I still get requests to add the usual “free sites” to Adult Everything. I’m looking at these sites and I begin thinking like Google thinks. How does this site improve my index? What is this site providing that is unique? Frankly 99% of the submissions are the same old same old kind of site. Free sites don’t update, it’s just build and forget. The main purpose is just to send the surfer off to the sponsor. While this method used to make money, it’s not going to work anymore. TGP’s are good because they have categories (unless they’re already niche tgp’s) and they update with new galleries daily. This keeps people coming back for more. Blogs are great and Google loves them. Even link lists have their place, but only if they list quality instead of quantity. So in closing, create quality sites that update and gain loyal visitors. Your main goal should be to get people to subscribe to your rss feed or to bookmark your site.

Wordpress has come a long way since I started using it. Now you can update wordpress from the admin panel, add plugins and themes right from the admin area too. There’s practically no reason to manually ftp things in the correct directories anymore, which was always such a hassle.

We’ll list your adult blogs as long as they’re handwritten and updated. Submit them all here: http://www.adulteverything.net/ae/addurl.html

I usually get idea’s for my posts from adult webmaster boards I frequent. That’s were this one came from.

I guess you just can’t stop free hosting. Folks don’t realize, but it snuck in through the back door once again.

Years ago, there were services that hosted adult content for free. Some might remember the likes of Porncity and others I can’t remember right now, it’s been awhile.

It was a hell of a deal, you could host all your adult pictures movies and sites for free, no cost. Well the cost of having their ads on your pages, stealing the prime real estate on your pages. Which in reality was a much higher cost than hosting, but the herd followed.

It didn’t take long to realize, free hosts sucked. For one, all the ads, second many free hosting services did not play nice. Some would sneak in 404 errors when there was none, 404 pages with of course, their ads. Or redirects when their was no need. All this causing far to many problems for directories and link lists who ended up with far too many bad, dead or redirected links.

The biggest problem with the free host model is that it left out accountability. When your actually paying out your hard earned dollars you tend to take your business seriously. with free hosting there is little incentive to keep up your business, you had nothing to lose.

Sure webmasters who put up the cash disappear as well, but when the money is on the table, it’s usually a different mind set to begin with.

But alas…

Even with all it’s inherent problems, free hosting is back, now disguised as free blog hosting. Guess they must have some new tricks up their sleeves, ones we can’t see, to make it all better?

It’s no better and no different. It’s still free hosting and it will still be a problem.

It’s even more of a problem today because of all the software development and high speed internet access. Now days you can purchase software to automate the process or building and updating blogs. Basically churning out millions of bytes of crap.

Who’s losing out?

The poor guy trying to do it right by creating content by hand, real and unique content. He loses out because he doesn’t mass produce. Since he doesn’t mass produce he doesn’t have hundreds of listings that clog up the directories with useless garbage, garbage the search engines don’t even want because they know better. Yet blog directories seem to list any ole crap, day in and day out.

Sad it’s come to this where the crap rises to the top. It should be the other way around.

It comes down to this…

If you can’t come up with $20 a month for hosting and $10 a year for a domain name, you don’t need to deserve to be in this business. Your not taking the business serious enough, so why should any one take you seriously. That is unless you want to do blogs.

One use to be able to say, you’ll do much better with your own hosting, but it’s not exactly true right now.

It will be again… mark my words. It will come. Let’s just hope it will be sooner than later.

If you follow the news or hit the boards you probably know Wordpress installs have been getting hit just about everywhere. You know it’s bad when your host sends you an e-mail about it.

So yesterday and today I took the plunge. I updated all 15 blogs to the newest Wordpress, 2.5.1. Wasn’t as bad as I thought, I had been putting it off.

In reality, if you want to be one of those that finds the good in everything, which I try my best, this exploit problem was a good thing.

• I was forced to back up my databases, something I don’t do often enough.
• I upgraded to the latest and more secure Wordpress version.
• Now I have the cool new version with all the new extras. (still getting use to it).
• Was able to clean up, un-used theme’s, un-used plug-ins, ect.

It wasn’t a bad thing after all.

Did you upgrade yours? I found the current exploit on every one of my blogs, every one.

Lately I’ve been talking alot about blogging. Some people might think to much or to passionate. Some might wonder why, others might not give a shit. I really don’t care either way, I do what I want and could care less what others think. More accurately, I do what works for me.

Funny thing is, with all the talk about finding a new free site model, most people still don’t seem to be getting the point, or seeing the big picture. It’s also funny that with all the “problems” with the current free site model, that some people are not saying.. duh.

I think most would agree or have agreed that one major problem with free sites is that they do not update. It’s a problem to the free site because the SE’s won’t stay long. It hurts the Links Lists because basically they are linking to dead wood.

