Dub.io - A new tool for parking your domains

[Kevin Johnson]

Hi guys,

My name is Kevin, been following this forum for quite awhile, but joined because I wanted to share a news. I am a VP of product at Dub.io, which is a small tool that our team has been building for a few weeks.

We wanted to see if we can create a new (and hopefully better) domain parking tool. We've named ourselves "Dub.io" - nice and short. It works like this.

1. Sign-up and you will get a website - to which, you can of course point your domain to. However, if you don't want to, that's ok. We will give you a Dub.io sub-domain.
   
   
2. Once that's done, you can start "populating" the site with contents. This can come from RSS feeds, YouTube videos or just from the web articles. Dub.io takes care of automatically crawling these and inserting into your site.
   
   
3. Each content can also be automatically tweeted to your designated Twitter account (this will usually bring more traffic and also get you some followers). You can also set up so that it's automatically posted to Blogger or Tumblr sites too.
   
   
4. And of course, you can monetize it. Right now, we allow you to insert your own Google AdSense ads and VigLink code. The best part? You keep all the revenue generated from your sites. We don't take anything.
   
   
5. Each site is all responsive to different screen-sizes. We try to include a variety of media types like images and related videos so contents are more engaging. Right now, we are in a "testing" phase, so everything is free! We would love for you to come and check us out and let me know if you have any questions.

Would love to discuss via this thread or if you have any questions, you can email me at hello @ dub.io

Thank you so much for your time guys.

 

[offthehandle]

@offthehandle Let me look into the issue further. Will message you directly about this soon!

Are you performing maintenance now?

 

[Kevin Johnson]

@offthehandle There weren't any maintenance over the weekend.. we did have a few big spikes but we didn't get any warnings. All is good now though.

 

[GoKaizen]

Not complaining, as Dub.io is a free service, just reporting.

There seems to be some network issues and the site is acting a bit slow. As well as the RSS sites I have.

 

[Kevin Johnson]

@Adam27 Yep we're aware of the issue - sorry about that. Had some crazy spikes over the last few weeks - keeping our eyes close to this one. And please do complain! It's unacceptable, so we can improve.

 

[Kevin Johnson]

We will be conducting some maintenance today - hopefully there won't be too much down time and we'll come back with better performance throughout our servers.

 

[Sushant21]

Eric @imadoer is right. The setup for Dub.io isn't straightforward.

Here is a guide;

1. Add Domain

Add the domain to your Dub.io account. The sidebar on the left click Domains >> Add Domains

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2. Site Configuration

After you add the site it won't take you to any screens. You will see the domain you just added has been added to your account under "Domains". If you can't find it, search for it in the top right.

You choose to create a "Site" or "Page". I assume everyone wants to do an RSS site.

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3. Configure DNS

After clicking "Site" to add you will be taken to a screen with options to add your domains.

After you choose which method, you'll see this instruction screen. Switch the domain's nameservers or use a CNAME record with your registrar or DNS provider.

Using CNAME means you could use subdomains with Dub.io. Which I've done.

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4. Add Site Info

When you describe the site, that is what will show up in Meta in search engines. Basically a description a user will see before they land on the site.

If you add keywords in the keywords filed, be aware that will pull random keywords into the Dub.io RSS site. I recommend adding specific RSS feeds.

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5. Add Feeds

The next screen will ask you to add a feed to the site. If you don't have one to add, you can always add feeds later.

To do that you would go to the left sidebar click RSS Feeds >> New Feed.

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6. Feed Options (Add Feeds 2)

Here will see you can add the RSS feed URL and Name your feed. Most WP sites you can access the RSS feed URL by going to example.org/feed. Like this https://opticalowl.com/feed

Some feeds use FeedBurner or have another RSS setup. It varies for different sites.

"Filters" menu allows you to use specific keywords or reject certain words on the RSS site.

With Blockchain.link - I pull in a lot of feeds from various coin and crypto sites. I try to have articles only focus on "Blockchain" and related news.

"Categorization" allows you to put the feed into a category. You have to go to "Category" to add a category and then go back to categorization. Kind of annoying. The category will appear on the homepage. I usually name the category after the site feed that is being pulled in. Helps with organization and UX.

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7. Quick Access Sites

If you want to quickly access other RSS sites, click the right downward arrow and you'll see a dropdown of all the sites you have.

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Was this helpful for people?

this helped.

 

[offthehandle]

Has anyone shared popular feeds here? I didnt go back up in the thread. But wanted to ad a list to help those getting started.

