Entries Tagged 'Tips and tricks' ↓

Hotlinking is when somebody uses an image that isn’t theirs in another page by linking directly to the image url.

It’s a form of stealing. They don’t have the right to use that image, as it belongs to somebody else. But they are also “stealing bandwidth”. When an image loads, the domain that is hosting it pays for the bandwidth out of their bandwidth limit. If people are visiting your site and seeing your image when they look at your page, then it is worth it to you. But if somebody else puts your image on display elsewhere without telling you, and it loads a lot, you can end up having to pay a big premium or get shut down by your host for exceeding their bandwidth limits.

The only way to find this out is to look at your server records. If you see a lot of hits from some site you don’t have a link on, and the page you have loading is actually an image, you’ve probably found a hotlinker.

One girl found a hotlinker this way. Some meathead had found a full-size image on her site of two girls kissing and was using it as his avatar in an Irish soccer forum. Many forums will upload an image off the web and resize it. This one just resized the image using height and width tags. So the full image was loading for every forum post he wrote, for every viewer who looked at any page he had a post on.

I think a couple of us joined the forum and posted that he did not have the right to do this. He was pretty arrogant about it. And this guy was a moderator! So she changed the name of the photo on her server and replaced it with an advertisement. I sent an email to the admin, who sent me back an apology. I guess there was going to be an email going out to forum members on that.

So first, the image must be hosted on your server so you have control of image names. This won’t work with any other image hosting, as they generate unique image names that you can’t change.

Here’s an image somebody might be using as a background:

Like this:

The fun part is that you can put anything you want in there. Somebody who right-clicked your image url to use it may very well not have used height and width tags on that image. So you could substitute a gigantic image for a small one.
Like this:

If the original image is a .gif rather than a .jpg image, you can substitute an animation, which can really get the attention of viewers.
Like this:

Here’s a link to a blog post where the writer got tired of people stealing his content. For him, the issue was not images, but text that other people were stealing. What he did was make a tiny clear .gif image and include it in the code. It did not show, so if somebody stole his text and didn’t realize they were getting an image, they might end up unwittingly hotlinking to it.

Most content thieves don’t do that, but eventually one did. It’s pretty funny when they do. All the author had to do was switch out the tiny, transparent image for one that got his message across.

If you catch someone like this and pull this switcheroo, make sure you take a screenshot so you can show everyone. And if you substitute an animated one, try to get a video screen capture.

I know people are always asking how to convert mp3 files to .wav files, or switch between so many different video file formats.

Here’s a link to a blog post describing a great many free media file converters. You should be able to find what you need there.

Here’s the thing.

To get placed more highly in a Google search (who doesn’t want that?), you need to make Google think you’ve got a damned fine site. The higher the PR (Page Rank) you’ve got, the better a site Google thinks you’ve got, and the higher you will come up in a search for your chosen keywords.

One of the ways you do this is by getting links from other sites like yours.

One of the things Google looks at when deciding how good a site you have is incoming links. They look at how many sites are linking to you and what kind of sites they are. The people who wrote the algorithm decided that the more highly ranked sites you have linking to your site, the better quality your site is.

So if you’ve got a site that lots of people with good sites think their readers will want to read, they’ll link to you and you may get a boost out of this. The best way to do this is to start by having quality content on your site. Update your content regularly and people will return to see what’s new. They’ll give you links.

Of course, there are other ways to get links. Some sites will trade links with you. Google looks at links like this and sees that they are reciprocal, which means the two sites link to each other. A link like this is not worth as much to Google, but you may get some good traffic out of it.

When you make a reciprocal link, you should place the site’s link at least as well as they have placed yours. So if they link to your front page, you can link to their front page. If they’ve got a “links” page, you can put their link on your links page or on your front page. But be nice. Don’t hide their link someplace on your site if they are giving you a link to your front page. I have offered to trade links with girls who wanted me to link to their front page, while they were putting my link on a page that was behind a tiny text link. Another girl offered me a link on a password-protected page that nobody but flirts whose banners were on the page had the password to.

It’s the same with topsites. If they want you to host their image, then upload it to your site and link to the image there. Otherwise, use the code they gave you and put the link on the page you gave them.

Here’s a banner for this site:

The url for the image is
http://help4flirts.com/banners/banner.gif.
The code for linking is
<a href="http://help4flirts.com/"><img src="http://help4flirts.com/banners/banner.gif" border="0"></a>

I had to type that out in strange characters for you to see that. In order for the linking code to actually show up the way they need to copy it, you need to either type it in special html characters, format it with <pre></pre> tags:
<pre><a href="help4flirts.com/"><img src="http://help4flirts.com/banners/banner.gif" border="0"></a></pre>

your linking code

See how I didn’t actually put the linking code in there? This one doesn’t work in Wordpress.

