Polyfetish

I sure hope phpBB 3.0 comes out soon. Or maybe I should just switch to Simple Machine Forums, which was really my original choice for Fetish Lore.

I delete 20 – 30 spam accounts a day. I do it when I get up, when I’m at work, even when I get up in the middle of the night.

I’m so glad that my sites that are powered by Movable Type and WordPress don’t need this attention. How well I remember that first day of the great blog spam flood: 100 junk comments in less than 30 minutes. That was the day I ended allowing open comments on my sites.

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.

AVNAds Publisher’s FAQ page explains how much you get paid for interstitial ads:

You will be paid at a rate 1 cent over the second highest bid.

My experience is that the amount you wind up earning can be several orders of magnitude less than the maximum bid.

So I always wind up cancelling interstitials. Considering the level of intrusiveness the few pennies aren’t worth it. Now if I collected something much closer to the max bid I’d keep running them.

My new and first forum, Fetish Lore, is doing surprisingly well in the first week.

On a personal level the smart, kinky women who’ve joined in are making for satisfying conversations. I’d hate to think that any future popularity would dilute this.

I’m very lucky to have developed an audience of people before I went off the deep end and established the forum.

On and off people have suggested that I start a kink-themed forum site. That always struck me as a mad and bad idea: launching a forum is easy enough but getting ongoing participation is tough.

But I’ve finally gone and done it, the site is called Fetish Lore.

My goals with it are probably conventional enough: attract smart likeable people who don’t think there’s One True Way to engage in the various forms of S&M, B&D, M/s, Whatever-The-Heck play: good-humored free spirits.

A second set of visits I’m hoping for are people who are nervous, perhaps confused by propaganda and porn and aren’t sure how to match their desires – perhaps their lover’s desires – with themselves and reality. And help them learn.

Visit the Fetish Lore forums.

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.

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.