July 30th, 2010 — SEO, html help
Between the <head> and the </head> tags of your page code, there are several tags you need to understand to make them work for you.
First there are two <meta> tags.
The meta keywords tag looks like this:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, …”>
You would select a few of the most important keywords for your page to put here. When I say “a few”, I really mean just a few. Putting dozens or hundreds of “keywords” that you don’t even use on your page just means that the whole thing will be at best ignored. At worst, you can be punished for trying to cheat by putting keywords in there that are clearly not a part of your site.
In fact, at this time it appears that putting keywords in the meta keywords tag is probably not going to help your site. So many people cheated on it that Google no longer will count it for you.
Then there is the meta description tag. It’s pretty self-explanatory.
<meta name=”description” content=”This is the description of my site I want to appear in a Google search.”>
Finally, there is the page title.
<title>Your page title text goes here</title>
Your page title shows at the very top of the browser window in the blue bar. It also displays as the text for your link, if your page is indexed on Google.
The page title for this page is “SEO – In your document head | Help4flirts – Mozilla Firefox” if you are viewing this post as a single post, and “HTML, design, and graphics tutorials for flirts, PSO’s, and the adult entertainment industry – Mozilla Firefox” if you are viewing it in the main index view.
You really want your page to have a title that reflects what the page is about. Names like Untitled Document (18,000,000 pages) and Page title (598,000,000 pages), or Home (4,520,000,000 pages), well let’s just say they aren’t going to set you apart from your competitors, or anyone else for that matter.
Using somebody else’s site name as the page title on your site entry page? Skeezy.
July 26th, 2010 — SEO, Wordpress
Here’s the deal with WordPress plugins: there are a lot of plugins, and they are not all equally good. Some of them don’t do what you need. More plugins are not better. Sometimes having multiple plugins means that none of them work, or there may be unpredictable results.
When deciding to get a plugin, search on what you need to see what is available. Look at several to see which one seems to fit your needs the best before deciding to download. Read how to use it on the plugin site. After you install and activate it, look for a settings or configuration panel to see if you need to configure it. Then check to see if it is doing what you needed it to do. If you don’t like the plugin, you can deactivate it and try a different one.
Seo, keywords, description, etc.
The most effective SEO comes from having different keywords and description for each post, as well as a unique description and keywords for your homepage. If you have the exact same description and keywords for every page, you won’t get any more mojo from google than if you had none at all.
By the way, your pages will still get indexed if you don’t have these, but it is probably more efficient to have them.
robots.txt file
A robots.txt file tells bots what to index and what not to index. Without a robots.txt file, the bots will generally just index everything. You can exclude certain bots if you know you don’t want them on your site. You can also exclude certain pages from being indexed and links from being followed. If you really have no preferences, the following code will permit all bots and spiders to index your site:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
That’s it.
July 13th, 2010 — Callbuttons, Free!, Scripts
June 25th, 2010 — Design considerations, Image editing
I have used Xara products for years. I upgraded from Xara Xtreme to the Pro version years ago, so I wasn’t aware how nice and inexpensive the regular version is. With the latest release, the product formerly called ‘Xtreme’ is now called ‘Photo and Graphics Editor’.
If you’re shopping for an image editor, this is very easy to use for cropping, brightening, etc. The program also has lots of advanced features if you’re into illustration.
The Pro model, now known as ‘Designer Pro’, also is a fully-functional web design program, with lots of drag-and-drop and instant update features.
The stand-alone design product Web Designer, is also available without the image editor.
June 18th, 2010 — For Niteflirt, Security info
The unfortunate fact is that recorded listings are still unavailable on Niteflirt, and there are customers who were able to listen who did not feel comfortable downloading them to their computer, where someone else in the household might find them.
There are options. Probably the easiest one is to download them directly onto a USB flash drive or a memory card, then pull them from the computer when not using them. Any memory card can fit in its case in a wallet, and some USB flash drives are small enough to do this with, too.
However, these can still be password-protected in case they are lost or just found by the wrong person.
Using file compression and its accompanying password capability to protect a folder or file:
This is an old post. The same may or not apply to later versions. Article
USB Drive Encryption
Cryptainer LE
Folder Password Expert
StorageCrypt
Googling on “password-protect USB flash drive” and other similar phrases will turn up lots of other options.
