Back in the day, huge link sites used to be all the rage…. then came along search engines that returned better results than AltaVista, and an endless stream of blogs posting lists of things. I remember making cookie cutter casino sites for DMOZ years ago. Happy days. Nowdays you'll be lucky to even get your listings reviewed by one of the volunteers let alone accepted.

Useful directory listings and Articles sites will pretty much always make money as long as you're providing something people actually want. They're not too much of a nightmare to maintain and are a worthy addition to most portfolios. I wonder if we'll actually see a rise in the importance of human-edited directories again, outside of buying links to keep up with the latest SEO trends.

• Webmaster Site
  This company has been making their product for 8+ years now, so they're clearly making doing something right. Some of the best scripts in their class. Look at the demos and the feature list(s). Not the cheapest ($150+), but you totally get what you pay for.

   

  • WSN KB (Article script) – Features list
    Brilliant, professional script with a lot of support behind it. Does everything you will need, and is VERY customisable.
    There's 300+ articles of documentation, examples, and extras which is presented using the script, so you get a very good idea of what this script can do for you. Includes functionality like TOPLISTS out-of-the-box
  • WSN Links – Look at that list of features
    The granddaddy Link directory script. Every feature in the book. The last word
    Listing links since DMOZ was cool. Shares a lot of the same features as the Knowledgebase / Article script above. Make sure you check these out, as they're pretty much the best in the business in my opinion.
• Your Articles Directory
  VERY full featured article directory script. Comes with everything including the kitchen sink, tons of themes, and it's only $100.
  Only $100 too,
• Subrion CMS
  (Subrion is a new PHP content management system and it can be used for building both simple and enterprise-level sites. It includes an extensive plugin system that makes Subrion CMS extremely flexible and easy to use. There are several packages that can be used separately or together on one site. They are: article publishing script, auto classifieds package, realty classifieds script, and web directory package.)
• PHP My Directory - phpMyDirectory Mods - PMDMods.com
  phpMyDirectory is another feature rich link directory / site management script. Interestingly, there is an active third-party development community for the software.
• Inout Article Base
  Another article script. I wasn't particularly impressed by the admin though.These guys make a very cool PPC ENGINE and Search script though.
• JMBsoft linkX
  A good link directory script from a company that has made similar software fo the adult industry for the last 10~ years. This looks to be an excellent script, and at $50 it's a bargain.
• PHP Link directory (Premium version)
  Open source script with a premium version. Has lots of plugins/modules. If you want to list articles… Use this. If you want a pure link directory, then JMBsoft linkX would be a better script for the price.
• Gossamer Threads Links
  Another very old and mature link directory package. As with the others, it's got pretty much everything + plugins, so it's a case of seeing which suits you more.
  They just released 3.3 today according to the forum, so you can be sure it's still being actively developed and supported.
• eSyndicat
  Popular pro link directory script.
• Indexu Deluxe
  Another popular professional link directory script.

Free / Open Source Directory and link indexing Scripts

• DewNewPHPLinks
  Looks like a fork of PHP Link directory. Open source and fairly actively maintained.
• PHP Link directory (OPen source version)
  Much better than most free scripts.
• Site-Sift
  One of the better free scripts out there.
• cpLinks
  Free commercial grade links directory script. Pity about the name though.
• Free Php Directory Script
• Ska Links. Not much info there really. Looks like yet another DMOZ clone
• PHPWeby

WordPress Directory Plugins / Themes

To be 100% Honest, I am yet to see a wordpress directory theme / plugin I think is particularly good. That's not to say the following plugins are bad software…. they're just not up to par as a link directory / article directory system compared to what else is out there.

• Article-directory-wordpress-plugin – Awesome!
  I found this just as I was finishing the article, so the above paragraph still stands Superb set of plugins + Theme to run a wordpress article and link directory site.
  Not particularly easy to setup and get going, but the results look worth it. If you're intent on using wordpress for a site like this, then this is probably your best bet. Demo Site on http://articlesss.com/
• WordPress Link Directory
• Directory Press. $79.
• Business Directory Plugin. Paid

Other CMS software for running directories

• Drupal CMS
  Very strong CMS. Depending on how much time development capital you have, you can make it do whatever you want.

Link Bid directory scripts.

These scripts are down last because I found them last and haven't reviewed them. There's nothing with paying (or charging) for placements, after all, the point of the exercise is to make money, right ?

Note that many of the other scripts also have paid placement modules, so it's definitley not a feature unique to either of these scripts.

• PHP Link Bid – premium themes for PHPLinkBid
  Sell site placeents, text links, listings etc etc. Both these scripts are well supported and if you play it right, will make you good money.
• Link Bid Script
  Also includes a free version of the same script.

I’m using cbnet Ping Optimizer for pinging.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.feed24.com/?c=add
http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?XmlPing
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://blo.gs/ping.php
http://geourl.org/ping
http://ipings.com
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.feedsubmitter.com
http://www.pingerati.net
http://www.pingmyblog.com
http://www.weblogalot.com/ping
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

The Marsaglia Random Number CDROM including the Diehard Battery of Tests of Randomness

The diehard tests have nearly every test you’ll want to subject an RNG to.

I’ve used these before when we were preparing RNG’s for a gaming license submission, and they were very helpful.

Toshiba RMH RNG cards
About - Half size PCI board - Half/Full size PCI board

Great little cards, and not too expensive either. We bought a few of these and they did the job perfectly. You’ll need to write your own drivers for windows though, as they only come with linux drivers.

TestU01 is a software library, implemented in the ANSI C language

A collection of utilities for the empirical statistical testing of uniform random number generators.

This is a great library, and would be very very helpful for anyone doing some development with RNG’s.

Lair Of The Multimedia Guru » Pseudo random number generators.

Interesting discussion on RNGs and which one to use where.

WordPress themes are always popular, and (hopefully) useful.  Here’s a list of links to themes I find either functionally useful or just great to look at.

There are free and premium themes here, in many styles, suitable for many different kinds of blogs.

Obvious

WOW. This is one of the most full featured themes I’ve seen for WP. It’s clear that a lot of thought has gone into making something that’s beautiful and functional.

It’s got a dozen colour schemes, every page variant you can imagine, sliders, useful shortcodes. Very high quality work. For $37, it’s an bargain.

• 3 types of animation
• 4 templates of Featured Pages
• 4 templates of Recent Posts
• 6 templates of Featured Posts
• 8 custom widgets

Accumulo is an RSS aggregation theme

Designed to imitate sites such as Popurls.com and Alltop.com. For whatever reason, aggregation themes seem quite rare.

WordPress themes by Alexandru Cosmin

WordPress Classified Theme | ClassiPress

Classified ads theme, so you can,well, sell things. It’s more than just some graphics, including a very full-featured admin to run a classifieds site off.

- 8 Free themes from blogthemes.com

- List of 21 Awesome themes at WpBeginner.com

- List of 25 interesting and unusual themes at SpeckBoy.com