Building sites with game theory and Drupal

After watching a quick video from Gary Vaynerchuk the other day on YouTube I got to thinking about how I could easily implement sites that utilize game theory to increase the level of engagement of my visitors.

Using Drupal and some of the modules for voting, and awarding points for actions we can build robust sites that encourage users to be active members of our site.  Just the other day I joined the Bing Rewards program and started exploring their site to gain points which I can exchange for free Redbox rentals, etc.

These days when we're struggling to keep readers interested and coming back using game theory can give them incentives.

For instance, we can award points in Drupal when certain actions take place such as liking our page on a social network, or signing up for a newsletter, or leaving a product review/comment.  We can then award badges or points based on this system which we could exchange for additional features, more prominent featuring of their profile (on a dating site, etc), or even monetary rewards.

For sites like this I would definitely suggest using Drupal over Wordpress because it has advanced granular permissions baked in which makes it easy to control access to content based on point levels, etc.

Start thinking about how you can use game theory to keep people active!  I wonder if it would be against the ToS of various affiliate programs to reward visitors with points for purchasing goods and then giving them prizes (free ebooks, free subscriptions to our sites, etc).  This could be a great way to boost Amazon Associates earnings if it's not prohibited.

Solving is_home() problem in Wordpress

I have a Wordpress site built on the Pagelines framework and wanted to exclude posts from all categories but one on the homepage and have been struggling with it for about an hour now.  I totally overlooked the fact that the query had to be reset before it would function correctly.

What was happening was no matter which page or category I was on it would only display the single category.  Here's what you need to do in order to get it working right (in your functions.php file).




function exclude_blog_cat() {
 wp_reset_query();
 global $query_string; 
 if (is_home()) { 
  query_posts($query_string.'cat=-1, -5, -6, -7, -8'); 
  }
}
add_action('pagelines_before_theloop', 'exclude_blog_cat');

Welcome to my new blog

I've been using a Tumblr blog that was embedded into my page but have been having problems with the limited amount of control over how the posts are presented.  I think that just using a Blogger setup will be better for what I do.

That being said, I find myself having a hard time blogging because I have so many diverse interests but usually not enough content on each to warrant a separate site for each topic.  I'm just gonna slap it all up on here and categorize it I guess.