The Eye of Kris

For years now, I've had this website called Laugh Break which was one of the first websites I ever created. It was mostly just something to experiment with - I was learning HTML and needed a project, so I decided to make a site with a bunch of those forwarded e-mails that you get from everyone (well, at least the funny ones).

Over the years, I've upgraded it several times, mostly by changing the look or switching the software that I was using to create and maintain it. There have been a couple of times that I almost shut it down, but when I started reviewing the log files, I realized that it was getting quite a bit of traffic. Mind you, it's not going to be one of the 100 most visited websites or anything, but it was getting tens of thousands of visitors a month, and I hated to just cut off all those people. I left it alone for a while, but last year I decided to try out Google's AdSense program, and see if I could actually get some money from all that traffic.

It turns out, I was sitting on a gold mine! Ok, not really. But it is generating enough extra cash to warrant renewing the domain name every year and continuing to add to the site. The problem is, adding to the site was a totally manual process that consisted of creating the HTML files manually and linking them all together, and it had to always be done on my desktop at home, where I had all the files and templates. It was too tedious for me to ever "get around to it".

So, here I was, with 350+ e-mails in the Laugh Break inbox that could be turned into pages of content with revenue-generating ads on them, but I just didn't have enough time to do it. So, I decided to invest in an upgrade.

In less time than I thought it would take, I was able to convert the entire site to use a database-driven Content Management System (CMS). Now, I can easily add content to the website from anywhere that I have an internet connection, and I don't have to create any links or update any menus - it's all done automatically.

The CMS I chose is called CMS Made Simple, and the main reason was because of the simplicity. I've tried out other, more popular CMS / Portal systems like Joomla and PostNuke, but they are very community-driven, which is not what I needed. CMSMS is really geared towards managing a plain-old-website, but doing it more efficiently. It's almost as if the other products had too many features.

In fact, what I needed was so simple, that I almost just wrote it myself. The main reason I didn't is that I wanted an integrated search feature, and I knew that could be a little tricky to write, and that most CMS's would have that built-in.

The biggest trick was setting it up so that all the old URLs would still work, because my log files showed me that a lot of traffic came from individual links that other people had created to specific pages on my site. I didn't want to break all those links and lose a bunch of traffic just to make updating the site easier. I was able to do that with the CMS, and from the end-user's point of view, you can't really even tell that anything has changed.

So, as of today, I plan to start updating Laugh Break more often. My goal is going to be to add at least 5 new pages each week, until I get through my mailbox. At that point, I'll just try to keep it up as new material comes in.

For those of you that used to visit the site often (Travis), but quit because it got stale - take note: it will be updated much more often in the future.