Polyfetish

A minority of us pays for web hosting, have our own domain and place our blogs there.

Way back before Blogger had visitor comments or Google had bought the service I had a few BlogSpot blogs. And I was very active on Live Journal for a few years.

I quit Blogger after only a short while. The lack of commenting really annoyed me. And they often had service outages.

Live Journal was lots of fun. I never really meant to leave it behind, my departure was mostly absentmindedness.

But even then I had them publish my blogs to my site. (I still have accounts on both for leaving comments.)

Which Blog Software

While you can continue to use, say, Blogger and have your entries appear on your own site you are giving up some of the advantages of having your own domain. You are still dependent on a third party, they still might zap your content and instead of having the search engine goodness of having all your links staying within your own domain, many of them will point to Blogger.

There are a huge number of blogging packages. Take a look at Open Source CMS. But most people will choose WordPress. It is free and there’s lots of community support in the form of themes and plugins.

Even better almost every web hosting company will have a “goodies” or “free installs” control panel that will handle the hassle of installing WordPress for you.

Which Webhost

I was happy enough with my first webhost until they took my site offline. I had a subdirectory named “erotic.” Supposedly they didn’t even look to see what it contained. The mere word was more than they could accept. I left them a week later.

There are a number of sites where people rate web hosting companies. If you want to do that route check here. I’ll give you my own recommendations shortly.

Issues

• Social Tolerance
• Bandwidth
• Performance
• Tech Support

By social tolerance I mean: will they get upset if they discover you have a kinky blog. Aside from my first experience I think not. But I did ask both of the webhosting companies that I use. Something for you to check before spending money.

Bandwidth: the volume of data you are allowed to transmit. If your site is just text this is apt to never be a problem. But if you have lots of images or other media files then you might exceed your monthly limit and have to pay extra for each month when you exceed your account’s quota.

Most web hosts have multiple plans with a sliding allotment of bandwidth.

Performance: some or all of your blog is powered by MySQL databases. This is where your blog’s content is stored and the database is called on as pages are assembled.

Many discount webhosts “oversell” accounts: they put too many sites on each server. Since the servers are overtaxed posting entries and comments can be very slow at peak web usage times. Visitors may decide to go elsewhere. Sometimes the MySQL resources are so badly exceeded operations fail. If you visit one of my sites and see “Server Error 500″ or some short text string of gobbledygook that is usually the cause.

Tech support: you are having trouble with your site – but not the software, nobody supports the software you install – you want help as quickly as possible.

Some bad web hosts don’t even reply to support requests. Or they give incorrect answers, often merely blaming you.

Mediocre hosts may take a day or so to respond. And the techs may not even make an effort to understand your problem.

Superb tech support will respond and may even have things fixed within minutes.

Who I Use

DreamHost: my experience has been variable. I’ve received warning some script was using up too much CPU resources on the server. Sometimes they are slow. Tech support can take a bit of time to reply. Often it is to tell you to look at their wiki. Right now I’m currently satisfied. But they aren’t the host to go to if you want hand holding.

JaguarPC: I pay for a semi-premium account with them. MySQL and resource issues have been rare and well within reason. What really sets them apart is incredibly good technical support. These guys are the best. You can check their forums.

Domain Name

If you do want your own domain you’ll need to go to a registrar who will make sure the name is available and handle the details of registering it with the proper authorities. To date I’ve been perfectly happy with GoDaddy (but wouldn’t use their webhosting).

This is as concise as I could make it.

While Blogger seems to be the most common home for kinky bloggers I’m not sure it is the best.

Blogger and Google are so large that when they go on the occasional blog purging campaign to delete porn spam blogs legitimate personal blogs also get hit. Most people neglect to download backups of their blog so they lose everything they’ve written.

The one advantage to BlogSpot blogs is there doesn’t appear to be bandwidth limits if you want to post lots of images and other media.

Free Hosted Blogs

WordPress.com offers state-of-the-art blog software. There are countless themes and plugins enabling you to easily customize and enhance your blog. I don’t know of any tales of WordPress.com having spasms of prudishness.

WP hosted blogs seem to show up more readily in search engines. But that may have been mostly a fluke of my own searching.

Live Journal has accepted sexy content throughout the service’s history. The best aspect of Live Journal is that it has been a social network before that phrase became a Web 2.0 buzzword.

On Live Journal people easily meet likeminded folks via the interests lists and the shared journals called communities. When I was active on LJ I interacted with lots of interesting people.

Pay Hosted Blogs

I’d go for TypePad. It is from SixApart the makers of Movable Type and owners of Live Journal. While I’ve never used Type Pad I’ve used Movable Type for years, the software is very similar and I’ve never found SixApart lacking in support.

Really this choice is mostly personal: with a bit of effort any of them should work fine.

Anchor Text

If you were to link to this site by name the anchor text would be Polyfetish. Were you to link to the site by description it would be Richard’s site about sex blogging (or something like that, however this place turns out).

The search engines are seduced – to a degree – by the anchor text. So I suggest using the site name at the least, perhaps some descriptive phrase is really better. But the latter’s effectiveness depends on how many people employ similar words when pointing to the site.

Title Attribute

In the same place between the brackets where you put the “http: … ” you can also put title=”words about this link” The search engines pay some attention to that as well. Again, the effectiveness depends on how many people use similar phrasing in their links.

Some people think that links to specific pages within a site can in some ways be of equal or greater value than links to the site’s home page. But only if others are linking to that page.