Surprising, a webmaster recently asked about updating free sites and at least two webmasters pretty much said it was a waste, or not how free sites were done. They still believed and passed on the “Set it and forget it” attitude. Talk about backward thinking.

Come on, it’s 2008. Free sites might have worked 5 years ago or more, but it’s pretty self evident, they are not fairing so well these day, haven’t for some time.

While I might be overzealous or high on the coolness of blogging, thats not really the big picture. The reality is that I am creating sites that are updating on a regular basis. hhhmm…. where have we heard that word before?

Are the thinking caps on? Powered up? Or has the battery gone dead?

A while back I was ranting about sponsor provided feeds, the fact that many do not work well, do not work at all. I’m not taking it all back because some of them still suck. But…

Seems the RSS feed plug-in I was using was not all that hot. Funny it was the one that comes with newer Wordpress versions. It does not work that well.

The good news is, I found a much better plug-in that works much better with sponsor provided feeds, guess they are not all that bad..:)

The new plug-in is,  KB Advanced RSS Widget. Yes it’s a widget, if your not using them, your missing out.

Couple things I like about the plug-in; You can set it NOT to link to the feed title, a number of sponsor feeds do not have the title encoded for affiliates. You can also set the plug-in to hide the widget if the feed is down, no nasty feed not working messages. There are also a number of formatting options available, to make the feed show as you want.

So far I love the plug-in. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

When I listed the plug-ins I use the other day, there was one I wasn’t quite sure about and that was the Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger. I did not yet have data that showed it would work properly, mainly for future dated posts. Well I’ve been using it for a while now and yes it seems to be working just fine, least on the blog I checked.

The logs show me it indeed pings future posts, that was my main concern. Just wanted to update the previous post and plugin in question.

Now get to work!

As promised, here’s the plug-ins I use on my wonderful all encompassing blogs.

Use all or some, it’s your empire. Once again, this is for Wordpress blogs and they work on version 2.3.3.

AddThisSocial Bookmarkting – I use to use a social bookmarking plug-in called sociable. I might even have told folks it was the best. Well, as some times happens, I might have been wrong. One day I started to think about the code this little number put on my pages. You could set it up to bookmark for like 30 some sites, each getting coded to your page. See where I am going with this? It was putting a TON of extra code on my page, not exactly helping my SEO. So the switch to the Add This, as it’s a small line of JS.

Google XML Sitemaps – Think this one pretty much explains itself. It creates a XML sitemap of your blog. Even alerts some search engines when your blog changes.

Math Comment Spam Protection – This is just one part of spam protection for your blog. Bewared, with some theme’s you may need to copy and paste some code, not really a big deal. This plug-in adds an extra field in your comment form, a math question like what is 5 + 6?. Can’t say it won’t be beat, but it’s working good so far.

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form – Here’s a heavy duty contact form for you, with built in spam protection. I can tell you there are bots out there just looking for forms to fill in. It even comes with a large number of theme’s.

Trackback Validator – It helps eliminate trackback spam by checking for a linkback.

Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger – First off, the jury is still out on this one. It completely replaces the one built into Wordpress, which is kind of good. The main idea is that it only pings when needed. When you edit a post, there shouldn’t be a ping, for example, same for posts in the future. It makes sense as too much pinging can get you banned. The reason I say the jury is out is because I’m not sure it works all that well. For one thing, for those posts that are future, does it ping them when they post? Also I noticed on one blog, I forgot a title and the pinger warned me ( good feature), and it did not ping (another god thing), but after fixing the post, it said it was an edit and from what I saw it never got it’s pings. So use this one at your own risk. I told you so.

Last but not least…

WP 2.3 Related Posts – Sure you can guess this one. It puts related posts/articles under your posts, on the single page that is. On some theme’s you’ll have to add the php code yourself

You now have my kingdom. Have anything to add? I’m sure no expert.

With so many folks new to blogging, I thought I’d put up a quick checklist as far what I do when setting up a blog. It’s just a primer, sorry no detailed plan scruffy.

This is my checklist, sure you’ll find your own process.

1. Upload Wordpress files. Make sure you have the very latest version from none other than Wordpress.org. I usually upload my plug-ins at the same time.

2. Setup up Database for blog. Your host can do this if your not sure. If they can’t or won’t , find another host. You’ll need the database name, user name and password.

3. Put all the database information into the wp-config-sample.php file. Renamed and save file as wp-config.php. Upload file.

4. Run install file. Talk about fast set up.

5. Pick my theme. I can be anal, so this one might take me some time. Install theme.

6. Activate plug-ins. Do any plug-in configuration.

7. If you plan on putting any images on your blog, you’ll need to create directory called “uploads” within your wp-content directory. You will also need to set the permissions for that directory to 777.

