Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Back to freelance developer in Toronto

In my job as contract web developer here in Toronto: I get about 100 - 150 emails a day. Some, from potential clients other's from previous web development clients. There are a few, however - that ask the same questions. Over and over - With that in mind, I have put my tutorial hat on again.

Just before the holidays, I uploaded a new video on YouTube - a Dolphin 7 Tutorial entitled: How to install Dolphin 7.

Dolphin (by Boonex) is an amazing piece of coding genius. I have been working on the Dolphin platform for about 4 versions - wow... Soon I will be the oldest (web site) freelancer in Toronto.  At any rate, Dolphin is a great 'starting point' for an online community. What I mean is: no one wants a 'cookie cutter' community, but building your own online community is a common trend with current web business entrepreneurs and webmasters.

With Dolphin you have all of the core function you could ever need - regardless of web site niche. I encourage you to check out the Dolphin 7 install tutorial and let me know if I can answer any questions about the software or the install.

I am always looking for ideas for more tutorials: So keep those questions coming in. I reply to mails mostly in the morning with my cuppa!



While I am the Dolphin topic: I highly recommend some research into both your chosen niche and online communities in general. 

Take a look at this great title. This will answer some questions, you don't even know you'll need the answer too: if that makes sense...?

Check it out anyway.


I wont leave it so long between posts: got a little busy with freelance work and neglected my blogging duties. 

See you soon 

PS: I do know this is alot like my previous post - about the (Boonex) Dolphin Tutorial Videos I posted on YouTube. You will also notice, I use my job description alot in the blog text: A freelance web developer in Toronto. 

I was reading a great article (blog) about creating backlinks for your web site: It talks about ways to use blogger blogging to increase backlinks. In this post, I am testing their concept.

Friday, November 26, 2010

New Dolphin 7 Tutorials

First off - let me apologize for my long absence from blogging. I am currently working a project in China. What I thought was impossible, to get to blogger.com from China - appears to have been fixed with a simple VPN service.

Down to the nitty - Dolphin 7.04 was recently released. This release gave us a new feature. A much-needed SPAM attacker for our Dolphin communities. Once again - Congrats Boonex on a job well done. Better late then never they say!

I have posted a couple of new tutorials over at youtube -



I enjoy getting your comments and requests for new tutorials - keep them coming!

In my How To Install Dolphin Community tutorial, I mention a site I came across called earningportal.com - This site has a focus on helping it's members build their community web sites. They have Joomla, Wordpress etc - but my focus (as you know) is the Dolphin community builder.

My point: If you are having a hard time signing up new members: Check out the resources these guys offer. Build your membership list and find new members for your Dolphin website, using the tools and resources offered there.

You do have to sign up (it's free) to see most of their tools. Not sure why they do it that way - but, it's free to join - so what's the big deal right?

They have a few video tutorials that I picked up as giveaway's for my clients. From what I hear (I didn't have time to actually view the tutorials myself) they were a great help in building traffic to my client's Dolphin web site.

I wanted to touch on something that I get a tonne of questions about:

"How do I generate traffic to my web site" - This is the million-dollar question isn't it. I'll be honest with you - I don't personally run a Dolphin web site, or any other membership-based community. I do have a few hundred clients that run these types of sites and they all have their own methods of getting traffic and finding new members.

I will say, I have heard from at least five of my clients that they use the same tool - as much as I get asked, I am always asking around. Especially from those web masters who have built a good membership list for their site. The most common tool I have heard actually works to generate traffic and sign ups - is an automatic traffic generator - Like I said, I don't use it myself, I don't really have any sites I want to generate traffic to. If you think about it though, if 5 clients are all using the same tool - it must work.. I will leave it to your own research... but hey... let me know what your results are. Does it generate new sign ups? How many? How long did it take to set up and use?

For the record, and for those friends that read my blog - China sucks! Other than the development team I work with are great - altho the language thing gets to me some times. It takes three-times as much effort to explain a function or script than it did with any team I ran in Canada!

Chinese food - sick to death of it! I would kill for a roast beef dinner, with all the fixin's -- but enough whining. I am enjoying my assignment and the little travelling I have done in China - would not trade the experience for anything.. so all whining aside.. I am glad I took the contract -- to those that helped talk me into it -- you owe me a burger and fries, and I owe you a BIG thanks.. This has been a great experience already and I still have 18 months to go...

Now that I have the VPN service, I will get back to blogging and creating new tutorials for Dolphin and other CMS systems, as time allows.

Take care all and have some chinese-food thinking of me!