Proxy Builder Blog

I have been quite busy lately juggling my full time job and all my sites. Im glad to say traffic and revenue are creeping back up through september, a few server optimizations helped there. I’ve always kept the proxy builder blog as an extra, I hope my proxy articles help people over time but I cannot dedicate myself to writing regularly. I hope that people are learning and experimenting with my ideas, I love new competition! Enough rambling, back to business.

I have made some very interesting purchases lately and with the closure of the PHProxy project, my timing couldent of been better. I now own great keyword domains for all the best PHP based proxy scripts around. Zelune.info was my first one word proxy script domain, quite a fitting TLD I think.

The Glype proxy script is a quite a young contender but if updates & patches continue at this pace it will be great. You can now use our free glype web proxy at Glype.net. You can also download the very powerful PHP glype proxy script from our site, but you must keep a link back to the original glype website to use it.

I also snapped up Surrogafier.info, the name of a increasingly popular php proxy script. I definitely got a very fair price and grabbed a snazzy new proxy template for it too. I have used this script on a couple of my proxy websites and found it had quite good functionality. The site needs some work doing to it and I will offer a free source for the Surrogafier proxy script download.

I have been slacking off a bit on my websites lately. Its difficult to work 24/7 but I have many more proxy projects underway and I showcase them here when they are complete.

Over the last couple months I have been using Adversal popups on the browsing pages of some web proxies. Although I made a reasonable amount of money from them, I decided that the negatives outweighed the positives. So I proceeded to strip popups out of my web proxies for several reasons I will cover in this article.

Lets face it, no one likes popups. They have always been seen as intrusive, annoying, ugly and sometimes malicious. I have an inbuilt browser popup blocker with my Google toolbar but as I can tell from my Adversal stats - many do not. To be honest, I’ve never even seen a popup from Adversal so why should I put my loyal proxy users through it? I do use a fast, custom proxy script but any advantages of that can quickly be washed away by an uninvited flashing eyesore jumping around on the screen. If I was a regular proxy user I’d be searching for a new site pretty quick.

Besides your visitors you should also be looking to the search engines. Search engine bots and spiders are becoming more clever every day, if they browse to your page and find some easily categorized popup code you could see your search rankings slump or disappear altogether. You may even have your site categorized as “spyware” if you ran an ad infected with one of many exploits. Popups have had alot of bad press and even the newest web users will quickly turn off a site that runs them.

Although I have listed alot of negative points, I can only keep my web proxies popup free while other sources of monetization are available to me. I think my proxy sites have a better viral effect without pesky popups. I would rather someone pass my proxy website address on than make a few more cents off a visitor who will abandon my proxy forever.

Proxy Builder would like to announce the release of a free Zelune Proxy Script download over at Zelune.info. Zelune is a fast web-based proxy script, it delivers great performance and competes with the more established PHProxy script. You can find more information on the Zelune Proxy Script at its official home - Zelune.net. They provide a reliable download location for the script and are slowly developing their website into a helpful resource.

The Zelune Proxy Script Pack over at Zelune.info comes integrated with this template:

As always, please keep the footer links intact, Zelune.info is one of my own proxy websites and I am providing these resources for free on that condition. I look forward to releasing more free proxy templates in the next couple weeks, keep checking back!

I would just like to share with everyone the newly released (Aug 6th) Glype 0.3b Proxy Script. It looks like an extremely promising alternative to PHProxy, Zelune and other PHP-based proxy scripts with very similiar functionality. I havent tested it myself yet but I look forward to integrating and trying it out. While I was reading this post I helped myself to some prime Glype domains - I’ve found however obscure the name, people will remember quality web proxies.

Here is a list of the current features in the Glype proxy script 0.3b

• supports caching headers to allow normal browser caching
• uses a server-side cache to speed up requests for common images, files and stylesheets
• no installation needed so simply upload and go!
• setup wizard allows you to configure advanced options for your proxy with no PHP knowledge
• simple theme system provides different layouts quickly and easily
• ensure anonymity by stripping client-side scripts and preventing them from running on proxified pages.
• block access to particular sites with your choice of either a blacklist (blocks every site listed) or a whitelist (blocks every site other than the ones listed)
• ban users individually by IP address or collectively with flexible support for IP ranges
• filter bad words that may cause the entire page to be blocked if the user is subject to network restrictions (such as at school, college or work)
• strip elements from pages such as embedded audio/video or flash to conserve bandwidth

• supports Basic HTTP authentication so you can log into your protected areas

You can find more information on the Glype Proxy script below:

System Requirements

• PHP 5 with cURL enabled
• optional: for caching, PHP must be able to write to the cache folder

Demo
Proxy: http://www.glype.com/products/proxy/demo/
Setup wizard preview: http://www.glype.com/products/proxy/demo/setup.php

Download
http://www.glype.com/downloads/#proxy

Notes Currently released as beta but tested on MySpace, Facebook, Gmail and many other sites.

As you can see there seems to be a very professional setup behind this proxy script, this market is still relatively restricted in the scripts available and more choices are certainly welcome. Time has shown however that proxy scripts can quickly come and go, unless there is dedicated development then it will be more wasted talent. I would appreciate feedback from users and other proxy webmasters on this new proxy service.

I have just updated the Proxy Builder proxy topsite list, I have a wide variety of traffic building tools for my proxy websites but well maintained topsites can drive in traffic and build pagerank. Many proxy webmasters believe that topsites are only beneficial to their owners, unfortunately in any field there will be people who abuse your trust.

Topsites can be a traffic building powerful tool to webmasters but you have to be able to spot bad apples or you may even hurt the site you are promoting. I have compiled a list of points that may help you in spotting a poorly performing topsite.

• Pop-ups: This usually means the owner has devalued the site, they turn off visitors and can pop up “harmful” adverts.
• Lots of self promotion: Many outbound links to personal websites or sites on unrelated topics can devalue the link to your website.
• You should also watch out for turkish link spam. Many automatic verification topsites become overrun by these malicious spammers. It shows little concern by the owner.
• Poor quality layouts and default images. “Aarvark Topsites PHP” is popular topsite software run on many proxy listing sites on the web. If many of the topsite buttons on your proxy are almost identical you may may turn your layout into an unsightly mess.

These may be general knowledge but its good to set out the basics for even the newest proxy webmasters. I have checked all topsites included in our list and at the time of writing are all to my personal standards. I use many of these topsites on my own proxies and see the benefit on both sides.