Creating portal for organizational purposes

The next step is, well, using your portal. Here’s what I suggest:

Keep your forum from prying eyes.

The simplest way to do this? Go into Cpanel and choose “Password Protect Directories”. The next screen lists all your folders. Pick the one you installed your CMS in. Now, go down near the bottom of the page, where there are blocks for you to fill in “Username:” and “Password:”. Make up a username and password, and plonk them in there. Now click “Add/Modify authorized user”. It’ll take you to a confirmation page – on that, you just need to click “Go back” down at the bottom. Now, tick the box at the top left of the page beside the words “Directory requires a password to access via the web (you must check this to activate password protection).” Now hit “save” in the middle of the page. That’s it. Now, when you or anyone else tries to access a file from that directory, they’ll have to input your username and password first.

The point of this? Everyone you link to will see your site in their backlinks, and they may come visiting. It’s unlikely they’ll have any bad intentions, but you’re going to be keeping records on your online ventures in here, so you don’t really want them seeing what you’re up to. This is the simplest way to keep them out.

Now for setting up the content of your portal.

Set up your Newsfeeds:

Go into your newsfeed section. You may have one set up already, or you may need to create a “block”. In either case, what you’re looking for is the part of your CMS that will allow you to run “RSS Feeds” or “syndicated feeds” from other people’s blogs or forums. Now, go find some feeds you like, and set them up in your portal. You may also have an option to set up various categories for them. I have mine running right on the front page, so I can scan the headlines every time I go, to see if there’s anything I want to read.

Next, input your links.

This is an ongoing process, of course. I input links to my cpanels, my stats pages, online tools I use regularly, forums I visit, etc. Here’s the one trick I want to share, though. If you would prefer not to even show up in anyone’s backlinks, there’s a simple way to avoid it: put this at the beginning of the link:

http://safeurl.de/?

.
That’s all. Your links will look like this:

http://safeurl.de/?http://bluemushrooms.com

That takes you to a gateway for a few seconds, then onto the site you’re visiting. Safeurl will show up in their backlinks instead of you.

You don’t have to use this feature if you don’t want to. My purpose in using it is so that when I visit my own sites, my site won’t show up in their backlinks. Why does that matter? Well, if all my sites share a common backlink, Google can tell my sites are connected. And while that shouldn’t be an issue – since I’m not interlinking my sites for spamming purposes – there’s a chance Google might someday look at something like that and think I must be up to something, and therefore my sites must be penalized. I admit, I doubt this is likely, but smarter people than I bother with this sort of thing.

And hey, it’s not like it’s a ton of work.

Next up, the final step: your forum

1. e107 as a personal or whole site portal
2. New Blog Portal and Ping Service
3. Creating a static front page on a blog
4. Grab this Booby!
5. How to recognize a scraper site

Pages: 1 2 3

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