Search engines are quantity queens.

As I said in my prior entry having my right sidebar content and not the entry proper appear in the Google search results for my pages seemed very unhelpful.

Someone searching for information on milking or orgasm denial wasn’t going to be motivated to visit if the text they saw was about refinements of corporal punishment.

My second worry was: I have no idea if Google treats the first part of the text it encounters more heavily than the rest but why take the risk?

I’d switched to lightly modified versions of the most recent Movable Type layouts so that I could use the various CSS style sheets from The Style Contest. The idea of making a website suddenly look very different by switching the style sheet seemed more exciting than it proved to be. (In this very specific instance.)

The upshot is that I modified my templates to shift the unique content to the beginning of the page even though the style sheet causes it to appear in the center.

The default templates seemed rather “noisy” to me.

Putting the links to the prior and next entry at the top again adds irrelevant words to the top of the page. Besides you hope your reader isn’t looking for another essay until they get to end of the current one.

One the individual entry pages the strongest header – <H1> – should be the article title. Not the name of the site. You need to emphasize what is unique.

And lots of clutter has strong headers – <H2> – which is best reserved for just one thing. I chose the articles category archive link.

Hopefully with the unique text is emphasized and the headers more focused Google will treat theses pages when (if?) it takes a second look at them.

In my prior entry I noted how Google had slapped Down On My Knees into the ground when it modified the mysterious math that generates the search results in an effort to clean out the spam bloggers who were littering the results with their blog, which existed only to promote commercial porn sites.

As I watched my traffic build back up and ebb I had to wonder if there weren’t any other factor at play. I’d read that Google was tightening up its duplicate content filters. Essentially Google sees no reason to display pages that contain identical information. This helps it keep out sites that just regurgitate, say, the contents of the Wikipedia or DMOZ with ads attached.

As anyone has seen some of my sites knows I like to pack my sidebars with all manner of things: extracts from visitor comments, links to the category indexes, etc. So on a page that contains only an illustration and a few remarks there is probably more stuff that appears on all 1,000+ pages of my sites that original words. And even on a page with a long original essay the distinctiveness of the page is diluted.

I’ve trimmed back the duplicate fat some. Probably not enough. I want people to see those comments in hope they’ll prompt the reader to add some of their own: you know how shy most people on the web are. And I want the navigational elements in hope it will cause visitors to a page to explore others.

It is tough to be torn between doing something that you hope benefits the visitor and offending the Search Engine Dominatrix.

In looking at Down On My Knees listings on Google I kept noticing that the content quoted in the portion of the page shown was the beginning of the comments section of the sidebar. That spawned two thoughts:

End of Part II

A few months back I noticed that Google had stopped sending Down On My Knees thousands of visitors every day. Suddenly it was none. I checked and almost every page had been moved to Google’s supplemental index (meaning these pages aren’t worth a damn).

Not again. My original website (which now lives on as four separate sites) had something similar happen a couple of years prior. That time I knew why (or have always thought I did). While the site had thousands of pages it also had even more thousands of affiliate marketing pages generated by scripts. Google eventually reacted to the junk pages and devalued the whole website. Fair enough. I just wish I’d understood before it happened so I could’ve kept the affiliate pages under control.

Shortly after Down On My Knees got zapped I learned that many sex bloggers were hit. Google assumed that all the sex bloggers were exploitative pornographers. Susie Bright was sufficiently well known that in her case and other highly visible sexuality bloggers the error was corrected.

Now I’m nobody in the great scheme of things. But as Google fiddled with the algorithm controlling this I got about a third of my Google traffic back. Well, for a week or two. Then it dropped to a tenth of the prior level. And so it has stayed for the last couple of months.

End Part I

BDSM Reference may come to be a site I regret starting. To live up to the title it needs a few hundred very boring entries: it should be comprehensive.

Two boring sentence can require more energy than ten that amuse or move the typist.

This is one time I regret being a one-person operation. But that is the nature of the beast.

With lucky maybe I can bring occasional whimsy to the dull definitions and find some really oddball or at least useful kinky lore.

I wouldn’t be surprised if to most people Femdom Weblogs and Femdom Blogs look the same.

Femdom Weblogs is essentially a directory. I try to find one of the blog author’s better posts – some people have such badly structured sites, especially money Dommes – and quote part of it. I link to the blog’s home page, not the post. If my reader visits the site to read the whole entry they will have to dig for it: forcing them to read more of the site than they might otherwise. I’ll list any F/m blog: even bad ones. The goal is to be exhaustive. A blog gets mentioned one time only.

With Femdom Blogs I try to point people to interesting entries by F/m bloggers. Sometimes it is an essay that I think is good. Others it is something that I can easily imagine a specific kind of reader be glad to be pointed to. I try to not limit to just my taste. Over time I’m sure I’ll refer to certain writers regularly because they often have something interesting to say.

After I initially seeded the directory I’d expected more people to submit their sites. No such luck. I guess I haven’t publicized the directory adequately.

I could’ve gotten more inbound links by requiring reciprocal links from those who listed their own site. But I don’t want to do that.

It isn’t a good idea. Google notices when all the sites that are linked to link back. And the Search Engine Domme doesn’t like reciprocal linking schemes. I sometimes smile at the little “proudly listed” badges I see on some blogs. Often site they are pointing to has been flushed into the back hole of irrelevancy by Google.

At least some of the people listed in the directory have gotten plenty of traffic.

I guess I’ll have to go back to seeding it for a time.