Restoblog

Personally I hate obfuscated URLs, ones like http://www.restohof.com/comments.php?job_id=25450. There is evidence that Google hates them too, and will give you a crap pagerank if the URL is too weird. At the very least, it’s better to have some nice keywords in there instead of “job_id.”

How to fix them?

One way is to dip into the arcane world of .htaccess files and mod_rewrite. I see you’re falling asleep already.

But wait!

You could hire someone to do it for you, or you could use this tool I found. it will write all the rules you need, you just plunk them into your .htaccess file and rejig your links, and your URLs will be nice and purty. Which is exactly what I’ve been tinkering wround with for the last 2 days.

Stay tuned for pretty links at Restohof.com, coming soon!

As you might remember, we used Creamaid to help launch the main Restohof site. How did it go? you might be asking.

When I signed up for it, I imagined that I would entice ESL teachers in Korea with blogs to write about Restohof, to check it out, and give it a review, good or bad.

That was my first mistake.

So working with US$100, I figured to make it worthwhile for an ESL teacher I would pay them $10 per post. Not great money when privates go for US$40 an hour or more, but maybe enough to attract some bored ESL bloggers who wanted to help me out.

After posting the offer, I was immediately plunged into an underworld I didn’t know existed, that of the self-employed paid blogger. These people are out to make money from their blogs and monitor Creamaid and others for new postings, and are very quick on the draw.

Before I started I wondered if anyone would write. But after setting it up, within minutes I had 8 submissions.

These were not the people I expected. They were not ESL teachers, for one.

My second mistake was to make my “mission statement” way too clever:

Restohof.com has launched!

We’re not saying all school directors in Korea are crooked, but uh, some of them are. Ok, a lot of them.

At the same time, some great, smaller schools have a hard time getting noticed in the din that is the ESL teaching industry in Korea.

And pity the poor teacher in the West, trying to find a job from half a world away. Who to trust?

Restohof.com grabs jobs from popular ESL job boards and lets the ESL community rate them for veracity, duplicity, and tomfoolery.

The older generation assists the new, and thus the cycle closes only to begin again shortly thereafter.

Help us get the word out.

Seeing how a great many of the self-employed bloggers are not native speakers of english, some of them didn’t know what to make of this. I should have written this much more clearly, telling the bloggers what I expected them to do. Namely, write about my site. And link to it.

There are some Americans who are self-employed bloggers, but the majority appear to be Asian teenagers. China. The Philippines. Singapore.

So now, the game changed. Instead of expecting to get links and traffic from ESL teaching bloggers and their readers, I was looking to get links from these one-step-above spam blogs to improve my Google ranking.

To this end I installed the Google toolbar and checked each submission to see what kind of pagerank they had.

Now, if you don’t know much about pagerank here’s what you need to know: it’s one of the tools Google uses to determine how good your site is and how high it should feature in Google searches. Pagerank is a number between 1 and 10 and the higher it is the better. A new site starts at 1. Getting it up to 2 or 3 can be a real battle. But if a site with a higher pagerank links to you, it increases yours a bit. So I was hoping I could catch some of the fire of my blogging buddies.

Most of these bloggers are used to getting $1 or $2 or maybe $5 per post, not the astronomical $10 I was paying. So they flooded me with submissions and it was hard to keep up. And truth be told, some of them could barely write English. The Creamaid interface is good, and the boys say they are improving it, but in my case the rejection notification was not varied enough. I was given a few different choices as to why I was rejecting a post, and the author of the post never saw my notice. They couldn’t figure out why they didn’t get $10.

It would have been nice if I could tell them: you spelled the name of my site wrong, and didn’t even link to it. But I couldn’t.

Also, the system only allowed me 10 posts in the system (my $100 divided by $10 payments) which was a hassle. Some submissions I wanted to keep in case nothing better came up. But the system cut me off at 10, so anyone wanting to submit after that point was denied.

Keeping a lineup of 20 or even 30 would have been better.
So how did it work out? Well, I got more than 10 posts linking to me (even the rejects linked to me). And my blogging friends taught me a few tricks.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have made the mission statement clearer, and I would have offered $5 per post, and I would have paid everyone.

My pagerank? Still 1. But there are other reasons for that. Fodder for a whole other post.

It’s taken a while, but we’ve got the discussion boards out of development and have released them to the public.

“So what?” you say. “Another message board.”

Yeah, I guess you’re right. But this one is another experiment in so-called “loser-generated content,” using the same rating engine that drives the rest of Restohof.

This means that you can classify threads as truth or tripe, and the best ones will rise to the home page, and the worst will be relegated to their own special page. The goal is to create a user-modified discussion board that is driven by the community at large.

Want to see the best? Go here. Prefer to dwell in the sludge? Go here.
Don’t like something? Set it as tripe. Something good in there? Truth, baby, truth!

