Besides writing sponsored post and blogging, I’m also making sure I do some programming. After all I used to be a full time web programmer.

The challenge is to find some direction to what I’m going to do. In my previous job, I just had to wait for instructions from my immediate superiors on what to do for the day. Just like a robot I follow obediently the instructions to the letter.

Now, I have no one to tell me what to do. Probably not wise to follow any random idea that pops up in my head. It has to have some hint of profitability or if not, at least something that can generate some traffic.

Web Directories
I’ve seen some web directories where you put up the URL in a particular category hoping for more traffic and increased visibility. That got me interested to see what were the available scripts out there that were being used. Looks like there is only one dominant and most used link directory script called PHPLD. It’s not free at USD 25 per directory with link back to the creator or USD 75 per directory without the link back. It’s certainly not a bad money making idea as website like Szab.net by Awang is generating income.

I’m looking to create my own script and I’ve taken a look at free scripts from source codes of PHPHoo (based on the old Yahoo Directory)  and Free PHP Directory. I don’t like the coding style as it’s not modular enough. PHPHoo is pretty dated now and since it was written prior to PHP4 some of the codes did not work

It was an easy fix to make PHPHoo work with the current PHP4 and PHP5. There was a problem with read globals which is a feature that is turned off by default because it’s been found to be a security hole in PHP scripts.

 I’ll probably republish the fixed scripts on my PHP blog with the modified codes to share with others. It’s a simple script but there’s lots of things to be learnt from the code for a beginner PHP programmer.


Free PHP Directory on the other hand is newer, better looking, well coded and has template support. I’ll probably delve into the codes and features to know more about it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to take someone else’s code and modifying it to call my own. I’ll start writing the whole thing from ground up using my own codes and libraries I’ve written over the years. It always feels better to plug in my own library of codes.

Profits ?
I don’t intend to sell the script once it’s completed for profit but to put it out there for free. It’s better to just generate traffic to my new programming site and get myself back into the open source/free source code community. There’s more benefit in that than directly selling scripts.

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