Spike Club is a Meme and a blog carnival. The aim is to simply get blog writers to talk about each other while at he same time having a little fun.

Each week it is the tern of a different blog to get a review. This week it was the tern of financial-independence.net so we sent Lord Matt to take a look.

financial-independence.net is a Drupal powered blog cum community on the subject of making money. It seems Stubsy has started the community as a personal project for getting out of debt (something I too have experienced the hard way, once before).

He currently has a cash give away which looks interesting.

He has been documenting the news that bank charges in the UK are largely illegal. more.

If you look down the left side bar you will see that you can create an account. While you would be advised that staying on topic is ideal you can earn some one way linkage by submitting content. On the whole this type of sharing also earns you friends which often become readers.

Lord Matt's advice today is to help Stubsy and see just how it can come back to you many times over.
Spike Club - review day: financial-independence.net

Our review will now focus o the platform used and how that has (or has not) effected the site.

Our first advice to all our readers is do not use Drupal. It is not sufficiently flexible or stable enough for a long term website solution and requires a very high level of expert skill to run effectively.

financial-independence.net is run as a blog although the software is actually set up to run as a forum and blog network (lots of blogs all in one place). The comment system is reasonably advanced by the look and feel is not all that special. Modifying a Drupal install to look nice is a mission not to be undertaken lightly.

Unfortunately once set up with Drupal it is very hard to move as I am sure Stuby is finding.

He makes good use of the built in keyword system to "tag" his posts (a good idea on the whole).

Overall it is not a bad site it is let down by the theme engine but it is made by the content.