The old way is to whine about it, and maybe sic the moderators on an offensive post or poster. The old way is to request a “sticky.” The old way is to hope that the moderators will listen to you. Forget about all that, now you can be in charge. The site is yours.
Even better, what you write and how often you write is linked to your profile. Do well, and your votes carry more weight. Don’t do so well, and your word counts for a bit less.
We had a lot of fun discussing it, testing it, and making it.

Hope you enjoy using it.

Have fun!

The crazy sumbitches at Creamaid have this wacky idea to rewire the web, one discussion at a time, by creating a doodad that will allow bloggers to have messageboard-like discussions, with no messageboards at all. They’ll just talk through the doodad.

For this the Korean government heralded them as geniuses and gave them startup money, and influential blog Techcrunch said they would “pollute the internet.”

What makes some people angry is that bloggers get paid to write. But for the boys at Creamaid this has always been besides the point. They’re more interested in building online communities than in getting rich.

So am I. Using a widget developed by a Korean startup to get the word out about Restohof is a very natural thing for me to do. And seeing how I still have a LOT of 50 Cent’s money to burn, I figured: why not spread it around?

If you have a blog and a PayPal account, write about Restohof on your blog and I will put $10 into your PayPal account. Those are American dollars. The good ones. Just follow the instructions on the gewgaw so you get it inserted into your blog ok, and watch the money roll in!

Starting a website like this takes a little money. Not a lot. A little.

I don’t mind. I chalk the whole thing up to being a hobby. But like any hobby I didn’t want it to get out of hand.

Now 50 Cent is a drug-dealing rapper who has a new CD coming out in June. Normally a guy like 50 Cent and a guy like me wouldn’t cross paths very often, but 50 Cent needs a little help with his website. I reckoned I’d help fiddy with his site in my spare time, and then use the money from that to fund Restohof.

So I’m happy to say that 50 Cent is as good as his word, or rather, the machinery around 50 Cent is as good as their word, because what they paid me today easily covers Restohof’s startup costs and then some.

The real question is: spend the remainder on bling or Google adwords?

What would 50 Cent do?

You might be surprised.

This is the question I hear most often when I show someone the site, and the one that I spend the most time thinking about.

If the site is driven by ratings submitted by surfers, how do I know that a single surfer with an axe to grind, or a job to sell, isn’t going to skew the ratings?

Well, first off, one user gets only one chance to rate a job. They can’t grudge something 100 times.

Secondly, each user needs to verify their profile through a real email account.

This is a very mild barrier to entry, I admit. So someone who’s determined enough could create 100 accounts with 100 real email addresses and log in and out 100 times to grudge a job 100 times?

Not quite.

While the site may look simple, there’s a lot happening in the programming behind the scenes to prevent someone from doing this. And I’m keeping an eye on how the site is used so I can keep one step ahead of any determined faker.

Also, a brand-new user doesn’t have the same weight as a more established user. Again, this is built into the programming of the system so that it can recognize a member of the community as opposed to someone trying to “game” the system. And again, this programming is constantly being tweaked.

The whole idea is to build a site that rewards legitimate participation of its members and create a strong online ESL community, while weeding out the scammers.

Will it work? It should. If it doesn’t I will change it.
I didn’t invent these ideas myself, I learned them from studying social software.

But seeing how these ideas are still new and this technology untried, anything could happen. It’s still very cutting-edge.

Should be interesting to watch.

Ok don’t kill me, but we had to wipe the member’s database clean in this last wave, to jiggle around some tables to get them to how we need them.

The upshot for you guys is that if you want to continue, you’ll have to create new profiles under new names.

I really didn’t want to do this, as I know some of you are quite proud of the history you’ve built up so far, but, well, that’s what testing is all about.

Trust me, the hard part is done and we’re ready to roll.

Sign up again and you’ll be a member for life.

The recurring problem with rotten job links has been fixed, but the archives are admittedly a dog’s breakfast. Best to ignore them for the time being, until the roll into oblivion. Right now the site keeps archives for 30 days, which I figure should be enough for anybody.

I find it interesting that when people write comments they tend to be short and snappy. Is that because we’re all so busy? If so, I thank you again for taking the time to test the site out.

Thanks to everyone for helping test. Obviously we had some things to work out.

And then I took a vacation.

And then we had some programming issues. Nerdy stuff you probably don’t want to hear about.

Oh yeah, and a death in the family.

But we’ve fixed all the things that needed fixing and are back on track. Thanks to all of you for picking up the ball again and helping me get the site online. Please test some more, and if you see anything alarming, email me at restohof@gmail.com.

If you’re reading this, it means I’ve sent you an email inviting you to “beta test” Restohof.

It’s really not all that exclusive. You can invite anyone else you like, too.

And it’s really not all that complicated. Just create a profile, browse around, and rate some ESL jobs.

Let me know if you come across anything that doesn’t work, or anything that you think I got really wrong. I’m going to be working on the site at the same time, so don’t be alarmed if it changes before your eyes.

Most of all, thanks for helping me out and for taking a little time to test. I truly appreciate it.