This is huge, very keyword specific and loads somewhat slow, but huge
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/article-2684527/RSS-Feeds.html

Reuters of course is huge also, lots of news origins here.
https://uk.reuters.com/tools/rss

Economist
http://www.economist.com/rss

 

[Kevin Johnson]

@offthehandle

What would be nice is if any of the above (and perhaps others) offer their contents via API. Then we can hook them up right into Dub (just like we are currently doing for Reddit, Tumblr, New York Times etc).

 

[offthehandle]

@offthehandle

What would be nice is if any of the above (and perhaps others) offer their contents via API. Then we can hook them up right into Dub (just like we are currently doing for Reddit, Tumblr, New York Times etc).

Here are a whole list of services that have API's.
This website evidently sells them?

https://newsapi.org/s/reuters-api

 

[GoKaizen]

If you do social sharing to Twitter, keep the intervals at 1 hour. More than that is likely to trigger an account suspension.

I guess automated Tweeting is technically against Twitter rules.

 

[offthehandle]

I don't think I have any that are set less than 24 hrs, and perhaps Kevin you might add 48 hrs and 1 week, if that is easy, if not I understand. I feel this is sort of spamming anyway as I have multiple sites on one twitter account, not sure how much it's sending and find half of these things tweeted are not something I would even tweet myself, not sure if the algo is on popular items or how it decides what to tweet. Thanks.

@Kevin Johnson is it possible to ad some logic to the keywords? Like a "+" and "or" to combine two keywords together if say the keywords were 2-3 words combined.

I will make up an example: "Miami Beach" + "restaurant" or "South Beach" + "restaurant" or "West Palm Beach" + "restaurant". So only 3 cities restaurants would be included if found in the news feed. I don't believe this filtering is possible currently as it would gather all restaurants it finds anywhere in the newsfeed. I could have 3 separate keywords I suppose, however at the moment that's the quickest example I can come up with. The "OR" and "+" function could help drilling down the filtering.

Not sure if that is easy or not. The filtering process I am finding difficult sometimes.

I use the Filter "Only accept contents from this keyword if they contain any of following words" often, and find it grabs irrelevant content because it will choose any and or all of the words, and simply entering words to reject does not solve the problem.

Thanks again, great system you have developed!

 

[Kevin Johnson]

@Adam27

Here's the Twitter's official page on automated tweets

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-automation

Automated tweets are not forbidden. They are allowed with the conditions set in the above page. We do follow the rules as much as we can. Which is why we disabled auto-liking and auto-messaging that were available in the past.

Frequency of tweets are also important. So we may actually allow 1 hour as the minimum. For most of the cases, if it ever happens, your account isn't suspended, but rather "paused" to make sure that your Twitter account is active. For that, we do recommend you use your Twitter account from time to time. Hope that makes sense!

 

[GoKaizen]

Have are the cron jobs set for picking up feeds? I noticed some feeds get picked up better than others.

 

[offthehandle]

I logged on to my twitter account manually using for some of dub ( rarely did in the past weeks) that is being used by dub. I made a manual post, and once I hit enter- it shut me down, sent out a captcha, then asked for phone verification. I had to send 5 different requests for the code, but finally reopened account.

Also this censoring stuff.

https://www.projectveritas.com/2018...rithms-to-censor-opposing-political-opinions/

 

[GoKaizen]

These RSS sites I have built with Dub.io have connected me with some important people. It shows you keep updated with a certain niche and know what sites are good to follow. There is value in being a curator.

 

[offthehandle]

keep updated with a certain niche

It's really great for gathering up data. That's the reason it has intrigued me, except I have over 100 which have sites on them. Lot's of hand filtering needed and I don't curate, just too many projects. Good thing you are focused.

 

[aspecht]

I started a parking site for my domain name dro.info on 2/6/18. I added a new twitter account to it and so far have 8 new followers and 1800 impressions. Monetized with Amazon but haven't made any money yet.
So far I'm pretty happy with results.

 

[GoKaizen]

Looks like people can support Dub.io now.

https://www.dub.io/a/billing/donate

Would be nice if there was a one-time donation option.

 

[GoKaizen]

Anyone having issues with slow Dub.io sites?

 

[Optimal Names]

Anyone having issues with slow Dub.io sites?

Yes, I removed my domains. Admin pages and parked domains where so painfully slow at times I could walk away and come back to find it still waiting. Been going on for a few weeks - for me at least.