Polyfetish

I got an email from MyBlogLog advising me to check Yahoo!’s adult use policy. The next day I noticed that three of my blogs were no longer showing traffic statistics. They all had either BDSM or fetish in their titles. I removed them.

Like most of my sites their language was very chaste. I forget the online tool I used but once I tested several of them and they didn’t register as even mildly risqué.

The one site that I would consider adult was still listed and showing traffic statistics. I removed it myself.

Like most large web entities MyBlogLog is incapable of discerning adult content from innocent sexual reference. By their standards the Mayo Clinic site is a cesspool.

On my related Yahoo! account I got a warning that I’d been reported as violating Yahoo!’s Terms of Service. I never violate anybody’s TOS.

Many years ago my primary email account was on Yahoo! One day they cancelled it without warning. Nor was any explanation available. My inconvenience was huge. And for years I stayed away from Yahoo!

Given this I’ll have to remove what business I do with Yahoo! - like domain registrations - elsewhere. You just can’t trust Jerry Yang. Ask his stockholders.

I suspect Google has opted to keep BlogSpot blogs from accepting trackbacks the traditional way is a means of combating trackback spam. I can certainly understand that.

There is a solution of sorts. Not likely to be much implemented since so many BlogSpot bloggers are technically unsophisticated (to say the least).

Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. For instance, suppose Alice writes a blog entry that Bob finds interesting. Bob then goes to his own blog and writes a post of his own about it, linking back to Alice’s original post. Now Alice’s post will automatically show that Bob has linked to it, and it will provide a short snippet of his text and a link to his post. What it all works out to is a way of expanding the comment feature such that related discussions on other sites can be included along with the regular comments on a post.

What are backlinks and how do I use them?

One of my sites gets a huge amount of traffic. But it gets few comments.

I’ve seen sites / blogs with much smaller traffic levels receive far more comments from the readers.

I think that I often seem to be writing ex cathedra and in a sense – that this makes me smile because I know my limitations – with intellectual power. A couple of people have told me that there doesn’t seem to be much they can say to add to what I’ve written. Without vanity I think I can say that maybe it is that what I write somehow strikes my audience as intimidating. Or at least very impersonal.

This isn’t a big issue for me. I could easily create a series of posts that would prompt lots of comments. That kind of emotional manipulation would be easy. I won’t do it because it seems almost a psychological crime. A rape of sympathy.

And it would also require that I dumb down what I write if only in terms of what is called “emotional intelligence.”

So I content myself with feeling grateful for the tough and good humored – and largely female – part of my audience that shares their thoughts and feelings without any worry that I’m a deep thinker or something equally silly.

Given that Google owns Blogger it isn’t any surprise that they’ve made adding Google Analytics to BlogSpot blogs:

Where do I place the Analytics code in my Blogspot domain?

Much better than the freebie stat counters.

I think this became a vice as WordPress grew in popularity.

The vice? Categoritis: placing an entry in a whole bunch of categories.

Sometimes I put an entry in two categories. But rarely: I try to stick with the one that seems most appropriate even if that seems a compromise. Once every year or two I may let an entry span four categories but those are special and very personal entries.

Categoritis may trigger Google’s (and those lagging behind other search engines’) duplicate content filter.

When Google sees the same content repeated across the web it tries to establish which copy is the most relevant. No reason to list the same words over and over again. In the past webmasters tried to create instant but worthless websites but copying all the content of DMOZ and the Wikipedia. This left the search engines ever more distrustful of repeated words.

Now Google really arches its brow when the repetition occurs within one site. Is the writer seeking to inflate his website’s page count the lazy way?

And when for each category you place an entry in you create effectively a duplicate page because the entry will appear in the archive for each category.

Google may think you a wicked person and penalize all of your pages.

I’m not saying this will happen. Exactly how the search engines respond to this isn’t clear.

But I notice those who probably know the most don’t commit the sin of categoritis.

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.