HTML tutorials for Niteflirt and other stuff

This isn’t intended to be a substitute for a full listing design and layout. It’s for those of you who have zero formatting on your listings and don’t know the first thing about it.

Pick your options, type your text in the Header text box and a paragraph of text in the Text area, and click the button. If you don’t like it, you can keep editing, because your text will stay in that box as long as you work on it.

All the text will run in together into one giant paragraph. Where you want a line break, copy and insert this: <br><p> into your listing edit window when you go to edit your listing.

That’s it!

LINK

Hopefully this will encourage you to learn a little more HTML.

I cleaned out the old email templates and made a few new ones here. I can probably rework the old ones and make them work better than ever, in about the same time it would take to create them new, of course. So that may happen, or I may just make shiny new ones.

Link

Unless you are using the old pre-transition callbuttons (which stopped working but then later became active again), your flirt-installed callbuttons do not change status when you change status. Code for those callbuttons is no longer distributed.

The link to callbutton code on your My Account page no longer is present. The link on our listings has not been coded, and if you click it the page ends up being refreshed. The only way to get current callbutton codes for your listings is to open a listing as if to edit it, submit twice without editing (unless you need to edit, of course), then click the link on the page that also has links to your account and help in getting started.

A callbutton whose code is obtained in this way while you were available is static code. It will always be set to available, though customers cannot complete a call by clicking it when you are unavailable. It will not send mail when you are Away.

I got this button while I was available:

   <a href=”http://beta.niteflirt.com/calls/new?listing_id=5734291″ title=”Yes – Taking Calls”><img alt=”D5_cb-call-now-136x40_v5″ border=”0″ height=”40″ src=”http://beta.niteflirt.com/niteflirt/images/D5_cb-call-now-136x40_V5.gif” width=”136″ /></a>

A callbutton whose code was obtained while you were away is also static code. It is supposed to send mail, and cannot change to “taking calls”. But the server is left off the code, so it refers back to your own server, and actually can never do anything if you place it anywhere but on your Niteflirt page. And why would you need to do that? There already is a ‘send mail’ option on your pages.

I got this code while I was set to ‘Away’:

<a href=”/messages/compose?message%5Blisting_id%5D=5734291&message%5Brecipients_list%5D=Principal+Angela+Quattrano”><img alt=”D5_cb-mail-away-136x40_v4″ border=”0″ height=”40″ src=”http://beta.niteflirt.com/niteflirt/images/D5_cb-mail-away-136x40_V4.gif” width=”136″ /></a>

If someone were to try to click it to send me mail, the address it would try to send mail to is http://help4flirts.com/messages/compose?message%5Blisting_id%5D=5734291&message%5Brecipients_list%5D=Principal+Angela+Quattrano, which is definitely not a real email address.

With the pre-transition codes, both the image and your availability are controlled by the Niteflirt server, not by the button. So the image changes when your availability changes, as does what happens when the button is clicked.

This pre-transition callbutton displays my correct availability status:

<a href='http://www.niteflirt.com/calls/PT_interimcall.asp?sid=XXXXXXX'><img border=0 src='http://www.niteflirt.com/calls/callimage.asp?sid=XXXXXXX&ImageType=1'></a>

I have changed the listing SID number to a series of x’s. Just substitute your listing SID number (found in the url of your listing).

First, you need to understand the difference between profile thumbnails and photos within the listing. If you are getting a message that the filesize, picture size, or filetype is wrong, then you are talking about the thumbnails that link from the category indexes to your listing.

You upload a profile thumbnail through the link at the bottom of your listing edit window that has a little box where your picture will be displayed when you get it uploaded.

IE simply doesn’t work for most girls.

Some girls have problems with different browsers. I was able to do this with Firefox, Opera, and K-Meleon. Other girls have found that only Google Chrome will do it. Try downloading that.

The regular photo uploader has not been installed yet since the transition. We do not have an eta on that. You will have to find an image host to upload them to. Some people use photohostess, which does not have private accounts. Some girls complain about downtime.

Most photo hosts are not adult-friendly. They will delete your account and you will lose your pictures in a heartbeat.

I think there are adult-friendly paid photo hosts.

If you do find some kind of photo hosting situation, better back up your photos. Who knows what could happen to your account? The site could shut down leaving you with no photos and no options.

Consider buying a domain and a regular hosting account. It is actually really straightforward to create a directory to host your own pics, videos, recordings, or whatever once you get the hang of it. You can also host your own blog or website.

I have dreamhost and I am satisfied with the service they give me. Email me if you want a discount code for them.

Standard HTML image code is:
<img src=”http://imageurl”>

Background image code:
<body background=”http://imageurl”>
which you would put at the very top of your listing edit window.

