January 4th, 2010 — Web hosting
I have had Dreamhost as my webhost for years. If you’re looking for a webhost that will let you have unlimited domains and permits you to do almost anything with your account. They don’t have a fast and dirty sitebuilder. I definitely recommend against fast and dirty sites, but hey, whatever you want to do, it’s your site.
Shop around. If you decide to go with Dreamhost, use this code: 6ZZIBMU2 and get a $50 discount.
December 31st, 2009 — For Niteflirt, Spreadsheets
This was requested on the forum. Hardly seems worth charging over. It is set up for 10 accounts. It gives you a place to type in debits as they are taken from your Niteflirt account, and to check them off when they show up in your bank account. It even totals up your debits for the day and months.
December 26th, 2009 — Email forms, Free!
Cara of CarasCam made this tutorial, and I made my first contact form using it.
If you are comfortable with editing something you don’t really understand, you can probably get it to work for you. Instead of being an HTML page with instructions, it is a script that has inline notes:
“// This is an inline note telling you what to do”
explaining what each part does and where you need to edit to make it work for you. This is how many free script tutorials you will find on the web work.
Save it as a .php file, edit it, then upload it to your site. The link you put to it will display a contact form that will submit to your email, after you have it set up.
November 19th, 2009 — Niteflirt issues
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.
November 17th, 2009 — Niteflirt issues
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:
Things it was not so good at:
What it couldn’t do at all:
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.
October 13th, 2009 — customer from hell, Design considerations, Niteflirt issues, Phonesex drama
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?
October 3rd, 2009 — Callbuttons, For Niteflirt, Niteflirt issues
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.
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.
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.
September 18th, 2009 — Niteflirt issues
I have a forum that can be used to discuss Niteflirt issues.
September 18th, 2009 — Niteflirt issues
They’ve got a beta site up, http://beta.niteflirt.com which apparently can be used to take calls, but they are giving mixed messages on whether it is safe to take calls and consider the payment secure. Most of the “advice” on this is being given in the new forum, http://forum.niteflirt.com (gotta be a flirt to access this forum), where the overwhelming majority of advice is given by flirts with no understanding of this sort of situation and no inside track on what is going on, and posts after the original one come up in some weird reverse order that makes it sometimes impossible to understand what is being discussed.
If you’re a Niteflirt customer, saw a “We’ll be right back!” page when you tried to access the site but have been wondering when the site will be back, the real answer is, “No one knows, they say they’re working on it”. Flirts are giving out contact information on their sites or in twitter (all my followers are flirts, so I’m not giving out info there). All of my sites have a contact or email me link on them, including this one, so if anybody needs me they can email me to find out how to speak with me.
If you’re a Niteflirt customer who’s been getting a “Bad request 400″ or “The connection was reset by the server” or “Server not found” page for days, it means that Firefox cannot view a simple HTML page due to the type of cookies the site has chosen to use. They’ve known about this problem for days, and the fact that they have not fixed it is telling me that they aren’t intending to. Damn. My desktop only uses Firefox.
September 16th, 2009 — Niteflirt issues
It is, what? Right now they are 24 hours past the loose deadline they gave us for coming back online. I understand that it’s hard to accurately predict these things, and I’m willing to cut them some slack, since they said that the site would be basically restored, except for some features that we use a lot, but which are not essential from the customer’s standpoint.
But should we believe that part? What if the site comes back and we all have to completely recreate everything we did before? With different restrictions and the pages are all different? Not getting a warm fuzzy feeling on this…
