left our jobs, went to Asia

To all geek brethren out there (and probably around zero interest to anybody else), this post is about more technical details of the site and the development of it.

pre 2006-09. Bought the domains cringel.com, cringel.net and cringel.org from godaddy. Redirected last two to .com version. Did the usual start-up installation of drupal on an existing hosting, installed basic modules and selected a theme. Still working in my day job, not much time for the site.

2006-09-22. Posted on seobook.com asking if our trip is interesting enough to be linkbaitable.

2006-10-27. Added cringel.com to drupal sites list.

2006-10-28. Installed some more drupal modules, did the first qualified post.

2006-10-29. Posted some content on 43things.

2006-10-30. Added TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor. Messed with it for two hours without success. Figured the problem was in TinyMCE compressor. Now runs like new. Played with google maps. Played long enough to be able to get the correct key and place a nice map with markers and itinerary on the front page.

2006-10-30. Created the favicon. This sucker is so easily forgotten, so I decided to do that at the beginning. Here's how it looks on screen (don't judge the design, I'm not a designer!):

And the magnified version:

The first one to guess all the ingredients in the favicon, gets a free link to his site!

2006-10-31. Everybody knows the Million Dollar Homepage. Just yesterday Seth Godin blogged about the new version of it, mmmzr. Too expensive to advertise there (the cheapest link comes at a hefty 8192$!). Browsed the creator's first posts on Digital Point forums, and saw a clone called The Chosen Link. Business involves risks, so I took one and bought a link on the 1st column / 2nd row. Will see how it evolves

UPDATE 2006-11-01: The guy refunded the money back, claiming that he made a mistake and the slot was already reserved. Sent him one more email asking if he has any more free spots with the price of <10$.

Two things learned

• He's not a scammer (refunded the money)
• The decision to buy that link was right (everybody did that = a lot of buzz)

Oh, and the 60x60px button I created, was my hiking boot, photographed and resized:

2006-11-01. Day of the dead in Mexico, day of the updates in Vilnius. Signed up for Microsoft Adcenter with a free 50$ coupon. Will run the advertising "campaign" (50$ worth) from November 6 to November 30. Should have at least 15-20 posts by then.

2006-11-01. Drupal 5 beta 1 released. As much as I am interested in that (cringel.com runs on Drupal), I'd be equally happy to get some visitors from that thread. UPDATE: 46 unique visitors from that thread in the first 24 hours. Now wonder, having in mind that the topic has 637 diggs already. And not only incoming visitors, but some helpful information about the updates of Drupal from the community.

2006-11-02. Posted new content, added 8 more modules. Module emailpage not working, module tell-a-friend is working improperly. Have the first registered user :)

2006-11-03. Yay! First backlinks showing up! (The joys of srart up site :). One of them is http://morgaine-lefaye.net/, and the other http://wanderlusting.org/cringel-travelers. More about the latter: as I have learned, the guys do something similar to us, and they somehow have stumbled upon cringel.com. I'd like very much to get in contact with them just to share experience, but the access to register as a user on their site is forbidden. Will find a way to contact though, start at whois wanderlusting.org, see if they have an email listed there.

Also today I think to rename all my underscores ( _ ) in links and addresses to dashes ( - ). Should be easier for people to type.

2006-11-03. Registered at technorati.com, so far with a fantastic result of 0 blogs linking to us. No problem, it can only get better :)

Posted a comment at startupnation.com, that brings us a few visitors per day. Anyway, drupal.org is the biggest contributor.

2006-11-14. Phew. More photos and more posts. Gets time consuming to do that and also try to promote the site at least a little each day.

Somebody stumbled upon us at stumbleupon.com, but the link lived not for long.

2006-11-14. Answering some comments, new poll, etc. The interesting thing is after a quick search, I found a way to enhance the Google Maps module. Now the bubbles are numbered, and if you click on them, it will display a popup text, which can be useful to identify the city or area, without needing to zoom in a lot.

Thanks, Crestline Soaring Society!

2007-02-05. I have to admit that the drupal built in system for breaking the post into teaser and main body is not functioning, or, more exactly, not adjustable by user. I use TinyMCE WISYWYG text editor, so the solution was found by installing the drupalbreak plugin for TinyMCE.

2007-02-07. Phew, all the trip preparations made me administer the site much less. Content is the most important anyway, and that's where my focus was. What's new from November up until now (February) is that comment spammers started hitting the site with around 500 spam comments during a month. That made me install the akismet module for drupal, since manual deletion was too much for me. Number of cringel.com backlinks now is 254, but again, most of them spam. During December and January cringel crew sent a lot of SMS and emails to family and friends about the site, and that was the main factor for increasing amount of visitors. At the moment there are around 50 uniques per day. Because of the same reason, 80 percent of uniques are type-ins, and only 20 or less percent come from search engines or blog tracking services.

Note to myself: I can't keep up with constant content updates and site promotion if I don't work on it at least 3-4 hours per day. And that's a small site!

2007-02-12. As a result of agreement with a printed magazine Verslo klasė to publish our travel experiences, we sent them the first article. It includes the link to cringel.com. Hope it increases the traffic, though I do not have a slightest idea how to track it, since all (if any) visitors will be type-ins.

2007-03-09. Obviously, it does not work. Sitting down, coming up with an idea, structuring, writing it down, proof reading etc. etc. Too long and too difficult, especially when internet is not always accessible, and given the fact that we're most of te time on the move.

That's why I came up with a simple, but hopefully effective idea - picture of the day. To make it look fancier and more attractive, I called it "A day in Asia".

It's main goal is to simplify posting and make new content available at least on a daily basis, in such way possibly attracting more visitors. The concept is simple - we travel in Asia, and each day see something that would seem completely different or even strange back home. We may be already used to it, but people back home definitely aren't. That's why we'll share it.

Will wait a month and see how it works.

2007-03-12. The first video on the site. Boy, it takes time. It better generate some traffic.

2007-03-21. The amount of backlinks has been steadiliy increasing during a period of last half year by a steady amount of.. 1 per month.

I do want to cry. Time for some primitive-post-to-forums-with-link-in-my-signature-SEO. Started from whatdigitalcamera.com and popphoto.com. Already received some suggestions and critique from pageonephotos.com.

2007-03-21. New site design! (Well, a theme).

2007-03-22. Seriously considering to write a great story about us and post it to digg.

2007-04-27. Google page rank of the site dropped from 3 to 0. What the heck?

2007-04-28. It takes time to write a great story, especially when I'm not writing it.

2007-05-01. Google page rank rocketed to 5. Good for a site 8 months old, eh?

2007-05-01. Added a page with recommended items, will see if it will generate anything

2007-11-05. It's already 8 months that the site gets updated with "A day in Asia" posts on a daily basis. Quite an achievement when travelling, I'd think. *Pats himself on the head*

2007-11-05. Continuing the cooperation with a magazine Verslo klasė, 10th consecutive article is on its way to print.

2008-04-20. Migration from drupal version 4.7 to 5.7 did not go so flawlessly. It appeared to be a lot of work, fixing and adjusting. Still, some parts of the functionality are not working, for example Image Assist module with FCKeditor. Changed the theme to drupal's new default - Garland.