Who are you? Name, age, location.

My name is Constantin Bejenaru, but I’m usually known as Boby. It’s not just my username on forums, homepages and so on, actually all my friends call me Boby. I am 22 years old and was born in a beautiful, medieval city called Sighisoara in the middle of Romania. Almost finished my degree at the university, studying mathematics and computer science, and have been living since 2002 in Cluj-Napoca.

What made you start programming the php link directory?

Last autumn I was looking for freelance jobs to fill up my wallet. Mr. David Duval, the owner of phpLD contacted me for some small improvements for releasing the new phpLD version 3.0. I have started with the captcha library, then some more things until I finished almost all items and phpLD v3.0 was released. Since then, I’ve done most jobs for the new version and become the principal phpLD developer. Never looked back, and never searched for something else. It’s nice to be part of great software like phpLD and it’s large community, to meet a lot of new people and try helping them.

How much of your day/week do you spend on this product?

This varies. Sometimes 24 hours, sometimes 2-3 hours. Usually I spend about 10+ hours including support on the forums. Depending on the current task and the time limit imposed by David, sometimes I really spend a lot of time in front of the screen!

What else do you do?

I spend a lot of time surfing the internet, reading news and programming PHP, MySQL, CSS and XHTML to improve my knowledge. Except phpLD, I am working on some other personal things. As a student I don’t had much time to do many other things.

How long has the directory project been going for?

About 3 years now.

Were do you see the directory software going in the future?

It already is a good business for some people, and it can be in the future for others too. My personal opinion is, link directory owners need to be a little more original to have success.

In your opinion what makes for a good directory?

A good directory always starts with an original idea. It can be a very good design, a unique feature or a niche theme to submit links to. The patience, determination and hard work of the directory owner can turn it into a success. This business is always changing, new features need to be added constantly, and the directory should be part (if possible) of a bigger website including for example a forum, weblog, a news section, etc. This way the users won’t just submit and leave, but come back and probably suggest the page to friends and partners.

In your opinion what makes for a bad directory?

Directory owners who want to build a link directory in 5 minutes and have instant success are always building a bad directory. For a niche directory, a regular template that is already available on hundreds of other websites, could probably work. But for a regular directory, the webmaster should consider in spending some money at least for a custom template, in case he or she cannot build one alone. Most link directories turn today into so called “link farms”, it can bring some money but it won’t last. Who is interested in these? No new features and no promotion have no success.

How do you see Search engines treating directories now, and in the future?

If well configured, like most of the phpLD powered websites, search engines seem to crawl and index them pretty well. If well promoted, the directory can gain a better pagerank, maybe on subpages too, and that will bring new submitters and if lucky new sponsors.

It’s known, Google can penalize “link farms”, and in future this feature will be improved by them, but I don’t think it will affect most human edited and built directories. Yahoo and MSN are not playing a major role at the moment. We hope to improve the optimisation for search engines in our updates and make the script more friendly so search engines treat them correctly.

What is your favourite directory?

Hard question, I think www.allthelink.com is my favourite directory powered by phpLD. The owner is a good guy working hard on his directory business. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying it’s the only good directory, it’s just my favourite.
My overall favourite directory is the well known www.dmoz.org

Anything else that you would like to say?

There’s not much more to say, maybe that I will start soon my own directories that won’t have the basic look and features. But everything else is still “secret”.

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