There’s been quite a discussion in the forums about the way individual listing availability control should be designed by Niteflirt, and I won’t get into that here. There still seems to be a lot of confusion about how it currently works, and that’s what I would like to clear up.

If you’re still trying to use the listing availability links as before and it’s not working for you, you are fighting the new system. If you are finding it does all kinds of unpredictable things, that’s because they changed it without notifying us or changing the help file. It operates in a completely different manner. It works, but it’s like a new feature which is not equivalent to the old feature it replaced.

The old system was designed to permit someone to change the status of one listing. Either from within your listing or from inside your Listing Details page you could click on the availability status of that one listing, go to another window, and change it. If you only wanted one odd listing on or off on an occasional basis, it worked great with that.

So, things the old system was good at:

• Turning on only one listing;
• Turning off only one listing.

Things it was not so good at:

• Managing multiple listings, rather than just one with a different status – could take a while to change all the ones that needed changing;
• Managing listings in multiple accounts – could take a whole lot of time.

What it couldn’t do at all:

• Save your chosen settings for next time. They were gone every time you changed your account status.

Listing availability is now focused on managing multiple listings and saving your settings, rather than having one listing different from the others.

Changing the availability of a listing within the listing itself or inside your Listing Details page now is changing the preset on it. Listings that are set to Away on the Listing Details page will not go on when the account is turned on. Listings that are set to Available on the Listing Details page will turn on when your account is turned on.

There is no need to make your listings show as Away on the Listing Details page when your master Availability is set to Away.

The settings will stay with your account until the next time you go in there and change them.

First, you have to know how to use a stylesheet to format an HTML page in at least a general way. I can’t get into that here.

Put the link at the top of your listing edit textarea.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="http://stylesheeturl">

The reason why the <h1> tag doesn’t work anymore is because Niteflirt has commandeered it in its stylesheet and assigned it to be gray 7 pixel. The only way to reassign it in a stylesheet is to take advantage of the fact that your entire listing is within a table cell with the class of “user”. The best way to change that default is to take advantage of that class:

.user h1 {
    color:black;
    font-weight:bold;
    size: 1.5em;
    font-family:georgia,garamond;
    text-align: center;
}

This will produce a heading that is big, black, bold, centered, and has the font I have chosen.

You really need to work with the “user” class, your own classes, or your own id’s within your listing, or you can seriously break the page by changing global defaults.

Much time has passed since we first met, online as it were.

It was as “ON” I first met her. She wanted the background removed from an image. I felt sorry for her, as she described her health issues. We had a couple of long calls. She described to me how a designer had taken $2K and failed to deliver the website she was supposed to get, leaving her with purchased software (photoshop, dreamweaver, paintshop pro) that she found unusable.

She felt designers deliberately talked down to her by speaking in incomprehensible jargon rather than everyday language she could understand. She did not see any value in trying to learn what the terms they were using meant.

I charged her a few dollars and gave her the image in several sizes. She came back and wanted support to install it on her listings in a payment mail button. I gave her the code to do that, but it was not what she wanted. She wanted me to take a piece of javascript she said some friend had given her and make it work using her image. She wanted me to do it for her. She did not want to know how it was done so she could do it for herself. I explained that I didn’t know any javascript and had no idea how to make it work, that all I knew is that I had never seen it done that way.

She emailed me back with a snarky, “A friend of mine did it for me for free.” And she posted on the forum outing me for ripping her off by giving her the image in a format she could not use (.gif!) and failing to give her what she needed. That a designer could not do what some friend of hers was able to do for free.

I blocked her on all her accounts I was aware of and put a notice on my help site that I did not work with javascript at any price.

Time passed and she contacted me on a new account of hers, “FA”. Or was it “F A”? It turns out she was still blocked on the old account she had renamed. The account she contacted me on was a spacing variation of the real account she needed the work done for.

She had a story about how an inexperienced designer had given her something she was unable to work with after charging her several times the initially-agree-upon amount. Silly me, I guessed who it was and should have contacted the girl to get the scoop.

We did not speak on the phone this time. I don’t recall if we did IM’s. But I know we did emails, hot damn! I got at least 2 emails every waking hour, and she wanted them all responded to promptly.

I ended up reworking a sliced-image photoshop template to make it easier for her to work with, to match up something that wasn’t quite right and fulfill her stated needs. I did not ask for money, but she paid me generously. I spent a great deal of time on the project.

Finally it was finished, and she now pointed out that she was not able to do something she needed to do – she needed an expanding text box in a certain location, which you don’t get in a photoshop template. without. asking. in. advance. Which she had not done, and which I would now have to start all over again to do.

I was finished. I wanted nothing more to do with this, as I now realized who she was.