June 10th, 2010 — Security info, Tips and tricks
Let’s say you have your own domain. You have uploaded files, say, photos, and you intend to sell access to those photos. You don’t want to give access to anyone who doesn’t pay. All you want is to sell access to photo sets by email, not start a member’s area where someone could have full access to all the files you might have.
If you’ve read this far, you probably aren’t sure how to go about this. There are a lot of ways to do it, many of them requiring a fair amount of technical expertise.
I’m going to skip around those and give the one that is the easiest to use that I know of.
Let’s say I have a domain named mydomain.com. The URL of that domain is http://mydomain.com. If I have an ‘images’ folder, as many people do, the URL would be http://mydomain.com/images/. If you have an image in there named myimage.jpg, the URL of that image is http://mydomain.com/images/myimage.jpg.
The first thing you need to do is check to see what happens if you go to that /images/ directory by typing in the address http://mydomain.com/images/. It is often the case that typing in a folder name will by default send you to an index page you have in that folder. But if you don’t have an index page in that folder (because maybe you didn’t put one there), depending on how your server is set up by your host, you may see a default directory page that has clickable links to all your images.
This is a bad thing, as anyone who knows you have an /images/ folder (or anyone who guesses you have one) can see everything you have in there. You may want to contact your host to see if they will change that, or you can simply create and upload a blank index page.
Open Notepad (Start=>Accessories=>Notepad), select File=>Save As. In the window that pops up, choose where you want to save it on your computer first, so you won’t forget where you put it. Type index.html in the “File name” box. Change “Save as Type” from “Text Documents (*.txt)” to “All Files”. Then click Save.
Upload the file into any directory that doesn’t already have an index file of some sort.
Now, let’s say you want to sell someone a set of files named reddress1.jpg, reddress2.jpg, and reddress3.jpg. You may want to sell multiple sets. It’s really convenient to name them like that, because it makes it easy for you to see what you have and work with it. But it also makes it easy for someone else to guess what else might be there. So if someone who bought Set 1 guessed that Set 2 contained reddress4.jpg, reddress5.jpg, and reddress6.jpg, then typed those in, they could very well find them. They might also go looking to see what you named your other photo sets, based on your sales info.
Obviously that’s way too easy. Here’s what I do. I append a random string to the end of the file or folder I am giving access to, using PassUtils, a free password generator. Unzip it and install it. To use it just open and uncheck the “punctuation box”, because having punctuation in a filename can mess up opening that file. Create as many passwords as you like. Then right click each password and copy the password to your clipboard. Rename your files one at a time by right clicking in a Windows ‘Save As’ or ‘Open’ window, or in FTP, by right clicking and selecting ‘Rename’. The name will be selected. Hit the right arrow to put the cursor to the end of the file name, between the file name and the file extension. Type an underscore ‘_’ or hyphen ‘-’, then copy in the random string.
The goal is to change the file ‘reddress1.jpg‘ to ‘reddress1_6cYm2FTg.jpg‘. Now you can still read what the file contains based on what you named it, but nobody can possibly guess correctly what you named it to access it without permission.
You can also do the same thing with folders containing multiple images. If you sell a single set of images in a folder named /Set1_6cYm2FTg/, nobody can guess the folder name, and you can still give the photos easy names inside the folder.
June 4th, 2010 — Forums, Niteflirt issues
It’s a lot easier for people who are reading your post when you quote the post. But it gets confusing if you just copy it and paste it in, as it seems like it’s part of what you wrote.
When you want to quote a post in a forum, look for a “quote” button or link at the top or bottom of the post you want to quote from. Click it. When the post appears, it will have the entire post you are quoting in it.
Like this one:
(Nothing will happen when you click the button.)
Then you can delete everything but what you are replying to.
June 3rd, 2010 — Design considerations
People who spend a lot of money on website design sometimes put a fair amount of money into marketing research to determine what design features will end up getting them more conversions (sales). If you are observant, you will find that in certain industries, certain types of web design predominate. It would be reasonable to take that into consideration if you were designing a site in that industry.
A lot of the research which has been done is available for free or a small charge. For instance, we know things like the first place someone looks when they land on your page (upper left-hand corner). We know that the more clicks someone has to make to find what they are looking for, the more likely they are to just give up. We know that the more information you have on a page, the less likely they will immediately see what they are looking for, even if it is right there.
So the question is, how is your listing design working for you?
The issue is that while there are numerous different types of design in use (and apparently many of the different types successful), what matters is whether a design is working for you to make you money. How can you measure that?
