RSSG and came across RSSGM or RSSG Modified which is being hosted as a project at SourceForge. So after comparing the two I decided I would post a note on the differences I found beween the two.

At first glance they seem almost identical. Some of the filenames have been changed in RSSGM but the code in them remains mostly the same. The only major difference I found is that RSSGM uses (by default) uses three keyword page template files plus one index page template file whereas RSSG uses only one page template for each of the keyword pages. When your site is generated, RSSGM randomly selects one of these pages for inclusion. This lets you vary the code, headers/titles, and ad placements from page to page to give make your site less of that script-generated feel. Also the page template that comes with RSSGM is quite different from the one in RSSG so if you're looking for an additional template to use with RSSG it is worth the download (just make sure you change the hard-coded paths to ../rssg).

I'm going to keep my eye the project to see if it is developed further. There have been several updates over the past couple of days so I think that is a good sign.

Now I have an excuse to make a new site :)