Entries from February 2008 ↓

If you’ve never made a banner, there’s a few things you should know. I’m not going to tell you how to make a banner image now. That’s something you would do in your image program, and there are so many options I couldn’t tell you what to do. If you have an image program but don’t know how to use it, I suggest getting a nice, thick book to help you with that.

First of all, a banner is a 468×60 image, in other words, it is 468 pixels wide and 60 pixels high. This is the standard size. Most topsites require you to submit a banner this size to their site and reject any other size or shape.

When designing a banner, keep in mind that this is the advertisement that your potential customer will be seeing when deciding whether to visit your site and/or call you. It needs enough information to give them a reason to click it. If you don’t have a website, you may want to put a phone number on, so that someone who can’t call right now can write it down to call you later.

But you don’t want too much information. The space is small, and it should be the colors and images that catch the attention of the surfer.

It also needs to be attractive and sexy, so most banners have photos and some sort of effect.

Most banners are animated because animated images are more eye-catching and you can put more info on a banner if it is animated in two or three frames. Just make sure you test your banner before putting it out on the web. Someone who reads relatively slowly should still be able to read all text on the banner. If your text goes by too fast, they won’t be able to read it at all! Slow down your animation if you need to. Each frame can be assigned its own speed in a good animation program.

If you have an account for phone sex on Niteflirt, you are permitted to put a banner on your account linking to your site, provided you provide only Niteflirt-safe services there. You can also display a banner to another flirt’s account. You can even put a banner in the space on top of a listing next to the profile thumbnail.

The last consideration is that many toplists host banners, and some of them – I’m thinking Phone Sex Central here – have a very low filesize they require, in order to keep their site from loading slowly. More frames, images, and effects mean a larger filesize. You may not be able to make your first, second, or third choice and still stay within the limit. Design is an art, and skills come with practice. Good luck.

Lots of people are just getting started on WordPress, installing their first blog on their site or getting a free blog somewhere. They’ll soon learn about blog comment spam.

Readers can comment on your blog entries. If you write interesting or controversial blog entries and you have a lot of readers, you can sometimes get some lively discussions going in the comments.

Blog comments are good. Blog comment spam is bad.

What is blog comment spam?

It is everything from links to free porn, drugs, spyware, trojans, dialers, and scams to otherwise legitmate affilate links. These are spammed to your blog in massive numbers, thanks to the fact that WordPress blogs share a common comment entry form, which bots have been designed to recognize and spam.

Obviously, the reason they’re doing it is that people do click those links and get suckered in. It’s a dirty secret that corporate America makes big bucks when their affiliates spam anyone and everything hundreds or thousands of times.

You could easily get hundreds of spam comments a week on a popular blog.

WordPress’s answer to this was to give you a moderation list of terms to put certain comments into a moderation queue in your admin area, and a blacklist to send comments containing certain words into oblivion. I tried this, but it was of limited usefulness, as spammers got sneakier and came up with new ways to fake out the blacklist.

So what can you do?

First of all, you have to moderate your blog comments. A blog with unmoderated comments will rapidly get buried in spam comments, and nobody will want to wade through them to try to read your blog, even if you try to remove them as soon as possible after they arrive.

Go to Options => Discussion. Select the first two options from this menu:

Make sure you resave the page.

So now your comments will form a queue in your admin area, and you will have to approve or delete them. This gets old really fast if you get a lot of spam. It’s easy to miss the real thing when you’ve got hundreds of comments to inspect and maybe only a few that are really comments.

The next thing I did was to install Akismet, a WordPress plugin which uses a database of known spam to detect suspected spam and put it in its own moderation list. Not bad, at least at first, but you still have to moderate them. And once in a while, Akismet does catch real comments in its snare. After you reach a certain threshold, Akismet is not enough, like here:

No kidding.

I was getting really annoyed at the situation. Next I installed Bad Behavior, which observes behavior to separate out the people from the bots. I also added Spambam, yet another anti-spam plugin that does a delaying tactic before accepting comments.

I don’t have a spam problem anymore on any of my blogs. If I do have a problem, I’ll let you know how I deal with it. There are plenty more plugins out there where these came from.

It looks like Niteflirt has reworked the standard logins so that auto-login no longer works in Internet Explorer, the browser it is optimized for. It seems to still work in other browsers, though in some of them you have to reset the login utility.

Let’s look at the old login on a little login utility I have called “Roboform” which I downloaded way back when:

Now look at the new login. Look at all that garbage in the login window.

Clearly this is something they have done—it’s not an accident where something “broke”—so I guess we’re going to have to learn to work around it.

[rant]It is also inscrutable why the powers that be decided that we should have to relogin every few minutes in order to view our FL stats, or why someone logged in and on the My Account page already would need to be directed to a “Create a new account” page. I’m wondering how annoyed the customers are at having to navigate through a series of registration and login menus every time they attempt to make a call…[/rant]

There are a lot of browsers out there that are based on IE, though they have different interfaces. I have a few of these, and they are all giving the same issue as IE, which confirms my suspicion that this is an IE problem.

But here are my suggestions:

If you don’t mind changing browsers, Firefox, Opera, and K-meleon browsers seem unaffected, or you may need to reset and resave your password. K-meleon has a nice login function that allows you easy access to a great number of different logins, if you need that, although the browser has a learning curve and may need to be customized more than most.

There are other browsers out there which I have not tried, so I can’t comment on them.

There is also Roboform. I seem to recall that they eliminated the free version a while back, but it looks like it’s available now as a 30 day free trial.

In case there’s any question in your mind, here’s one I got today. I used Opera to view it, which gave it those nice little popups.