She told me a friend had fixed it for free. She posted outing me on the forum for cheating her by giving her back a sliced image template – a table coded up for the images. Apparently she later sucked some other designer into trying to fix it, too, and it became the epic of “The $200 Template”, where yet another helpless, naive newbie was portrayed as victimized by flirt designers who cheat them and veteran flirts who won’t give a newbie a break.

The pattern: Complaints that veteran flirts and designers cheat newbies, and she is here to help by warning them, sometimes trying to “help” with “tutorials” trying to convince them to use low-grade html editors that apparently she can’t even use herself. Or warning them to be prepared to get the designer to agree to demands for unlimited communication in advance, and to be prepared to sue her.

I see posts like that and I get flashbacks.

I still get emails from her various personae trying to get me to work for her, unaware that she is well-known.

She pretends she is someone the designer does not know in order to get them to work for her.

Radioactive is the word.

I really feel sorry for someone who cannot permit herself to learn to do things for herself, who is incapable of communicating her needs. Or I would if she was not so resolutely malevolent and vindictive. How can someone lead their whole life blaming everyone else for the same things that go wrong, over and over again?

Q: Where is my callbutton? I can’t see my callbutton in my listing, I can’t see it in the category indexes! Nobody can call me, I won’t get any calls!

We have never been able to see our own callbuttons in our listings while logged in except in the ‘edit preview’ mode. Now we are also unable to see them in the category indexes. Everyone can see them but you. To see them, log off and look again. If you have another account, log into it and you will see it, too.

 

You can’t call yourself, so you don’t need a callbutton to click. That callbutton being missing from the category index makes it easier for you to find your listing’s position, too.

Q:I keep getting calls and missing them even though I’m on a call already!

The old call status used to go into ‘busy’ well in advance and stay that way. This one goes in at the last minute and comes out when the customer is adding money. Sometimes it doesn’t go into busy at all, or resets itself to available even if you are still on the call (and ultimately correctly credited).

 

The solution is simpler than the explanation. Shut off your account when you start a call, and it will stay off until the call has ended and you turn it back on.

Q: The new callbuttons don’t change from available when you take a call!

Nope, they don’t. This is a major issue, because the callbutton is static. The code they give you permanently reflects the status you were in when you took it. The system will put through calls to you if someone clicks a button that says you are “available” even if you actually are not, and you will miss them. Somebody messed up when they were designing the code. It is going to be a big deal for them to fix it.

 

The only thing you can do is to not use the callbuttons. Instead link to your homepage or to a listing you would want them to call. The callbuttons Niteflirt displays on your account will correctly show your account status. See that button in my sidebar? It is always live. I am on 24/7 and only flirts see this button, so it’s not a big deal for me.

Whatever you do, don’t put callbuttons into your listing! They will see buttons that say you are both unavailable and available and click the available one.

Q: I can’t tell what account or listing the call is coming in on!

Pick an account (I used a slow one) and add a listing from each of your accounts to your favorites. Keep that page open. When a call comes in, after you click ’1′, refresh the page until it shows one as ‘busy’.

Oh YEAH I am getting into this! Niteflirt now has full external CSS stylesheet support!

If you know what that is, you may be as happy as I am, because right now I am streamlining all my listings and getting rid of every damned bit of inline formatting and html formatting. Yeah!

If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it. I may write some tutorials about it sometime, but it’s kind of a broad subject.

Somebody can now check to see if we can reference external javascript files, please. I won’t get to it at least until next week.

Some of us were using Call manager scripts to log us in and out of our multiple accounts when we got calls. Well, they don’t work anymore.

Heck, you can’t even see your callbuttons change anymore. If you have multiple accounts and add one callbutton from each to your favorites of one of the accounts (pick the slowest) then you can see all your accounts at the same time and hopefully tell which one is busy.

This script should open up your favorites in an iframe that refreshes every 60 seconds. Save it as an html file and open it in a browser File=>Open.

I wrote a little script to help girls log in and out quicker, now that the old ones no longer work.

Download the text file, open it in Notepad, and edit it so you replace the dummy accounts in “Account #1″, “Account #2″, etc, and the dummy passwords, “Password #1″, etc, with your own.

Do not use a word processor. If you have a Mac, you will need to download a free text editor. Get one that sounds like it’s intended for coders who are typing code. Make sure it is not a word processor.

Save on your computer as an .html file and open it in a browser. Bookmark it in your Bookmarks toolbar folder, so you can open it at a click.

If you click the logout buttons while you are in a browser window where you are logged into a Niteflirt account, it will log you out and change your availability status.

I have disabled the login feature so garbage doesn’t get submitted.
Demo
Text file

If you can’t get this to work, I can customize it for you for $5, but I think you can get it to work. It’s simpler than you think.