Or you can put it in a textarea. “Cols” is the number of columns. Put more to make the textarea wider. “Rows” is the number of rows. You can increase or decrease, but you want the entire code to show without too much wasted white space.
<textarea cols="40" rows="3"><a href="http://help4flirts.com"><img src="http://help4flirts.com/banners/banner.gif" border="0"></a>
<a href="http://help4flirts.com/"><img src="http://help4flirts.com/banners/banner.gif" border="0"></a>

You can use any of these in an html page. You can’t use the ‘pre’ tags in Wordpress.

There are two kinds of recordings you can make, recorded listings and mp3s.

The recorded listing plays for a caller on the Niteflirt system. You can record this over the phone by clicking the Create a Recorded Listing link at the bottom of your My Account page under Other Tools and Links. (I could give you the link here, but it will only work if you are logged in to your account). Follow the directions you are given and say whatever you want to go into your recording over the phone.

One problem with doing it this way is that you have to say it all the way through from beginning to end. There is no way to correct a mistake. So you need to practice in advance.

Many of my recorded listings are like stories. I write out the text exacly as I want it, and then I read it out loud again and again, editing awkward spots and rewriting parts that I realize might sound better a different way. You need to practice until it sounds completely natural. It should not sound like you’re reading from a script.

The other way to make a recorded listing is to make and upload a .wav recording. I am not sure how well this works. I know some girls have had luck with it, though the only time I tried this it didn’t work. And I have heard lots of complaints.

But first, you need to make a recording. So download Audacity and install it. Also download and unzip the Lame Encoder while you’re at it, which you will need to make mp3’s.

You will need a microphone to do this, too, though the one that is built into your computer may be good enough to start.

Open Audacity, hit the red button and start talking.

If you make a mistake, start again with the sentence you flubbed in. You can go back and edit out the error when you are finished. When you are through recording, click the button with the yellow square on it.

Replay what you have recorded. Highlight any mistakes by clicking one end and dragging your mouse across them, then delete.

To save, give the file a name and it will save it as an audacity project. To save as a .wav file, you will need to select Export As .wav. To save as an mp3, you will need to select Export as .mp3. The program will ask you where your Lame Encoder is on your computer. Browse to it and select it. Now fill out the little info form with something, and export.

Now you have a .wav file, which you may be able to upload to Niteflirt as a recorded listing if you are lucky. And you also have an .mp3 of the exact same recording, which is the other kind of recording I was writing about at the top of this entry. If the system was working right, you would be able to attach an mp3 to a payment mail and put the link on your page. As far as I know it is not working right now, so you will have to find another host or put it on your website (if you even sell a few, this will pay for a website).

The original open source callbutton script was written by Mistress V and graciously provided free of charge on her Proflirts website. Since then it has been modified by Hypnotic Guy into a thing of remarkable versatility. However, the original is simpler and may meet the needs of most flirts.

I had heard rumors that there were some changes going on, so I saved the script package for download. I was disappointed to hear this week that the Proflirts site was down. But since I have the script, I can supply it here. I even added a little text file on how to make your button script, which used to be on the Proflirts blog.

Keep in mind that this is not a beginner project. You will need a website of your own, and you will need to be comfortable following instructions to edit files in Notepad, even though you may not understand exactly what it is that you are doing.

Right-click, save, and unzip.

I see this question a lot. The trick is in understanding that Niteflirt has two site search engines. One searches through listing text, and the other searches only flirt names. So if you type a flirtname that is made up of common words into the regular search box, you could get back a list of thousands of listings that contain any of those words. Obviously this situation would not be helpful.

The other is a flirtname-specific search box. If you type the flirt’s name in there, you may come up with a list that has only the listings of the flirt you are looking for, or the list might have hundreds of flirtnames on it. For some reason a long list like this is not sorted so that exact matches come first.

But if you put quotation marks around the name, now you should only get a list of names that contain all the words as the one you are searching for.

The other way to find a flirt is to type their name in the address bar of your browser right after the sitename, like so:



and you are there, whether or not the flirt has listings. If you want to email her, there is a Send Email link on her home page and every listing page, provided she has listings approved. You can’t email members who are not on your customer list until they have listings approved.

It’s pretty simple if you look at the picture. The more you charge, the higher percentage you net, and you make more per hour. A lot more.

The old-fashioned standard html way of doing it is to put a text attribute in the <body> tag, like so:
<body text="#000000" link="#000000" vlink="#000000" alink="#000000"> where ‘text’ is the color of the text in your listing, ‘link’ is link color, ‘vlink’ is visited link color, or the color of the links that the visitor has clicked, and ‘alink’ is the color of links that are active, or highlighted.

