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.

Can’t be all business all the time right? Though my wife might disagee.

So here’s a good one, a new product from Germany, A Cheeseburger in a Can. Yep a real cheeseburger with all the fixings like pickles, sealed in a can. This guy cooks it and tried it out. I won’t giveaway the ending..:)

If that wasn’t enough, follow the links and check out another guy building a “Meat” house, kinda cool actually. Or maybe it’s a guy thing.

Just this afternoon I finished completely re-doing my wife’s computer. It was so infcted with virus’s, it would not work at all, I could only boot in to safe mode, that was it. I was and am still so pissed. If I’d ever come across some one who passes this crap on to people’s computers, I’d beat the crap out of them at the very least.

To make it even more fun, I had like 30 gig of pictures and family stuff to get off before I could wipe it clean. I could not even get the pc to boot into safe mode with networking, nor would the pc see my external usb backup drive. My wifes pc is a newer Dell with a SATA hard drive, so the extra hard drives I had laying around didn’t exactly hook up. I was reduced to uploading to a SD card in a card reader, plugged into the USB port. Talk about taking forever..

Seems few people realize how devistating these viruses can be, until it happens to them.

What I don’t understand is, why the practice of installing software on some ones computer without their knowledge or consent, is not Illegal? Or is technology moving too fast? Just now, years later are spammers finally getting busted. Seems to me the virus kings need to get taken down as well. Am I wrong?

Recently I found a little glitch with Wordpress, though I haven’t had time to find out if there is a fix. I noticed on my future posts, while they post fine, if the post I created for the future is in a new category, the post will publish, but the new category will not. Odd.

Not really a big deal, you can just go into “Manage”, click on “Edit” for the post and just click “Publish”, a two second job, New Category gets posted.

Thought I’d pass it on.

Yes, yet another one of my sponsor rants.

Today it’s about bullshit stats reporting. And how they seem to think webmasters are complete idiots. Stupid as stumps. I’m not the only one to bitch about this.

I was checking my stats on pone of my sponsors, I won’t say who. My stats ratio showed 1:187.  Most people would say that’s an out standing ratio, especially these days. The bullshit is, that ratio is figured off my sales to JOIN PAGE hits! WTF?

Now if it was figured off my unique hits, which it should be, and only be, the real ratio is 1:1019 wow, quite a difference isn’t it? And quite a difference if you were to figure out cost per click.

Why would webmasters want to see their ratio calculated off joins? Maybe I am off base, but I see it as this..

My business is to make money. My only goal is to send as many surfers to the sponsors as possible. Right? What more is there? You could say building traffic, getting trades, make sites, blah, blah, blah. Of course you need to do the work, but in the long run, what is your end goal? Okay thats out of the way.

Not only do I want to send as many porn surfers to the sponsor as I possibly can, but if I don’t want to be working for peanuts, or be making less than a burger flipper, I need to make the most money from the traffic I do send to the sponsors. Common sense.

See where I am going?

If my ratio is 1:187 with a descent payout, I’d be making pretty good money for my traffic. Hell, it would be good money 5 years ago. But the bad news, I already told you what my real ratio is.

The only conclusion I or any other webmaster can come to is the sponsor thinks we are stupid. No really. What else is there to think? Joe webmaster looks at his ratio and say’s, “Hey this program does very well!”. They might even try to send more traffic because it’s converting so well (ya right!). I can only conclude it’s to make the program look better, like it’s converting well, when in reality it’s not even close.

Once again, I want to make as much from my traffic as possible. From EVERY hit I send, not just the ones that click to the join page.

Has any one heard a valid reason for ratio’s being calculated from join page hits? If so, I’d sure like to hear it.

</rant>

I often wonder if webmasters realize how awesome Wordpress really is?

The best thing I love about Wordpress is the future posts.  Take the last couple days, the wife and I have been hitting the blogs pretty good and we’ve got pretty much all of them set with posts for at least the next week to two weeks. In reality we could hit hard for a couple more days and pretty much take the rest of the month off.

When I say future posts I mean posts at least every two days. With the majority of the text original, if not all of it original. If one was industrious and did not have too many blogs, one could future post far in advance, and/or create posts for every day. Some hard work and the payoff could be all kinds of time off while your sites work for you, making you money. Not a bad deal huh?

Naturally Wordpress is not the only blogging platform or cms, but it has a few things going for it. One it’s free, second it’s easy to use and third, it has a huge community creating for it (because it’s free).

Some might go a step further and tell you, you could use a script or program to regurgitate your past content for a long time to come. While it’s a appealing idea, regurgitate is the right word, your just bringing up the same old stuff. The Search Engines know what’s different, we know that.

Free sites die off, we know this for a fact. We hope to get lucky and get some Search Engine love in the future, but that will likely be short lived as well, because free sites are not updated.

Maybe you can create yourself something that works for you? Even while you play or sleep?

As always these are just my theories and thoughts, though most are proven from experience and trial and error. So take them as you’d like or take nothing..:)

Now get to work!

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!

Most every adult sponsor offers a webmaster referral program. Well, the vast majority. You send a webmaster to the program, if they sign up you get a special prize. Either a one time commission or a percentage of all their sales.

Now if your going to offer a referral program, why the hell do you try cutting webmasters out of their fair share?

I think you know what I’m talking about. Like those hosted galleries with the link at the bottom to the program, but they DON’T have an affiliate ID. Right down to the individual sites that have no affiliate ID in the link for the program.

For one it pisses me off. Second, if they know about it, I and you can only come to the conclusion they are trying to weasel their way out of actually keeping their promises and paying webmaster referrals.

How many sponsors do you promote that do this? Have you voiced your opinion? Have you asked them why they have a webmaster referral program, yet do not put affiliate ID’s in the program links?

Maybe we can make a difference?

</rant>

Of course this is not true for all, most are upstanding citizens and play nice.

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?

Actually some what old news, but thought I would post it anyway.

Feb 27, 2008 Adult affiliate program, Mayors Money announced that it has been acquired by DeeCash. I don’t know if any one has been watching but DeeCash has been slowly buying up affiliate programs, last I remember was Jason and Alex, though there have been a number of other programs they added to their line up. Either they know what they are doing, have huge pockets or a credit line longer than John Holmes dick. From what I’ve seen, little changes with programs they snap up, but makes you wonder if there is a grand plan in the background. At the very least, they could have one central hub, pushing porn surfers into one big funnel from many different spouts. Not a bad position to be in.

In other news, Lion Dollars has closed it’s affiliate sign-up page. One reason they state is because they are revamping their program and moving to another system. Their new stance will be “invitation only”. Pretty bold move if you ask me, then again, as they state, it could help reduce fraud, maintain the programs integrity and I think in other words, lose less than desirable webmasters. I can’t really blame them. I would be curious though, how tough it will be to get in the program, how they will pick and choose. Or is it more a bluff?

The only drawback so far for Lion Dollars is that old link codes will only be good for six weeks after the new launch. I don’t know about you, but I think it sucks when programs change their link codes! Sadly it’s the webmaster that loses when they don’t change their codes.

Many folks would argue, saying it’s the content, not the layout that matters. While they are pretty much right, I am still a firm believer that how your website looks can make a big difference of how surfers perceive your business and in turn if they choose to come back, re-visit or make a purchase from your site.

Think about it for a minute. In the real world. Ya it’s still out there. Take two different stores. Store A is beautiful, decorated perfectly, clean and professional looking. Store B is drab, dimmly light and looks like it was decorated back in the 1970’s. With content (merchandise) and prices the same, which store would you be more likely to do business with?

Why should it be any different with a website?

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.