A while back I downloaded the free Iconico colorpicker. I guess there are a lot of colorpickers around, but I’ve always been satisfied with this this one.

I’m going to give you a few instructions on how to use the colorpicker to help you select colors for your html site—such as Niteflirt—backgrounds and text colors mostly.

A few colors are named in html, and you can use these names in building your site. But there are millions of possible colors, and to use most of them you must find the hexcode for the color and use that instead. A hexcode takes the form “#” plus 6 letters or numerals. So “#ffffff” is the hexcode for white, and “#000000″ is the hexcode for black, both of which are named colors.

Take a look at the color pic window, which sits on top of other windows on your screen.

The red arrow is pointing at the window where you will find the hexcode for the color the mouse pointer is hovering over. Clicking the tabs at the left of the middle window will give you more options to help finding the exact color you want. There are more instructions on the Iconico site.


Now watch color pic in action.


As you mouse over pixels on your screen, a magnified image appears in the window at the bottom, the color appears in a swatch box, and the hexcode appears in the hexcode text box.

When you find a pixel that is the color you want, hit ‘c’ on your keyboard. The hexcode for that color will be copied to your clipboard, and you can paste it into your page code.

will change your text font.

will change the background of your table.

will change the background of your page in normal html. This doesn’t work on Niteflirt pages, though. To put a solid colored background in a Niteflirt page, you will need to make an image of that color to use instead.

I got a ‘Paypal’ phishing email. Hopefully most everyone is familiar with these, but just in case, I’m posting here.

They send you a random email saying there has been suspicious account activity, and helpfully suggest you click the link provided to login and verify your account.

Not always, but often the emails look very official. This one came to the address I actually use for Paypal, but I have also received them at almost every active email account I have ever had.

First of all, notice that nowhere does the email have my account name on it, which official emails do. Also, look at that little yellow box. In Opera, when you move your mouse pointer over a link, a box like that will pop up and tell you where the link actually is going to send you. In other browsers, this link will show up at the bottom of the page.

That link doesn’t look anything like any official Paypal url you have ever seen.

If you were to actually click the link, it would probably take you to an official-looking login page. Were you to login, whoever sent you this would not only have control of your Paypal account, but they would probably also be installing all kinds of malware and viruses on your computer.

If you ever have any question as to your account status at Paypal, Ebay, or anywhere else, type the url into your address bar and go there normally.

Update 02-27-08:
Here’s another Paypal phishing email I just got today. This email said my account had been suspended for endangering all of Paypal. Look where this link would take you!

You really need an index.html page in your image directories to keep surfers from poking through them. The problem is that if you have a directory full of images without an index page, a surfer can just type one in and your server may helpfully generate a default list showing everything that is available for him help himself to. Nice.

I’ve put together a little tutorial on how to redirect unauthorized visitors to your callbutton url. I don’t really expect these cheapskates to go through with a call, but it certainly makes me feel better knowing that somebody in this position may suddenly find themselves calling me…

Link

This tutorial is for girls with websites.

Here’s the problem. When you have an online directory without an index page (index.html, index.htm, index.php, etc.), many hosts will helpfully create one for you – or for a surfer who happens to be looking for one.

What this means is that if you have a folder full of photos and you give or sell the address of one of them to someone, they can go hunting through to see what else you’ve got there in that folder.

Here’s an unprotected directory.

Maybe you sold Image1.gif to a customer, or maybe this person knows your site domain name and is just guessing you have an ‘images’ folder. Most people do have a folder named ‘/images/ on their site. So they can type in any of the following:

• http://yoursite.com/images/index.html
• http://yoursite.com/images/index.htm
• http://yoursite.com/images/index.php
  or even just
• http://yoursite.com/images/

which assumes you have some kind of index page there and will produce it for him. Here’s what will come up on many webhosts when you don’t have an index page of any kind:

These are clickable links. If you had folders in that directory, they would appear, and he could click down to see what was in them, too. He can open any image he wants and save it, stealing all your images because you left your directories wide open to view.

On your website, create a new directory. Put an image in it, but no index page. Then type the url to the directory only to see what comes up. If you get a page like the default directory above, you need to fix this now.

Some girls will put a blank page in directories and folders, which certainly will stop unwanted visitors from figuring out what’s inside, and without the file name, they can’t access any of your files. I have made pages with “naughty boy” messages that redirected to my homepage after allowing time to read.

[At this point I will add that there are those who say that having html redirects (which this is) will hurt your ranking with Google. There are many things that are said to hurt your ranking. It is extremely unclear what does and what does not. The bots are pretty smart. I think if it's clear you're doing something to trick your way up in search standings, you run the risk that your site may get in trouble over it. But if you're not trying to do that, you will probably be ok.]

An html redirect will send who lands on your page to another url in a timeframe you specify. Undoubtedly you have seen pages with a message saying, “The page has moved. You will be redirected …blahblahblah.” You can do that yourself and redirect the surfer to your homepage or any other url you want to send them to.

Here’s the code:

<meta http-equiv=”REFRESH” content=”0;url=http://www.the-domain-you-want-to-redirect-to.com”>

where you replace the number ’0′ with the number of seconds you want them to linger on the page before they are redirected.

But I got tired of that. The only people arriving at that page are thieves. Why be nice, why not just redirect them directly to my callbutton url?

Since the surfer is immediately sent to your callbutton. Take your sid right out of the callbutton code niteflirt gives you.

Click on the image to open the text file. Copy it, edit to put in your listing sid code, then resave as an .html file. Upload into any or all of your directories that have no index.html file of their own.

Got a graphics, web design, or other site that flirts may find useful? Drop me an email and we can trade links.