Almost a year ago, I created a website. Now, yesterday, while keeping an eye on the repercussions of my domain transfer, I stumble upon this thread in the World of Warcraft forums.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against someone building a website that competes with mine, that's just healthy.
What I do mind is:
When they steal my stylesheet;
When they name their site the same as mine;
When they use the same layout, including the menu and complete phrases;
When they slap a "(c)2008" on a site whose HTML code was ripped off mine.
So, to get back at the guy, I implemented a few small features from the clone site and integrated them in my site. Why not. At least I didn't rip off his code.
I've decided to get a proper domain for my WoW Gem Finder application that was on a subdomain (wowgems.jponrails.com). The new domain is www.wowgemfinder.com.
This should be an interesting experiment and will yield an answer to the eternal question: what is the effect of moving a site to a new domain on the site's PageRank.
I expect my PageRank to be disrupted, but eventually, in 3 months or so, I expect it to be better, since the new domain name is more SEO-friendly than the old one.
I took care of all the necessary things, including:
Redirecting (301) incoming requests to the new domain using mod_rewrite;
Changing references to the old domain within the site (I had a few absolute links, notably for the widget and the add-a-link text);
Updating Wiki entries on a few websites that point to my application;
Sending out a few emails to my most important incoming link sources;
Letting Google (and MSN, and Yahoo!) know that the new domain exists.
Now, all I have to do is sit back and see what will happen to my PageRank. Hopefully, the transition won't be too brutal. I'll keep you posted!
It didn't take much time to implement, a few hours, most of the time spent fiddling with the layout to make it nice.
I initially made that site when I played World of Warcraft (I've quit since) but I still maintain it because it's quite popular with the community and it still gets a couple of thousand visits every day.
I set out to write a small application last week. After 6 days worth of free time, I give you Xornot's Gem Finder. It's a small Ruby on Rails application that allows you to find World of Warcraft gems.
I wrote this small application because no-one else did and I wanted to use it. Also, because I wanted to prove that simple, straightforward projects that can be done in a matter of days, can be very useful in the real world.
And useful it is, if I look at my log, which is continuously serving request every few seconds, a mere 6 hours after I made the URL public.
Anyways, used the acts_as_taggable plugin to index the information. If were to do it again, I'd modify the plugin to actually generate the tags automatically from the object data. Since I was already feeding the database when I thought that up, I decided to put that idea on ice and perhaps recycle it in another project. Nevertheless, the dataset is now complete and I have a laboratory to play around with tags. At the present moment, I don't do anything [out of the ordinary] with them, but I will try different things in the weeks to come.
I'll post the appliction's access statistics as soon as I gather enough. I think this will be surprising.
Update 2007-03-07 17:11
After six and a half days online, the site has had 2964 unique visitors and 3629 visits (1.22 visits per visitor). 16568 pages were served, an average of 4.56 per visit. These stats exclude non-visible spider traffic. Not too shabby!