8. Posts 10-15 new posts.

9. Promote.

Thats about it. Tomorrow I’ll go over the plug-ins I use. Now get to work!

Theming. Is that how you say it or spell it? Doesn’t look right to me, but Google told me to spell it that way.

Anyways… Seems some folks don’t quite understand how to change the theme on their blog, or put in a new one, so thought I’d show you how easy it is.

First step of course is to find the theme you want to use. We’ll use an example name of BlueTheme. Download it to your pc. Unzip the file. You should now be left with a folder, BlueTheme. Upload the entire folder into the directory wp-content/themes/ so it ends up as: yourblog.com/wp-content/themes/BlueTheme/.

As I said, upload the entire folder as is, do not remove any files from the folder and do not upload any files from the theme any where else.

Go in the admin of your blog and click on the “Presentation”. There you should see your theme listed with a small screenshot. Click on your theme, in this case, BlueTheme.

Want the next step?

Sorry there is no more. I told you it would be easy. You’ve just added a new theme to your blog. Good job..:)

The only thing left is making it your own, if you want. All these changes will be done to the files in your theme’s folder. You’ll usually need to modify or make your own header. I often edit the footer as need. If you want to go further you can edit the CSS file, usually named style.css to change text, font sizes or font colors.

Just be careful what you change. I usually copy what I am changing so I can paste it back in if the change doesn’t work right.

Hope this helps someone, if so, leave a comment. and give me a linkback on every site you own..:)

Now get to work!

Last month or so I’ve been putting up some new blogs, re-doing old and revamping many of my sites. In the process I thought I’d add some sponsor provided feeds. In a side bar widget, I am not in to splogs (unless some one shows me that make money..:)).

What I am finding is a majority of these sponsor feeds either do not work or have traffic leaks. It amazes me that sponsors do not test the feeds before making the public for webmasters? I am also surprised how many have been available for some time and I was the first that noticed there was a problem? You can’t tell me they don’t have somewhere they could put up a test blog.

I am using a RSS widget that comes standard with Wordpress 2.3.3, not like am using some homebrewed who-knows-whats-it thingy. Sadly the only valid feeds I’ve found thus far are from Kinky Dollars. Love their content. Little tougher to get that first sale, but they recur very nice!

So… if your using sponsor provided feeds, check them out, you could be losing sales. I noticed the biggest problem was the feed titles. Also, make sure your Id is getting passed.

Do you even use them?

I’ve been really getting into Wordpress lately, probably because it’s such an incredible blogging platform. I’m know it’s not the best available, but I’m just slinging porn, not building an corporate empire, well maybe a porn empire..:)

What I’ve come to learn is that messing with your Wordpress is not that hard. If you look at the code, it really just many php snippets, or php script calls. I am currently working on a new blog and I didn’t like how the Tag Cloud looked in the Tag cloud widget, because of the template of course.

So instead of trying to change all kinds of CSS code with all kinds of trial and error, I found the code to call the tag cloud itself. It’s as easy as going to Wordpress.org and searching. Found it in the second post. It’s as simple as this:

<?php if ( function_exists('wp_tag_cloud') ) : ?>

<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=22'); ?>
<?php endif; ?>

You can see it in action here: Blowjobs and Handjob The site might still be in the process.

My template had a little intro paragraph at the top of the sidebar. I just pasted that code in to my theme page for that paragraph and there is was, my tag cloud looking much better and actually in a better position. Of course I had to add a couple <br>’s to get it spaced right, though I could have done it with CSS, I was being lazy.:)

Another example. Say on your index page you want your post tags to show under each post, some theme’s are not set up for that, usually you can just paste the php tag code and your set.

Naturally you can not just paste code any where, some times it won’t work with the theme your using, or format right. It takes a little trial and error.

In reality, if you were good at CSS you could make your own templates, totally unique, just by pasting the proper php code. Look at the pages for your blog, there really is not a ton of code there, it’s all in the backend of Wordpress.

As most of us know, blogging is hot and here to stay, least for a while. I’ve jumped on the bandwagon myself, though some times I think I’ve taken to much work on myself.

Anyways, a number of adult sponsors have been finally providing blogging/rss tools for their affiliates. One I just learned about is Cybernet Bucks. They are providing rss feeds for all their sites, just plug them into your page and you have content that updates itself.

If you’ve never heard of Cybernet Bucks, they are a very popular fetish/bondage affiliate program. The have some very high quality content and retain very nice for us.

I’ve been wanting to post this for some time, but seem to forget or get busy with other projects. A fellow webmaster has been putting together a great site for adult webmasters that blog or want to learn more about blogging. The site is The Walrus’s Adult Blooging Tools. Not only is it a great looking site, it is loaded with many blog tools and blogging information. From RSS to pining to blog software, it’s all there and growing. So check it out, I’m sure you’ll find it very useful, I know I have.