Niteflirt won’t let you do it this way, and if you try you’ll first get a message that you can’t put “text” within the <body> tag, and then that you aren’t allowed ‘link’, ‘vlink’, or ‘alink’ either. So what you have to do is trick it. The formula that’s searching though your code for banned snippets is looking for the entire word ‘ text’ with a space before it. You can add a ‘border’ attribute and remove those pesky spaces, and even though the code is really nonstandard, it will still work.

<body border="0"text="#000000"link="#000000"vlink="#000000"alink="#000000">

will make all the text on the page black, as #000000 is the hex code for black. There are also a number of color names you can use. So

<body border="0"text="red"link="pink"vlink="maroon"alink="purple">

will give you red text, pink links, maroon visited links, and purple active links. Of course it will do it in your listing, too. You probably don’t want that. So what you do is put it at the very bottom of your listing.

You can just copy and paste this, but you should pick a different color than pink, which is really hard to see, maybe like "#ff00ff", which is a hot pink.

<body border="0"text="red"link="#ff00ff"vlink="maroon"alink="purple">

Just in general you should look at the colors on your page to make sure they are dark enough to read and pick a different color if they are not really easy to see. Yellow feedback on a white background won’t work. Take my word for it.

Yes, we talked about this before. We covered some things in detail, in particular how to choose a host that will grow with you. I related the issue of how a free webhost can hold you back and prevent you from doing lots of the things you might want to do, even if they do permit adult.

Once again here I’m going to put in a plug for the freedom you get when you can host images on your own site and manage them as you please.

Even if all you want is to make a blog right now, putting it on your own website is a smart move. You can still drop blogs around here and there, so long as you’re staying within the tos of the free blog hosts. But for the blog that represents you, you’re putting a lot of work in on it. It should be yours, to do with as you wish.

If you’re going to put that much work in on it, you should have the option of making it a real site.

So here’s the story I’d like to relate to you. I spent much of this weekend installing a new website for a girlfriend who previously had a bunch of very strange pages created by a customer who knew nothing about web design or adult web design for PSO. Those pages were not only ugly in a 1992 sort of way, but they didn’t work right. You’d have to click a button several times to get a “mouseover” to work so the photo would show, instead of a large blank space. It was kind of a maze to get to her existing blogs, which were stuck with the default wordpress theme.

So I replaced the entry page with a really pretty one, the main page with one that links directly to her new blogs. Drop dead gorgeous if I do say so myself. And the blogs are very pretty, too.

Unfortunately, due to her choice of server, there were several problems that needed to be worked out. We never were able to change one of her settings, which would be necessary to get maximum indexing for her blogs.

But the big deal is that she selected this host because it looked like it would be good for a beginner. They had some kind of site builder, an uploader of sorts, and some other cool stuff that no longer works for her because her new computer has Vista. And the stuff she thought was going to save her time and money? While it made it harder (read: more work) for me, the biggest problem was making the blogs work right.

After a discussion on the forums:

Things could have been worse. At least she had apache/linux hosting. If she had chosen Windows hosting, as many “starter webhosts” offer, she would have had to move to another server to do what she wanted. You don’t want a Windows server. Just take my word for it.

If you have to pay somebody to install a blog for you, that’s an hour’s work, if nothing goes wrong. If there’s a problem, it can take several hours for somebody who knows what they’re doing to sort out the issue and fix it.

The problem is that when you pick a free wordpress theme, you may be getting something highly standard, or you may be getting something that seemed like a good idea at the time to the designer. Fixing a misbehaving theme can be a real pain. And none of this should be necessary, because if you choose a webhost that has simplified installation for wordpress, you click and you are ready. You are provided with a large number of themes that are ready to use. Dreamhost has “One click” installs for wordpress blogs and lots of other popular installations. On the rare occasions when I had issues, it was from upgrading very old blogs, and they went out of their way to fix them for me.

If my girlfriend had had to pay me for the time I spent straightening out her blog issues, she’d be out of money right now. The little bit of convenience back at the beginning that saved her doing research and asking for help would have ended up costing her a load of money in the end.

For those of you who are still nervous about what it means to use FTP to upload files and images to your website, I’ll be writing a little tutorial on that shortly. It has to be little. It’s a lot simpler than you could ever imagine.

The standard callbutton script was originally provided by Mistress V as open source on her Proflirts site. The site is no longer available, so I am making the download available. I am providing the script as a free download. I did not write the script, so I cannot help you with it. You need to have your own web hosting to host the php script.

I have a specially adapted Godaddy script that is free that you can download here.

Now Hypnotic Guy has developed a variation that works for all your listings, even though you may have different availability statuses. You can even have separate call buttons for your different listings. Just imagine, a pair of pretty feet for your foot and shoe, a dollar bill for financial domination, a broken heart for your gfe listing…

It comes in a zip file with directions. I put it on a payment request button for the minimum, .11. Unfortunately a lot of girls paid for it and my LVS went straight to hell, so now you’re just going to have to download it from this button link. Just click, download, and get to work with it.