SurfiOnline

In an attempt to draw more users to MyBB, today I purchased a “premium” subscription from HotScripts. For $30USD (quarterly), we receive a yellow listing and the ability to place screenshots along with the listing. This doesn’t seem all too bad and in my opinion, it didn’t cost much either. (I looked at the sponsored listings however they’re $500USD quarterly for the category we’re listed in.)

For some time, we’ve been floating around on HotScripts and right up until a month ago, we were stuck on Page 9 for some reason! I couldn’t believe that we were behind other resources which weren’t as popular, were older, or were generally not as good as MyBB.

In an attempt to get us higher up in the charts, I updated the MyBB listing to outline the new version (1.0) that we released and change a few of the details. Great, so now we’re sitting in a place I’d call comfortable: Page 3.

I don’t think updating the listing though had a direct affect on our position, I think it comes down to the ratings given for MyBB since we implemented the “MyBB @ HotScripts” rating form on the download page of the MyBB site. Since then, we’ve had a greater increase in the number of users rating MyBB.

HotScript’s, however, still does not make up for the top percentage of our referrers. Our top referrer is now OpenSourceCMS, closely followed by Google, and then Forensoftware.de. HotScripts follows with only 233 actual referrers since 20th November.

After adding this premium subscription to the MyBB listing, I noticed we’re now on the bottom of page 2 – hopefully we can make it to the top of page two at least, if not maybe page 1, taking out some of our other competitors.

It will be interesting to see how much changing our listing to an enhanced one actually increases the popularity of MyBB, only time will tell, really.

If people want to help, they can offer there support to MyBB by simply visiting the MyBB Listing at HotScripts, and giving their honest opinions of MyBB by either rating it or writing a review of MyBB. Each rating and review gives us higher sort points, which gets us higher in the HotScripts listing.

I think I have, I think I have, I think I have. Okay, after the plea for a decent text editor I made last week; it seems something pretty close to what I was begging for has slipped in to my hands.

After a few comments I checked out some of the recommendations you guys made. VIM wasn’t too good when it didn’t work first time. I’m also not much of a fan of VIM even in Linux (nano > *). Notepad++ was missing the file/directory task pane and Zend, well, we won’t even go there.

Readers, meet PSPad. PSPad, meet readers:

PSPad is an awesome free text editor, which doesn’t look like it was made in the 1990’s. It answers my prayers in a lot of areas:

• Modern-style user interface
• Customisable UI - it is limited but allowed me to turn off most of what I don’t need.
• File browser task pane
• A useful status bar
• Browser testing - and it also has buttons to resize the window specific to certain resolutions!
• Template support
• Regular expression support
• Automatic code completion
• Built in support for adding your own debugger
• Spell checker

But of course, it has lots more than just that.

It has a few annoyances though, such as Redo isn’t Ctrl+Y, it is actually Ctrl+Shift+Z. That is going to take some getting used to. The other annoyance would be that when I close PSPad, it opens up again but the ‘project’ tab on the side bar is active and not my last used tab (well, I would settle for some way of disabling this project management system all together). I can live with those, however.

Other nasty little goodies it has includes a code explorer which will show me a listing of functions, variables, and includes in place in the script and allows me to jump directly to them - this is particularly useful if I’m working on a class in MyBB or a large file of functions (functions.php!). Things like an ever-so-useful colour eye dropper and hex converter (oh, the time that would save!), built in Lorem Ipsum generator, expression evaluator, macro recording, and a whole lot of other things I could go on and on about.

It’s cool. You should check it out..