ZachWingo

Introduction

My brother, sister and myself were all home schooled and now that my nephew is almost 6 my sister is also considering homeschooling him. I thought I would see what kind of information is on the internet and behold I found tons of stuff on cluttered sites with tons of outdated links.

The Solution

Seeing so much information but hard to actually reach because they are buried amidst tons of Google Ad’s I decided to put together a directory of some sorts that is uncluttered. Of course I want to make some money for my time and to do that you need to attract visitors. The solution is I created a site, registered the long descriptive domain name and began posting information as I found it. The style is simple, provide an excerpt of the actual article with a link directly to the article. I thought about taking time to design something but being lazy and uncreative I settled on a default template of a great CMS called sNews.

The problem & What I’ve done

So, the problem is search engines like Google are very good at recognizing original content from copied content and because 99.9% of all my content is simply excepts I was not ranking high and therefore not getting visitors. So I needed to create some original content, and I did that, and in the end it was a lot of fun. Because I’ve been studying Algebra and Calculus, math was on my mind and then you mix that with my recent attempts to become more proficient in PHP, the solution I came up with was to create Math Worksheets and use PHP to generate the actual problems and answers.

The beauty of using programming to generate this stuff is the power to do a lot of work with little effort. Loops allow us to do something over and over until a given condition is false and so this made it easy to make 1 worksheet and 1 answer sheet and then repeat it over and over to get a large set of problems. I created about 30 different types of math worksheets like, addition, subtraction, multiplication, addition of fractions, etc.. For each type of problem I created 50 worksheets/answer key’s so that works out to about 30,000 problems total with little to no effort. The fun was in figuring out the logic to actually solve the problem and display the results.

If you want to see the site or the Math Handouts I created just visit the insanely long descriptive site called freehomeschoolresources.info and yes I know it’s long but it works well because of the key words and the .info was used because I was cheap and Godaddy was having a sale on them for $1.99.