Well, if you did it yourself—especially if you are not particularly skilled—are there errors on the page? Is it broken? Can you tell? Things like typos, grammatical errors, broken code, non-working buttons, and missing images need to be fixed, first of all. If you can’t tell by looking, have someone else look at it to see if they see anything that you missed.
Do you have a statcounter on the page? That will help you see how much traffic you are getting.
But if you’ve had a design up for a long time, it’s pretty much impossible to tell whether making changes would help you or not. It would be a mistake to simply assume that it will or won’t.
If you get a new design, put it up and WATCH CAREFULLY to see what happens. It’s not about your tastes and whether you like it. It’s about whether it inspires your customers to make purchases.
You may find your traffic and/or sales increase. You may find them drop off dramatically. I have heard several girls put up new designs, pleased as all heck, who took them down really fast when they found their business died off.
May 30th, 2010 — Niteflirt issues
First of all, “LVS” stands for Listing Value Score. It is a system that was designed to rank the value of a listing in order to determine its relative worth to Niteflirt. It was used for two purposes: to determine the order in which listings should appear, based on that perceived value, and to set a relative price that individuals should pay to feature.
Niteflirt created pages for us to help us understand our LVS. They never told us what our “scores” were. The blue boxes (on a scale of 1 to 10) were never meant to give either accuracy or precision to our understanding. There were many factors they used, and we were never told what all of them were or how they interacted.
Prior to the LVS, everyone paid the same to feature for a position, and “featured listings” were in a separate section on top of listings that were not bidding to feature, which were ranked by points. And prior to that, all listings were ranked by points earned, so the 6 girls with the greatest number of points were always on the front page.
Back then there were plenty of guys scouring the indexes looking for new girls, so not having any points did not mean you were not going to get any calls.
Now that is impossible. One of the unintended consequences of LVS featuring is that one of the few avenues for a flirt’s increasing her business has been increasing the number of accounts she runs. From the implementation of the lvs up until the transition, the number of listings on the system maybe doubled. But now there are hundreds of thousands of new listings. Really.
One problem with the LVS is that when the decision was made what to reward (ie, getting clicks and calls directly from the indexes), it was also being decided that other types of business were of no value to Niteflirt. So girls who attracted calls through their websites got no credit. We still get no credit for signing up new customers, and Niteflirt directs them to the front page to prevent the flirt who attracted them from getting the call they signed up in order to make. There is no commission Niteflirt has to pay for doing that. Flirts pay money to give traffic to Niteflirt in exchange for absolutely nothing. Why should they ever change it?
You got no credit for mail purchases unless the customer was already a customer whose first transaction with you was a qualifying transaction. And there were lots of times you’d be paying for clicks that were entirely unfair. We were paying for clicks to blocked customers, who were never going to call. A $1 click a day from a blocked customer is going to cost a girl $365 a year. For 1000 accounts, that would be $372K a year of essentially unearned income for Niteflirt. Is it any wonder they refused to stop that?
After the transition, the LVS that was current about a week prior became the standard listing sort for months. Girls who had been consistently high earners were there, as well as girls who just plain got lucky.
After a while, they started to implement changes. What we have now, imperfect as it is, has been in effect since early this year. They keep making changes to it, but the fact that there is an LVS in effect is not new this week or month.
A lot of girls are so eager to get featuring based on LVS scores back that they are willing to pay for lots of clicks that don’t lead to calls. There is nothing in the implementation of that feature that is going to fix anything that is broken on the site. Niteflirt recognizes that girls are willing to throw money away and it is working mightily to provide that service.
The LVS we have is not the same as it was before the transition. Prior to that, listings in an account were linked together. A big purchase on one would pull up the rest of the account. Now they are not. Only the listings that earned a lot of money will show high on the indexes.
Featuring will be based on the LVS we have now. Giving flirts the ability to feature will not revert anything to what it was before the transition. There are probably 5 times as many accounts active as there when we last had the ability to bid. That’s 5 times as many girls desperate to get calls. You do the numbers.
It’s just a matter of supply and demand. Calls coming into the site are fixed. The demand for those calls is ever-increasing.
April 26th, 2010 — javascript
I’m taking an online Sitepoint Javascipt live course for only $9.95. It’s for people who are comfortable with HTML and maybe CSS. If you think you’re ready for Javascript, you might want to check it out. It starts today, but you move along at your own pace, give that you have weekends to catch up.
There are videos, articles, assignments, and a private forum. We’ll see how it works out.
